What you need to know
- Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth explained that Meta is changing focus from first-party development to focus mainly on third-party games for Meta Quest headsets.
- Horizon Worlds is now taking a mobile-only approach and will be scaled back from the Meta Quest’s Horizon OS.
- Oculus Founder Luckey Palmer says, “the narrative that Meta is abandoning VR is obviously false.”
Nearly two years ago, Meta made moves to more deeply integrate Meta Quest headsets with the company’s Horizon Worlds metaverse. The Meta Quest store became the Meta Horizon store, and free-to-play Horizon Worlds content was prominently placed in front of users instead of more traditional gaming content. The result was a substantial decline in game sales on the Quest, backed up by tons of developer data to prove it.
Many on social media are saying the changes are too little, too late. Several development studios have announced closures lately, some citing broader challenges across the video game market, while others have attributed them specifically to the VR market. Even developers of games that regularly stay in the top-20 best-sellers have announced layoffs. Allegedly, more are also on the way.
“We’re going to let VR be what it is and what it does great,” Bosworth continued. “We’re going to focus a lot more on the third-party content library and ecosystem that has developed there.”
But according to several interviews I conducted after Meta’s studio closures on January 13, 2026, Meta let go of several staff who worked with third-party developers and reduced funding to programs like Oculus Publishing. Bosworth wasn’t asked about this topic in either of the Davos interviews, but has so far failed to comment publicly when asked on social media.
Heath’s interview with Bosworth revealed that Meta is “still continuing to invest heavily in this space, but obviously, VR is growing less quickly than we (Meta) hoped.” We saw this trend begin in mid-2025, although the Christmas holiday period saw the Meta Quest outsell even the Nintendo Switch 2 on Amazon. Even with that success and the success of several new games, Meta looks to be shifting priorities away from first-party development.
As Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, said on social media, “Oculus had a strong internal mandate to NOT be Nintendo and instead build things that build the ecosystem. Returning to that is good.” “This is not a disaster,” Palmer followed up with. Meta “still employs the largest team working on VR by about an order of magnitude. Nobody else is even close.” Time will tell if that continues to be a good thing.
