The company, which spent billions of dollars to build Horizon Worlds an immersive, virtual hangout zone on its Quest virtual reality headsets is “shifting focus” for Horizon Worlds “to be almost exclusively mobile,” according to a blog post published on Thursday.
Horizon Worlds is part of Meta’s Reality Labs division for VR products and smart glasses, a unit that has burned nearly $80 billion since 2020.
“Last year, we began to experiment with Worlds as a mobile platform, and we saw positive momentum,” wrote Samantha Ryan, Meta’s vice president of content at Reality Labs. “Now, to truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going all-in on mobile.”
The move signals how dramatically Meta has redrawn its VR ambitions.
Meta said it is still committed to virtual reality hardware and supporting third-party developers who create games for it.
“We’re in it for the long haul,” Ryan wrote, and pointed to the company’s “robust roadmap of future VR headsets tailored to different audience segments.”
Meta invested nearly $150 million in VR developer platforms in 2025, Ryan wrote, and she said that popular games like “The Thrill of the Fight 2,” “Hard Bullet,” and “UG” had earned “millions” in revenue.
Still, she wrote that 86% of the time people spend in Meta’s headsets is in third-party apps, not its own. The pivot to mobile effectively pits Horizon Worlds against entrenched competitors like Roblox and Fortnite that cater to casual mobile gamers rather than VR enthusiasts with headsets.
On Meta’s latest earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg pitched Horizon as the natural home for “immersive 3D” content: AI-generated scenes, objects, and mini experiences. Now, rather than putting on a headset, people could just spin up that content with a prompt and then share it straight into Instagram, Facebook, or Threads, he said.
