• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Following the downsizing of its Reality Labs division, Meta has announced plans to cut off its immersive Horizon Worlds social gaming platform from the company’s Quest virtual-reality headsets, exclusively recentering the app’s existence around mobile while investing in developer communities.

By separating its Quest VR platform from Horizon Worlds, Meta is attempting to “create more space for both products to grow,” “doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem” while making Horizon Worlds a mobile-first experience, according to Samantha Ryan, vice president of content at Reality Labs.

Meta first began experimenting with Horizon Worlds as a mobile platform last year and has decided to go “all-in on mobile,” with ambitions to deliver synchronous games across its family of social media platforms and massive user-base. 

To build out its Horizon Worlds mobile gaming library, Meta will depend on developers utilizing the company’s Creator Fund to create new games with Horizon Studio and Horizon Engine, which Meta plans to make available to more developers in the coming months.

Ryan also says that in 2025, the number of Meta’s mobile-only games surpassed 2,000, with hundreds of developers making six figures from their creations.

By removing Horizon Worlds’ VR functionality, Meta is choosing to compete directly with popular social-gaming platforms Roblox and Fortnite. 

In addition, Meta believes VR is a “critical technology” and remains committed to sustaining its VR investments “over the long term.”

According to Ryan, the company has a “roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures.”

Ryan highlights the importance of developers, stating that 86% of the time people spend on VR headsets is with third-party apps. To capitalize on this trend, Meta plans on forging more investments and partnerships with the developer community.

The announcement, however, comes as Meta continues to cut more Reality Labs jobs and investments.

Last year, Meta divided Reality Labs into two distinct sectors to better “articulate the value that’s generated here across both segments,” but Meta has since committed to cutting related spending by upwards of 30%, then laying off about 1,500 Reality Labs employees and shuttering its VR game studio.  

With Reality Labs costing Meta more than $70 billion over the past six years, the tech giant has doubled down on AI investments, committing to spend over $600 billion on AI developments in the U.S. alone through 2028.

Earlier this week, Meta also signed a multi-year partnership deal with AI chipmaker Nvidia to onboard more GPUs and CPUs -- intended to power the company’s multi-gigawatt data centers and superintelligence goals.