This week, Meta announced the latest evolution in its Metaverse strategy, and while it’s not totally unexpected, it is still a bit surprising. Horizon Worlds, Meta’s Roblox-like Metaverse ecosystem for Meta Quest headsets, is officially being killed off on Meta’s VR platform, with the last day of service happening on June 15, 2026. This was detailed in an email sent to Meta Quest account holders:
AC thVRsday
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Meta spent much of 2024 and 2025 deeply integrating Horizon Worlds into the Meta Quest experience, going so far as to rename the Meta Quest’s operating system to Horizon OS and making Horizon Worlds the first thing you see in the headset and on the companion mobile app. Meta recently announced that the Horizon feed would be sunset, and now it’s fully pulling the plug on everything from the Horizon Central social hub and the Horizon Worlds app.
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In other words, the Meta Quest experience is going back to the golden age of 2022 when the Meta Quest was a gaming-first platform. It’s a move many (including myself) have been calling for for years, and proves Meta really is cleaning up all the junk and getting back to basics with the Quest.
What ‘gaming-first’ really means
Back in December, I wrote about how Meta was “cutting the fat” and getting back to basics. Based on what I knew, that meant abandoning the concept of an integrated Metaverse and going back to making big games to attract large numbers of gamers. Unfortunately, I was wrong about the latter half of that equation. Meta isn’t the next Nintendo or Sony, and that’s a real shame, considering the quality of the games we got from its first-party studios over the last decade.
Instead, Meta will focus solely on funding third-party games and studios, but, even then, it won’t be the “gravy train” as it has been for the past few years. Meta said that Oculus Publishing shipped over 140 games in 2025 and has many more shipping this year, so while blank cheques will no longer be written, the company still appears to be serious about funding game development.
Unfortunately, the changes being made to Horizon Worlds also mean a few good projects will be tossed to the wayside. Back in November, Meta debuted social Hyperscape worlds using the updated Horizon engine, allowing users to socialize in hyper-realistic environments. This service will be sunset along with Horizon Worlds, but at least the scanning and building of Hyperscape environments in the original app will stick around.
And while it’s sad to see some of these things go, the reality is that they have to die to save the rest of the ecosystem. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has stated many times that Meta “is a big company and can work on many things at the same time,” but users only have so much time and attention, and it’s clear that Meta’s focus on a Metaverse-first platform is not what’s been winning gamers over to the platform.
The gamers have spoken
To prove that the Quest is a gaming-first platform, Chris Pruett, Director of Games at Meta, spoke at GDC about the state of the Quest ecosystem. “Quest usage has been growing year over year, and in 2025, we hit our all-time highest numbers of unique users ever in our history.” That’s not a sign of a dying platform — quite the opposite.
In 2025, “over 100 titles generated $1M+ in gross revenue in 2025,” and Pruett explained that “premium app sales remain the largest revenue driver for our ecosystem, but IAP grew significantly in 2025, by over 10%.” That’s great news for games, and what’s particularly telling is that Pruett doesn’t mention Horizon Worlds numbers once. Meta is no longer trying to justify funding a feature no one wants.
So instead of garbage-tier free content being thrust in your face the moment you turn on the headset, Meta looks like it’s going back to promoting actual games that people are spending lots of real money on.
To back that up, Meta will continue expanding its Meta Horizon+ gaming subscription, which gives gamers access to over 100 games for only $8 per month. To make things even better, Pruett noted that Meta doled out over $20 million to developers who participated in the program in 2025, proving there’s actually profit to be made for developers as part of the service.
Meta still maintains that its promotion of Horizon Worlds had a limited negative impact on game sales, but the data doesn’t align with what developers have told me and other publications. Pruett noted that despite the low impact, promoting Horizon Worlds front and center “was universally unpopular with our developer community, so we’ve removed them from the Store shelves.”
Meta is often criticized for acting “too Silicon Valley” in that it constantly tries new things and abandons them before users truly have a chance to accept them or change habits. “The cycle of experiment-learn-adjust is typical for Meta. We are cautious not to make assumptions we cannot prove, and when our assumptions are disproved, we change course.”
Slow down
My advice to Meta is the same I gave last year regarding monthly software updates that were pushed out before being tested enough: slow down. The adage of the tortoise and the hare absolutely applies to gamers, who are infamously resistant to change of any kind, and Meta needs to start recognizing that.
This is going to be a weird year for VR gaming, undoubtedly, but plenty of amazing games are still on the horizon (pun intended), including the next VR Games Showcase next week (trailer above) and new hardware from several companies over the next year, including Meta itself.
While I think it’s a massive mistake for Meta to abandon first-party game development, the company is still getting back to basics and focusing on gaming as the primary purpose of the Quest platform, and that’s the right move at the end of the day.
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