In 2021, Facebook became Meta and the company claimed its focus would be to “bring the metaverse to life.” It launched Horizon Worlds, a VR metaverse that people could explore and create worlds in. It looked bad and wasn’t great, but it was supposedly the future. Five years later, Meta’s metaverse is ditching VR and spinning Worlds into a Roblox clone after burning $70+ billion on virtual and augmented reality.
On February 19, in a blog post on Meta’s official website, the company announced its plans to split its VR and Reality Labs sector from Horizon Worlds, its free-to-play 3D metaverse that supports user-created worlds and games. The company claims that doing this will “create more space for both products to grow.” The plan now is to fully pivot Worlds into a mobile, non-VR software experience that will resemble a Roblox clone more than the virtual metaverse depicted in Ready Player One.
“We started Worlds for VR with a small crew of dedicated creators who set out to build immersive experiences on their own,” said Meta. “Last year, we began to experiment with Worlds as a mobile platform, and we saw positive momentum. Now, to truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going all-in on mobile.”
And when I say Horizon Worlds is becoming a Roblox clone, I mean that quite literally. In the blog post announcing this big shake-up, Meta name-drops three experiences that have landed on Worlds in recent months and become hugely popular: Grow A Garden, Steal A Brainrot, and Yeet Yourself. (Though oddly, after posting the blog, Meta removed the last two games. Hmm.)
These are popular Roblox experiences, and it makes it clear what Meta is really doing with this pivot. Not many people wanted to strap a VR headset to their face to play bad games. But plenty of folks, including kids, are far more likely to hop into Horizon Worlds if it’s just a phone game they can hop into on a device they already own. Early testing proved that. When you consider that Roblox is one of the few parts of the game industry that is growing rapidly and making tons of money, it makes sense that Meta would decide to take its bad VR Roblox clone, rip out the VR part, and hope to find success as a slop generator for kids.
As for what this means for the future of virtual reality at Meta, the company claims it isn’t going anywhere. It says it has more VR hardware in development and plans to invest more in third-party VR devs. But after the company sliced up its VR game studios last month, well, it’s clear that if VR sticks around, it won’t be a main focus anymore at Meta. Instead, the company is focused on AI. For now.