Meta has reversed course on plans to end virtual reality support for Horizon Worlds, the social media platform once pitched as a cornerstone of the company’s metaverse vision.
On March 17, Meta told users that Horizon Worlds would no longer be supported on Quest headsets from June 15, with the platform instead continuing on mobile and web.
But the decision lasted barely a day.
In an Instagram Q&A, Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth said the company had decided to keep Horizon Worlds running in virtual reality (VR) after fans said they were “heartbroken” by the move.
Meta will keep Horizon Worlds available in VR “for the foreseeable future,” though with limited support and mainly for people already using existing games.
Horizon Worlds was Meta’s pinnacle virtual social space tied closely to its Quest headsets and to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wider ambition for immersive digital life.
That ambition was so central that Facebook renamed itself Meta in 2021 while its Reality Labs division poured billions into virtual and augmented reality.
Since then, Reality Labs has spent heavily and struggled to turn that spending into a mass-market success. Meta has poured $73 billion (about €63 billion) into it since the rebrand.
But Horizon Worlds never became the VR hit Meta had imagined.
The platform struggled to make virtual socialising feel mainstream, while Quest headset demand also weakened.
Meta has already cut more than 1,500 jobs in Reality Labs this year as it narrowed its focus. The reversal of the decision marks the company’s pivot towards the mobile version of Horizon Worlds, where downloads are up 53 percent from last year.
Bosworth said there is a “much bigger audience” there, and argued that building for phones gives the team more momentum than maintaining separate mobile and VR versions.
Horizon Worlds’ mobile app reached 45 million downloads worldwide across iOS and Google Play, including 1.5 million downloads so far in 2026.
Bosworth’s comments suggest Meta still sees some value in keeping VR access alive for existing users, even as the company shifts its focus to mobile.
