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Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued
- tyleo 7mo agoInteresting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for. They feel a bit directionless to me. They are still making money but even their AI attempt feels half hearted. I think they are really trying but I’m not sure they can build the engineering muscle to move in new areas with the brand damage they’ve sustained.
- bhouston 7mo ago> Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for. It was clearly the wrong bet. He pumped something like $100B into the endeavour (Meta Quest / VR / Horizons) and it is just slowly dying as we speak. He has to give up on it, although I am sure it will be called a "pivot" into AR glasses.
- tyleo 7mo agoYeah, it was a bizarre decision. There isn't a clear ROI on games and that's what Horizon Worlds has been the whole time. There's no equation that says a 100M game automatically makes 100x more than a 1M game on average. If anything the equation is sub-linear. 100B just doesn't seem like the right size for a game investment.
- Anon1096 7mo agoIt's supposed to be a Roblox competitor, which does print money, though probably not to the extent of how much they invested. The problems are 2 fold: People/kids don't want to put on a VR headset to play Roblox. I guess they're conceding this point by pivoting to mobile. Meta is the opposite of cool. Real name requirements, only humanoid avatars, super corpo branding, etc really seriously hold them back from competing with VRChat or Roblox. This one is terminal it'll never be fixable as long as Meta is at the helm.
- tyleo 7mo agoEven Roblox doesn’t print money if you look into that business. They print engagement but are still fighting tooth and nail to make a dime on it. I can see Meta wanting the engagement though.
- bombcar 7mo agoIf they wanted a Roblox competitor, they could have bought Roblox for much less than the billions they spent. Even now it's still less.
- eclipxe 7mo ago100B wasn't spent on a game. The RL org is much larger than Horizon Worlds, or even VR
- ed_elliott_asc 7mo agoThere are some really good ar glasses for a couple of hundred dollars, I think they are going to end up really cheap and not the 100 billion investment that facebook needs.
- ljf 7mo agoAny you'd recommend or can point me to good reviews for?
- recursivecaveat 7mo agoTbf I don't think they ever intended to make back their investments via the goggles. As near as I can tell the thought process was basically: "Real estate + fashion + live entertainment + art + etc is X quadrillion dollars. We could make The Virtual World and capture all that value. It would be irrational not to invest $100B!" Basically Pascal's Investment.
- PLenz 7mo agoIt's not slowly dying, it was dead on arrival and never had any real traction
- KronisLV 7mo ago> He pumped something like $100B into the endeavour (Meta Quest / VR / Horizons) and it is just slowly dying as we speak. Literally never met anyone who used or liked the Horizon thing, VRChat in comparison is more popular and doesn't feel like a soulless corporate husk: they also have quite the variety of worlds, from party games, to someone building a whole jet/chopper flight combat simcade world; ofc all of them are a bit jank, but lots of cool stuff and very expressive avatars. Meta Quest, on the other hand, seems like a really good piece of tech - I still have my Quest 2 (because I'm broke as hell), but I enjoyed even that one, albeit maybe with a slightly more comfy head strap than the default one and the Virtual Desktop app cause their Link app doesn't support Intel Arc GPUs. The tracking is good, the experience of all sorts of stuff in VR is nice, games like H3VR or VTOL VR are great, as is Into The Radius VR! At the same time, I can see why it never saw super widespread adoption - tricky to develop for and also a somewhat limited audience. Also the productivity situation just isn't there, closest I got to a good productivity setup (out of curiosity) was the Immersed app before they messed it all up by removing support for physical monitors - I could have my 4 physical monitors in VR surrounded by whatever I want and some virtual monitors and just lock in, it was kind of zen despite the technical limitations. It seems like people got promising tech in place... and then never really wrote good software to take advantage of it. Even Virtual Desktop has artificially enforced monitor limits in VR. I hope VR tech continues to progress (especially lightweight headsets) no matter what happens to Meta.
- IncreasePosts 7mo agoIt makes sense to rebrand anyway, because I'm sure they don't want people to only think of "that social media site" for all of their other ventures. Just like Google rebranding as alphabet
- tyleo 7mo agoIDK, I still call Google "Google". I even hear employees refer to the entity as "Google". The Meta rebranding seems different.
- mikepurvis 7mo agoI think for Google the more meaningful other brands are the actual product ones, like Waymo, Nest, YouTube, Calico, Verily. Those are the ones that benefit from being able to distance themselves a bit from being "a Google company" and all the baggage that comes with that, eg an assumption that it'll be shuttered at some point, will pivot massively into ads, whatever. I don't think Meta has nearly that need. It's "other companies" are Instagram and Whatsapp, which are basically in the exact same space as Facebook.
