The most expensive experiment in Meta’s history is coming to a close. Mark Zuckerberg’s company has announced the shutdown of Horizon Worlds on VR, pulling it from the Quest store in March and ending all VR access on June 15. The metaverse — once the centerpiece of Zuckerberg’s corporate identity — will continue only as a mobile app, stripped of the immersive promise that defined it.
Zuckerberg launched his metaverse mission with unmistakable conviction in 2021. Renaming Facebook as Meta, he argued that immersive virtual reality was the inevitable successor to the mobile internet. The metaverse would offer people a digital existence as rich and social as their physical lives — commerce, art, friendship, and work, all inside a headset.
The commercial response was underwhelming. Horizon Worlds attracted only hundreds of thousands of monthly users, a fraction of what would be needed to sustain a platform of its ambition. The experience struggled with poor graphics, limited content, and a fundamental question of why people should prefer a virtual room to a phone call or video chat for ordinary social interaction.
Reality Labs, the Meta division that built and maintained the metaverse infrastructure, paid the price. Its losses since 2020 total close to $80 billion — a sum that makes it one of the most costly product failures in technology industry history. Layoffs of more than 1,000 employees in early 2025 were the clearest signal yet that Meta had decided the experiment was over.
Public commentary was biting. Social media users highlighted the absurdity of spending $80 billion on a virtual world while global problems went unsolved. As Meta now channels its ambition into AI, the metaverse will be studied for years as a case study in how even brilliant entrepreneurs can fundamentally misjudge what people actually want from technology.