The dream of the metaverse may have died for now, but Meta has decided it’s not completely giving up on the VR experience in Horizon Worlds, the virtual worlds service that it originally envisioned as the first step toward said metaverse.
The news was announced via the Instagram account of Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. “We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR,” said Bosworth in an AMA on the platform in response to someone who expressed disappointment at the previously announced plan to end support.
He went on to clarify that only games and experiences that already support VR will continue to do so, while new games will be exclusive to mobile, and the majority of the team’s development focus will be on mobile instead of VR.
In February, Meta announced that it would be “shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile.” It also announced changes to how its marketplace for VR software works, putting all the emphasis on supporting third-party developers in lieu of major first-party development. Meta had laid off 1,000 employees of its Reality Labs division in January, mostly by shuttering teams that were making first-party software and content for the company’s Quest VR headsets.
Several thousand people still work in Reality Labs, though, as Meta still plans to release new VR headsets, and it is investing heavily in AR glasses and related technologies. (Reality Labs also includes some AI and computer vision teams, among other things.) And just earlier this week, Meta posted to its community forums that VR support in Horizon Worlds would end on June 15, with just web and mobile support continuing after that.
Bosworth’s announcement rolls back that decision, at least for now. About a month ago, he had said that “there’s a much bigger audience in mobile,” and that switching the Horizon Worlds development team’s focus to mobile at VR’s expense was “a pretty easy way to increase their velocity.”
Bosworth didn’t explain the change in plans today, except to claim that it was in response to feedback from users who didn’t want VR support to end.