- caconym_ 7mo agoI don't think Google really "rebranded" in the same kind of way, since Google is still their brand across the vast majority of their product offerings and the signs on Google offices still say Google. Seems like the Alphabet thing is more about letting the "other bets" be under a higher umbrella, and possibly other reasons related to financial engineering etc.
- nerevarthelame 7mo agoThe rebrand came at a time when "Facebook" was mainly associated with either tremendous scandal (Facebook Files, ad fraud, Cambridge Analytica, Rohingya and Tigray genocides, etc.) or a social media platform increasingly dominated by the elderly. I think it was a desperate lunge away from that toxic brand toward ANYTHING else. Zuckerberg put his money on VR, given the pandemic and the mild success of Oculus. Betting big on the metaverse in particular was a mistake, but it might have helped keep the Facebook stink off of products like WhatsApp and Instagram, which remain pretty popular among mainstream audiences.
- Analemma_ 7mo agoCan we all say a big thank you to Neal Stephenson for inspiring Zuckerberg to light tens of billions of dollars on fire in this stupid quest? Imagine what kinds of anticompetitive acquisitions or further privacy-invading tech they might’ve spent that on instead.
- bathwaterpizza 7mo agoThey had the money to try something, did it, didn't work. Not unheard of. Still a >$1T company.
- Traster 7mo agoI was at Intel for a while and there was one glaring problem - they have one product that spins off a huge amount of cash. This means a few things: First, that one product is really where the things that matter happen. But second, they have all this money and they don't know what to do with it, they can't spend it all on their core product because that looks terrible - they're already throwing off money, investing more probably just makes your company look bad (you're spending more to get the same revenue). SO instead you have to take that money and make bets. But not just any bets. You need a bet that (a) matters if it pays off, and (b) looks favourable compared to the core business. So you buy Mcafee and Altera and MobilEye, 5G was the future once... So to take the Meta example, they need something that is going to have revenue upside similar to Meta advertising revenue (one of the most profitable things in the universe), and that has better margins that the advertising business (basically impossible).So the only logical thing to do is to make grotesquely large bets on things that are extremely speculative. You can't bet on things that are well known - because nothing known has the properties from earlier that you're looking for, and you can't bet small because you've got to convince people you're the pay off is of a similar size to your existing business. In Intel's case they lost focus on the core business and so that died and their other bets didn't matter because the core business was dead. With Meta the core business in't dead, but it's only a matter of time before it's seriously threatened and so they're going to attack that threat with everything they've got - and they have a tonne of resources.
- einsteinx2 7mo agoSounds a lot like Google as well
- FartyMcFarter 7mo agoBut Google actually knows how to do research and how to apply it to products. Meta's AI research hasn't produced anywhere near as many state of the art products /revolutionary achievements.
- einsteinx2 7mo agoI was thinking more of their primary revenue source / money printer being their ads business like Meta then they also spend billions from it on all kinds of other bets.
- cedws 7mo agoI'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip. Serving soap cutting videos and giving teen girls body dysmorphia isn't a very compelling mission. Though I'm sure many are mercenaries and will work for whoever pays the most.
- coldpie 7mo ago> I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip The next 5 years are going to be very disappointing for you.
- joe_mamba 7mo ago>I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip. That's the irony. The genius scientists are against AI used for defense, but somehow they're all-in for AI being used to getting people addicted to ads, dopamine, gambling, debt, porn, political manipulation, etc. basically everything that's guarantee to wreck society, but thank god they aren't making weapons I guess.
- karmakaze 7mo agoThe Meta/Oculus bet was never about VR or gaming. It is to solve Zuck's greatest fear of being beholden to platforms controlled by others. What it was supposed to be was basically what Microsoft missed out on with mobile, losing to Google and Apple. VR and AR could be that next platform to own and control. They would love to have all the data that Google and Apple enjoy. That's what Quest -> Horizon was about, change a gaming device into a mainstream entertainment and work-friendly one. This is all driven out of fear and lack of control. It would suck for them if OpenAI owns the most successful personal AI device.
- crooked-v 7mo agoI still find it funny that Apple did exactly the usual Apple thing of coming in way later and yet inventing a UX for this kind of stuff good enough that Meta immediately started scrambling to copy it.
- dmix 7mo agoHaving a baked in hardware userbase and dev team helps a lot. The hardest part of inventing new things is getting feedback from real people who really think deeply about this stuff, who also have lots of power within the company to say no.
