A few weeks ago, Meta published an update from Samantha Ryan, of Reality Labs, announced a “renewed focus” and a “doubling down” on virtual reality. It planned to achieve this by “almost exclusively” betting its future on the smartphone Horizon Worlds app.

In an announcement today, Meta shifted its definition of “almost exclusively” to simply “exclusively”:

Earlier this year, we shared an update on our renewed focus for VR and Horizon. We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience. This separation will extend across our ecosystem, including our mobile app. To support this vision, we are making the following changes to streamline your Quest experience throughout 2026.

This opening paragraph is opaque and, though the announcement goes on to explain exactly what is happening, it is not nearly as clear as the email sent to Horizon Worlds users. I really think Meta is looking to exit from its pure V.R. efforts, especially with the sales success of the perv glasses.

As I write this, the Horizon app for iOS is the sixty-ninth most popular free game in the Canadian App Store, just behind Wordscapes and ahead of Perfect Makeover Cleaning ASMR. Nice?

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Samantha Ryan, “VP of Content” at Meta’s Reality Labs:

We’ve recently made some pretty big changes, including right-sizing our Reality Labs investment to ensure that our efforts remain sustainable over time. We’ve been in this space for over a decade, and we aren’t going anywhere. We’re in it for the long haul.

By “right-sizing”, Ryan means laying off ten percent of the Reality Labs workforce, and pouring money into the Ray-Ban partnership instead of metaverse initiatives. By “in it for the long haul”, Ryan means shifting the definition of the “metaverse” to meet Mark Zuckerberg’s latest obsession. They did not whiff by renaming the entire company around a crappy update to Second Life; you just are not getting it.

Ryan:

Our goal remains constant: to empower developers and creators as they build long-term, sustainable businesses. We used to have a pretty well-defined audience for VR, but as we’ve grown, we’ve attracted new audiences — who want different things — and the onus is on us to make sure that each of these distinct groups can find the apps and games that appeal to them.

That’s why we’re changing our roadmaps to increase your chances for success. We’re explicitly separating our Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform in order to create more space for both products to grow. We’re doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile. By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each.

Meta can say it is “doubling down on the V.R. developer ecosystem” all it wants, but it announced in January it would be shutting down its work-focused V.R. app with only a month’s notice, and it has cancelled third-party headsets. Now, it is saying Horizon Worlds is basically a phone app. Last February, Andrew Bosworth wrote in a memo about the importance of this very strategy:

[…] And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. […]

As I write this, Meta Horizon is the fifty-seventh most popular free game in the Canadian App Store, just two spots behind Hole.io, “the most addictive black hole game”. Maybe people do not, in general, want to wear a computer on their entire head — not for the thousands of dollars Apple is charging, and not for the hundreds Meta is.

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Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg is expected to meaningfully cut resources for building the so-called metaverse, an effort that he once framed as the future of the company and the reason for changing its name from Facebook Inc.

Executives are considering potential budget cuts as high as 30% for the metaverse group next year, which includes the virtual worlds product Meta Horizon Worlds and its Quest virtual reality unit, according to people familiar with the talks, who asked not to be named while discussing private company plans. Cuts that high would most likely include layoffs as early as January, according to the people, though a final decision has not yet been made.

Wagner’s reporting was independently confirmed by Mike Isaac, of the New York Times, and Meghan Bobrowsky and Georgia Wells, of the Wall Street Journal, albeit in slightly different ways. While Wagner wrote it “would most likely include layoffs as early as January”, Isaac apparently confirmed the budget cuts are likely large-scale personnel cuts, which makes sense:

The cuts could come as soon as next month and amount to 10 to 30 percent of employees in the Metaverse unit, which works on virtual reality headsets and a V.R.-based social network, the people said. The numbers of potential layoffs are still in flux, they said. Other parts of the Reality Labs division develop smart glasses, wristbands and other wearable devices. The total number of employees in Reality Labs could not be learned.

Alan Dye is just about to join Reality Labs. I wonder if this news comes as a fun surprise for him.

At Meta Connect a few months ago, the company spent basically the entire time on augmented reality glasses, but it swore up and down it was all related to its metaverse initiatives:

We’re hard at work advancing the state of the art in augmented and virtual reality, too, and where those technologies meet AI — that’s where you’ll find the metaverse.

The metaverse is whatever Meta needs it to be in order to justify its 2021 rebrand.

Our vision for the future is a world where anyone anywhere can imagine a character, a scene, or an entire world and create it from scratch. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re making progress. In fact, we’re not far off from being able to create compelling 3D content as easily as you can ask Meta AI a question today. And that stands to transform not just the imagery and videos we see on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, but also the possibilities of VR and AR, too.

You know, whenever I am unwinding and chatting with friends after a long day at work, I always get this sudden urge to create compelling 3D content.

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