Meta is changing its metaverse strategy once again. The social media giant is now making a major change to the Horizon Worlds VR-exclusive app, originally designed for Meta Quest headsets. Meta said it will separate its Quest VR ecosystem from the free, social 3D virtual experience and shift its focus largely to mobile users to compete with Roblox and Fortnite. This comes after the company laid off about 10% of its Reality Labs division, closed three VR studios, stopped new content for the VR fitness app Supernatural, and discontinued its metaverse platform for work. In 2021, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also changed the company’s name, and last year, Meta’s Reality Labs lost $20 billion.
What Meta said about shifting Horizon Worlds’ focus from VR to mobile
In a blog post, Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs’ VP of content, said Meta is “explicitly separating” its “Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform” and “shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile.” Horizon Worlds was originally launched for VR, but the company now plans to compete more directly with platforms like Roblox and Fortnite that offer user-generated experiences on smartphones. Ryan said, “To truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going all-in on mobile.”“We’re in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world’s biggest social networks. You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it’s our main focus,” she noted.She even added that Meta will prioritise support for third-party developers in VR. “While we’re proud of the world-class work from Oculus Studios over the years, among 1P and 3P apps, 86% of the effective time people spend in their VR headsets is with third-party apps,” she said, underscoring the company’s shift in emphasis within its Reality Labs division.What we know about Meta VR hardware’s futureMeta said it will continue developing VR hardware despite the strategic shift. “We have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures,” Ryan said, adding that upcoming devices, which could include a new mainline Quest headset, may come at a higher price point.Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth also discussed the company’s evolving approach in a recent episode of the Access podcast.Following its earlier push into the metaverse, Zuckerberg has increasingly positioned AI as central to the company’s future social platforms. The approach could include AI-generated games that users can create and share through their social feeds. “There are 3D versions of that, and there are 2D versions of that and Horizon, I think, fits very well with the kind of immersive 3D version of that,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s latest earnings call.
