Meta Is Shutting Down Its VR 'Metaverse' After Spending An Obscene Amount Of Money Building It—And People Are Roasting Mark Zuckerberg Hard

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was roasted online after Meta announced they'll be shutting down Horizon Worlds, part of their virtual reality "Metaverse," this summer after spending close to $80 billion on the project.

The news comes five years after Zuckerberg declared the metaverse to be the future of Facebook, even renaming the company Meta to reflect that vision. In recent months, Meta cut roughly 10% of the workforce in its "metaverse" division and signaled a shift away from virtual reality for its flagship platform, Horizon Worlds, where users interact through avatars.

Earlier this week, the company announced that access to the immersive world via VR headsets would end on June 15. A day later, Meta partially reversed course, saying it would continue supporting some existing VR apps within Horizon Worlds but would stop developing new ones.

Taken together, the moves mark a significant retreat from Zuckerberg’s original vision of a fully immersive, VR-driven metaverse—effectively signaling the end of that initial concept.

According to Eric Seufert, an independent mobile analyst who spoke to the New York Times about Meta's decision, Meta jumped the gun way too early:

"They’re basically winding that whole experiment down, because they see that trying to will V.R. into existence as a stand-alone platform would take many more years and many more hardware cycles."

Meta is now putting the overwhelming majority of its resources behind artificial intelligence, but the spectacular failure of Zuckerberg's "Metaverse" vision prompted many to mock him and the company online.

Believe it or not, Horizon Worlds was such a failure that it never drew more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users.

Even worse: Reality Labs, the Meta division responsible for VR and metaverse development, posted an operating loss of more than $6 billion in the fourth quarter alone.

It's not a good week to be at Meta, that's for sure.