Meta
Meta Horizon Worlds
It was seen from afar: no one was interested in the metaverse, no matter how much Mark Zuckerberg tried to sell his ‘Matrix’ with the aesthetics of a second-rate 3D animation series. Now, Meta closes Horizon Worlds completely and permanently.
The billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has just officially buried his great fantasy, which almost everyone always considered absurd and uselessat least with current technology: Meta announced that it will lower the curtain and close , its virtual reality world.
The support of this virtual universe for its own ends definitively on June 15, 2026, says El Confidencial.
Launched in 2021, this “metaverse” platform was at the origin of the infamous company brand changewhich moved away from Facebook and Oculus to be called “Meta”. This closure is an unconditional surrender of Meta before an undeniable reality: no one wanted to live inside a helmet.
From the beginning, the platform suffered from a poor adhesionwhich translated into very limited appeal among virtual reality users, which forced the company to open it to mobile phones in 2023.
But it was of little use. The metaverse imploded. On March 31st, worlds like Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju and Bobber Bay will disappear from the Quest store, closing a chapter that cost billions of dollars to Meta.
Chronicle of a death announced
O dismantling will be total. On March 24, Meta will also phase out its spatial captures, known as “Hyperscape,” after in February discontinuing its standalone app Horizon Workrooms, an immersive space originally launched in 2021 that allowed you to “work” together with up to 50 participants.
This trail of digital corpses is accompanied by very real cuts at Reality Labs, the gigantic division with 15 thousand workers tasked with building this immersive house of cards.
A Meta fired 10% of workers of this extended reality section, including the developers of Horizon Worlds itself. Additionally, this week closed three video game studios which it had previously acquired: Armature Studio, Twisted Pixel and Sanzaru Games.
These closures are in addition to the Previous Ready at Dawn killsin 2024, and Downpour Interactive, in 2025, leaving the company supported by third-party titles and few surviving studioscomo Beat Games, BigBox VR, Within e Camouflaj.
Even though social software is being decimated, Meta remains tenacious in manufacture hardware. The company plans to launch a limited edition device codenamed “Malibu 2″in addition to preparing a possible successor to the current Quest 3.
He’s also working on a lightweight display connected to a processing disk — basically, a little external computer that you carry in your pocket so your glasses don’t weigh down like lead — dubbed the “Phoenix”, whose launch was postponed from the second half of 2026 to the first half of 2027.
But the Metaverse, unlike the bird, is unlikely to rise from the ashes.
