Meta keeps Horizon Worlds on Quest after planned VR shutdown

Meta has reversed a plan to end VR support for Horizon Worlds on its Quest headsets, after telling users earlier this week that the social app would become web-and-mobile only from 15 June. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said in an Instagram Q&A that the company decided “just today” to keep Horizon Worlds working in VR, a change confirmed by a Meta spokesperson, according to TechCrunch.

The reversal lands inside a business unit that has become a running balance-sheet problem. Reality Labs has lost $73 billion since 2021, TechCrunch reports, and Quest headset sales fell 16% year-on-year from 2024 to 2025, according to IDC. Meta has already cut more than 1,500 jobs in Reality Labs and shut several game studios, and TechCrunch notes reports of a broader layoff round that could reach 20% of the company. Against that backdrop, shutting down VR support for the one first-party “metaverse” product would be an admission that the platform never found a durable use case.

Keeping it alive does not mean it works; it means too many internal bets depend on it existing. Large companies often treat product metrics as budget arguments. If a platform can still post some growth—downloads, monthly active users, creator activity—it can justify headcount and keep a narrative intact long enough for the next reorg. TechCrunch cites Appfigures data showing 45 million total mobile downloads and 1.5 million downloads so far in 2026, up 53% year-on-year. But it also estimates only $1.1 million in total consumer spending, a trivial sum next to Reality Labs’ cumulative losses.

Bosworth has argued that mobile has better product-market fit and that building for both mobile and VR forces the team to “build everything twice,” TechCrunch reports. That is a revealing constraint: the economics of Horizon Worlds are now less about virtual reality as a category and more about the cost of maintaining parallel clients and tooling. The VR version is expensive to iterate on, but dropping it risks alienating the small core that uses Quest for social experiences and undermines the hardware flywheel Meta has tried to build.

Meta’s broader strategy has been to subsidise an ecosystem—creator payouts, promotion, and bundling with Quest hardware—rather than wait for organic demand. The weak spending numbers suggest the platform has not converted that subsidy into a self-sustaining marketplace. The longer it remains dependent on internal funding, the more Horizon Worlds becomes a political object inside Meta: something maintained to avoid writing down the premise.

Meta has not said what changed between the forum announcement and Bosworth’s reversal. The app will remain on Quest, while the company says it will still prioritise mobile.

TechCrunch’s download figures show the audience is on phones, while the revenue is still missing.