Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

tyleo

Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for. They feel a bit directionless to me. They are still making money but even their AI attempt feels half hearted. I think they are really trying but I’m not sure they can build the engineering muscle to move in new areas with the brand damage they’ve sustained.

cheriot

Condolences to those that about to be laid off Context: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/14/meta-reportedly-considerin...

xd1936

Unbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?

amazingamazing

And soon 20% of meta too

etchalon

Zucker just keeps failing up.

bhouston

Okay, how long until Meta Quest is discontinued/sunset? I believe there is no expectation of a Meta Quest 4 right?

darth_avocado

Layoffs are probably on the horizon

bhouston

Is Meta Horizon Worlds working on PC well? I guess it is their attempt to be competitive with Roblox.

jryio

Historians will write about the 'metaverse' as the last software frontier humanity embarked on before AI. What a shame. Hopefully capitalism and AI research does not produce equally bad products and ideas.

i1856511

Did they ever get legs?

rhcom2

The most obvious and expected outcome to everyone except Zuck.

sergiotapia

The quest is such a beautiful device. I hope they continue to work on it and release new versions. VR is so good and still in it's infancy.

drivebyhooting

When will horizon worlds be axed entirely? It has something like fewer than 10,000 active users at any given time.

daverol

Where will all those Meta Avatars go? Is there a retirement home in the Metaverse?

t-writescode

They were trying to compete with an existing, VERY good couple of alternatives, and the people most actually likely to use that product were already on those services. It was a losing play that didn’t know what market it was actually entering.

senderista

Imagine what $100B could have done for medical or energy research.

yhvr

It's baffling to me how much they juiced up this platform on Horizon OS, and now they're just axing it from there entirely. Millions if not billions of dollars gone to waste. At least I won't have to see it in the UI anymore, I guess. How does this even happen?

d--b

That sucks. At least they had a purpose, a vision. Now Zuckerberg is going to be all sour about it and even more cynical about everything. They’re going to go back to what they know how to do: optimize for attention and sell personal data.

jeffbee

Second Life, which contains only niche perverts, has more concurrent actives than Horizon Worlds.

jrflowers

I guess that idea just didn’t have legs.