Meta has been scrambling to ensure its online social universe, Horizon Worlds, remains relevant to users around the world. Competing with the likes of Roblox and Fortnite has proved to be difficult for the platform. So this past week, Meta announced that Horizon Worlds would be dropping the core technology it was built for, VR. However, the company has now slightly backtracked and said Horizon Worlds will partially support VR.
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What is Horizon Worlds?
Back in 2021 when the “Metaverse” craze was in full swing, Meta launched Horizon Worlds as its flagship social app. The idea being to create one expansive world where people could socialise, play games, buy products and build their own worlds: one neatly unifying universe. However, that turned out not to be the case, with low user numbers and retention.
Meta continued to heavily promote Horizon Worlds to VR users, namely dominating the Meta Quest Store (now called Horizon Store) with user-created content. This naturally led to both consumer and developer backlash as game discoverability became even harder. Furthermore, in 2023, Horizon Worlds opened up to the mobile market, providing easier access to folks worldwide.
Saying no to VR
With its focus shifting to mobile, and VR retention remaining stagnant, earlier this week, Meta announced that Horizon Worlds would be dropping VR support. This would happen in stages, the first taking place on 31st March 2026, with the delisting of the app as well as events. This would include removing access to first-party worlds like Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay.
Then, on 15th June 2026, the Horizon Worlds app would be completely removed from Quest headsets. That would mean all worlds would be completely inaccessible to VR users. From that point on, Horizon Worlds would be flatscreen-only.
However…
Saying Yes to VR (sort of)
On a mere two days after that huge announcement, Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth revealed in one of his regular AMAs on Instagram that this wasn’t 100% true. In fact, some worlds would still be available to VR users. Effectively classed as ‘Legacy’ worlds, these are older worlds built within the Unity game engine that can’t work on flatscreen devices.
“I have a little bit of good news here for you then. We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games, to support the fans who’ve reached out like yourself who really care about that,” Bosworth said.
“The Horizon Unity runtime games, they’re not going to work on mobile, they’ll just be working in VR. We’re not bringing new games – most of our energy is going towards mobile and the Meta Horizon Engine there. The reason for that is because that’s where most of the consumer and creator energy already was, and so we’re leaning into that. But for people who already have games that they like that they’re using in Horizon Worlds, will be able to download the Horizon Worlds app and use it in VR for the foreseeable future.”
So if you are a fan of Horizon Worlds in VR, you can enjoy some of its content as originally intended for a little while longer. How long that remains in place remains to be seen.