- wolvoleo 7mo agoOn the other hand, pico was always copying meta's UI. And meta's UI has changed every 6 months anyway. Like significantly so. They were up for another redesign anyway :)
- bombcar 7mo agoThey could release a subsidized Facebook phone which is just some android pos with Facebook rammed into it for way less than the 70 billion or whatever they burned on VR.
- tokioyoyo 7mo agoThey actually did that before, if i recall correctly?
- cheriot 7mo agoCondolences to those that about to be laid off Context: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/14/meta-reportedly-considering-layoffs-that-could-affect-20-of-the-company/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/14/meta-reportedly-considerin...
- xd1936 7mo agoUnbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?
- kemotep 7mo agoBillions. Facebook has spent billions and billions over the past decade in VR. Starting with the Oculus merger and then in 2021 with the rebrand. 10 billion a year supposedly for the past 5 years now.
- EGreg 7mo agoThey could have just waited until AI came out, now they can spend $1 million on tokens and slop :)
- xd1936 7mo agoI meant hundreds of millions on Horizon Worlds specifically. Virtual concerts and the like. Big "Hello Fellow Kids" energy.
- tantalor 7mo agoCan you blame them? They saw the huge success Fortnite was having in that space. Facebook's core competency is copying other successful products. Sometimes it works.
- amazingamazing 7mo agoAnd soon 20% of meta too
- etchalon 7mo agoZucker just keeps failing up.
- bhouston 7mo agoOkay, how long until Meta Quest is discontinued/sunset? I believe there is no expectation of a Meta Quest 4 right?
- giobox 7mo agoIn all seriousness, given component price increases etc, the Quest 3 remains an incredible deal for PC VR use. Aside from the foveated rendering, the lens/display specifications are very close to Valve's still to ship Steam Frame, which at this stage will almost certainly cost more than the Quest 3 does. 25 PPD VR headset for 499 with inside-out tracking plus controllers etc is amazing value. I've never once used any of the Meta applications, I only use it for VR games on Steam. I think there is a case to be made one should buy one while you still can, if you want a great value PC VR headset. It's still an excellent choice for stuff like sim racing as well. I also think the Quest line of hardware is done for. They are clearly much more interested in the glasses lineup, products like the Ray Bans etc, none of which appear to use any of the Quest software stack.
- kstrauser 7mo agoIf only it were made by almost[0] literally anyone else, I'd allow one into my house. [0]"Almost" has plenty of room for any horrid exception someone might want to gotcha me with, so please don't.
- wolvoleo 7mo agoYeah the frame is gonna cost at least double now with component prices. I was hoping to buy one (I've got 4 quests of different types) but nope not if it's > 1000€.
- LorenDB 7mo agoMeta has very recently had leaks of an upcoming lightweight headset. So maybe not a Quest 4 as a direct successor to the Quest 3, but a new headset is in the works.
- riskable 7mo ago
- darth_avocado 7mo agoLayoffs are probably on the horizon
- hvb2 7mo agoAnd those are the non virtual ones, right?
- netsharc 7mo agoOh no, those poor people who are happy to get paid making products and services to exploit our basest emotions, amp them for "engagement", subverting civility and democracy in the meanwhile, are going to be laid off?!
- OrangeMusic 7mo agoAnd which honorable and morally superior company do _you_ work for?
- bhouston 7mo agoIs Meta Horizon Worlds working on PC well? I guess it is their attempt to be competitive with Roblox.
- jryio 7mo agoHistorians will write about the 'metaverse' as the last software frontier humanity embarked on before AI. What a shame. Hopefully capitalism and AI research does not produce equally bad products and ideas.
- ncallaway 7mo agoI do not think historians will write about the metaverse at all. Maybe it'll be a case study in business schools for a while, but I think that'll be the extent of its legacy
- nullpoint420 7mo agoAnd the blockchain.
- rchaud 7mo agoIf they mention it at all, it'll be in the context of the C-suite envy about the money being made with Fortnite skins and "virtual assets", resulting in galaxy brain ideas like "buy land in the metaverse" or "own rare art with NFTs".
- kevin_thibedeau 7mo agoIt can always have a second life.
- i1856511 7mo agoDid they ever get legs?
- rhcom2 7mo agoThe most obvious and expected outcome to everyone except Zuck.
- renewiltord 7mo agoZuck has become a very rich man avoiding all the obvious and expected outcomes. When Facebook stock hit its low a few years ago, HN was explaining why it was doomed. The man has founder mentality at the helm of a trillion-dollar company. It is no wonder he is what he is.
- riskable 7mo agoThey just used their war chest to buy a bunch of companies to diversify their revenue stream. It's not like Meta made some massively profitable innovations or new services.
