One day after announcing the wind-down of its Horizon Worlds metaverse platform on Quest headsets, Meta is changing course: CTO Andrew Bosworth revealed during an Instagram AMA Wednesday evening that the company will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for the "foreseeable future.”
Bosworth’s statements suggest that Horizon Worlds in VR will essentially be in a kind of maintenance mode. “The Horizon Unity Runtime Games, they’re not going to work on mobile, they will just work in VR. We’re not going to …
Bosworth’s statements suggest that Horizon Worlds in VR will essentially be in a kind of maintenance mode. “The Horizon Unity Runtime Games, they’re not going to work on mobile, they will just work in VR. We’re not going to be bringing in new games. Again, most of our energy is going towards mobile and the Meta Horizon engine there. [...] But for people who already have games they like, [they] will be able to download the Horizon Worlds app and use it in VR for the foreseeable future.”
Bosworth said that the decision to keep Horizon Worlds running in VR was “to support the fans who have reached out.”
Meta had originally announced Tuesday that Horizon Worlds would shut down in VR on June 15, and that the company would only support mobile Horizon Worlds going forward. Existing Horizon users heavily criticized the company, with many commenting on the announcement page itself to express their displeasure. Creators who built their worlds for Horizon’s VR version also reacted with disbelief.
Meta’s announcement to close Horizon Worlds in VR, and the reversal of that decision the next day, came two months after significant cuts to Meta’s VR efforts, which included the layoff of 1000 employees. They do also reflect the challenges Meta faced as it tried to transform the Horizon Worlds VR app into a social metaverse platform for the masses. Meta sold tens of millions of Quest headsets to date. And yet, when you visited Horizon in VR, even popular games often only had a few dozen simultaneous players.
Meta’s attempts to promote Horizon Worlds within the Quest app store also led to significant backlash from VR developers, who felt that the free worlds were taking attention away from their paid games. When Meta Reality Labs director of games Chris Pruett announced that Horizon Worlds had been removed from the Quest store at GDC this month, he got loud applause from the audience
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