- paxys 7mo agoThe stock lows was a market overreaction, and it corrected itself soon after. It’s not like Zuck got the company out of the hole by making some genius moves. Quite the opposite. Meta would be in an equally good or better position today had Zuck just done nothing for the last decade.
- rhcom2 7mo agoPast performance is not indicative of future results
- sergiotapia 7mo agoThe quest is such a beautiful device. I hope they continue to work on it and release new versions. VR is so good and still in it's infancy.
- Eufrat 7mo ago> VR is so good and still in it's infancy. I believe 30% of the population cannot use VR in any way shape or form because your inner ear has decided the floor is the only place you can be.
- andybak 7mo agoEven for games or experiences with no artificial locomotion whatsoever?
- Eufrat 7mo agoYes, my understanding (and I suspect the reason why the airflow experiment worked) is that a large part of the reason this happens is because of a mismatch between the output from the vestibular and visual systems. So, the automated defenses of your body freak out and go into a defensive mode. I think that ~30% of the population just has more sensitivity to the mismatch.
- andybak 7mo agoBut surely that requires (virtual) player movement in VR for there to be a mismatch?
- Eufrat 7mo agoThere is always going to be some movement. It’s impossible for there not to be. Whether it is rendered in the VR environment or happening in real-life through small little motions, there’s a lot of little things that help to establish the mismatch. It’s probably most like getting car sick. You are obviously moving, but you are also stationary at the same time. This doesn’t happen to folks suffering from motion sickness when they are driving, though, because there is now a physical action tying the motion to your inputs. This may lead you to ask why people watching a movie in a theater don’t get motion sick and the reason is the same, multiple inputs tell you otherwise. You can see the edges of the screen, you can see the audience, there’s a lot of input telling your body there’s nothing weird going on here. The more immersive, the more some people’s bodies do not handle the illusion well.
- drivebyhooting 7mo agoWhen will horizon worlds be axed entirely? It has something like fewer than 10,000 active users at any given time.
- robot_jesus 7mo agoFrom the article: > By March 31, 2026, Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer appear in the Store on Quest. Also, Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay worlds will no longer be available in VR. You can still jump into your other favorite worlds in VR until June 15, 2026, after which the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from Quest, and Worlds will no longer be available in VR.
- LorenDB 7mo agoBut Horizon Worlds will continue to be available on mobile, so it's just the Quest ecosystem losing access in favor of a phone-first platform.
- gcr 7mo agoA phone-first VR platform?
- drivebyhooting 7mo agoPhone-only The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Very few people want to buy a separate cumbersome face hugger device.
- SchemaLoad 7mo agoI don't think that's entirely it, they don't want the product facebook is selling. VR Chat is massively more popular than Facebooks offerings. Though Facebook had impossible goals, they didn't want to make a gaming device, they wanted to make the next smartphone, that everyday people and office workers would use. Which was just unrealistic.
- daverol 7mo agoWhere will all those Meta Avatars go? Is there a retirement home in the Metaverse?
- OrangeMusic 7mo agoThe app will still exist, but only on mobile (which is absolutely inexplicable).
- 9864247888754 7mo ago[dead]
- pimlottc 7mo agoWhere will they put all those legs?
- t-writescode 7mo agoThey were trying to compete with an existing, VERY good couple of alternatives, and the people most actually likely to use that product were already on those services. It was a losing play that didn’t know what market it was actually entering.
- cammikebrown 7mo agoWhat are some alternatives?
- t-writescode 7mo agoVRChat is the most popular one. Age verification. User generated models. User generated worlds. Revenue sharing in worlds. For-sale models and props. It’s quite feature rich now. Edit: fixed typo
- squidsoup 7mo agoDon't forget the deranged furries.
- t-writescode 7mo agoThe suspiciously wealthy software developers, astronauts, pharmacists, game devs and artists that build high quality 3d models, Blender and Substance Painter tutorials and add-ons that prop up a good percentage of the VR headset market, Patreon market, and have a thriving artisan ecosystem?
- riskable 7mo agoThey're not all deranged! Some are completely productive, functional furries. Probably. Maybe. Also, your statement is far too reductive! There's plenty of avatars with scales! Also, don't forget the anime girls that are actually middle-aged men and the occasional sentient burrito.
- 7mo ago
- senderista 7mo agoImagine what $100B could have done for medical or energy research.
- jeffbee 7mo agoAlmost nothing. That is a few weeks of global medical R&D spend, spread over more than a decade.
- paxys 7mo agoAnnual R&D spending of pharmaceutical companies: Merck - $17.9B Johnson & Johnson - $17.2B Roche - $14.6B AstraZeneca - $13.6B AbbVie - $12.8B Bristol Myers Squibb - $11.2B Eli Lilly - $10.99B Meta’s losses on Metaverse last year - $19.2B So, simply redirecting their spending in that division would instantly propel Meta to be the biggest medical researcher in the world. And as a bonus they’d get a real return out of it.
- asdff 7mo agoIt would cover the entire NIH budget for two years. That isn't nothing.
- slaw 7mo ago40 nuclear power plants.
- robot_jesus 7mo agoAs a thought experiment, they probably helped the world global happiness more by burning $100B rather than just sitting on a massive cash hoard as so many tech companies enjoy doing. Sitting in their coffers it was doing nothing. At least this way, it went to a whole bunch of individuals, manufacturing startups, etc. And theoretically many of those recipients spent some of it. I'm not saying it wasn't wasted spend, but velocity of money is a thing and maybe it's better off in the hands of the people who it was spent on instead of sitting in Zuck's war chest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
- 7mo ago
- yhvr 7mo agoIt's baffling to me how much they juiced up this platform on Horizon OS, and now they're just axing it from there entirely. Millions if not billions of dollars gone to waste. At least I won't have to see it in the UI anymore, I guess. How does this even happen?
- OrangeMusic 7mo agoIt ia billions. At least 70.
- d--b 7mo agoThat sucks. At least they had a purpose, a vision. Now Zuckerberg is going to be all sour about it and even more cynical about everything. They’re going to go back to what they know how to do: optimize for attention and sell personal data.
- jeffbee 7mo agoSecond Life, which contains only niche perverts, has more concurrent actives than Horizon Worlds.
- cubefox 7mo agoVRChat also seems to be used only by niche perverts. Perhaps only niche perverts are currently interested in the Metaverse, and Horizon Worlds failed because it didn't cater to niche perverts.
- jrflowers 7mo agoI guess that idea just didn’t have legs.
- HiroProtagonist 7mo agoWhat you did there, I see it. :)
- givemeethekeys 7mo agoThat's okay - it felt cartoony and, I imagine it wasn't the reason why the vast majority of people bought the Quest anyway.
- crooked-v 7mo agoPlenty of people use the 'cartoony' parts of VRChat and even have Quest devices entirely for it. The difference comes down to, well, VRChat just being the plain superior product in almost every regard, especially for social spaces, even after Meta set huge amounts of money on fire with Horizon Worlds.
- givemeethekeys 7mo agoOh, how cool. I have not tried VRChat!
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- ralusek 7mo agoMaybe I'm just naive but I don't really understand discontinuing things like this. Like, unless there are like 100 people using this, how can it not be possible to just leave this running at like 0.5% of its former capacity. Just leave up like 1 server, collapse all of the DBs into one, and let these few autists have their stuff.
- michelb 7mo agoIt probably distracts from the AI race. With the newly bought political power it makes far more sense for Meta to align with whatever this administration seeks. And it’s not gaming or VR.
- reverius42 7mo agoThey should probably rename "Meta" the company then.
- FartyMcFarter 7mo agoThere might be expensive non-technical maintenance required, such as checks for illegal user content.
- sxp 7mo agoAt a minimum, the app needs updates to handle breakages caused by OS updates. It needs moderators and other staff for legal reasons since Meta is large enough that there's always a significant liability risk for even a few users. It needs to interact with the main non-VR app unless they want to fully isolate it. Etc. When I was at Google, I had many of these discussions about cost tradeoffs for products that were https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- dmorrison1 7mo agoIt was terrible, and frankly the only way I see it getting to where it got is by upper management keeping their fingers in their ears and their eyes shut.
- seydor 7mo agoFacebook's strong suit has always been gossip. Why are they even spending for anything else
- browsingonly 7mo agoThat was the point of Horizon Worlds. They were trying a (very expensive) social play for VR. The problem is that the intersection/suitability of VR and social media is rather low, while as a counterexample the intersection of mobile and social media is very large. I have no desire to chat with old classmates when I "suit up" with VR goggles, I'm there to game.
- jesse_dot_id 7mo agoI never understood why they were trying to recreate real life social interactions in VR, because it's worse by default, and the majority of the nerds who buy this tech are probably trying to escape that on some level. I know that any time I went into Meta Horizon Worlds, I didn't want to hear 95% of the people I heard talking. What I do use VR for is Bigscreen VR nearly every night to watch stuff with my friends. Scrolling through reels in a movie theater is pretty fun and even though I never do it solo on my phone, I will sit there for like 3-4 hours in VR enjoying communal brain rot. Perhaps they should focus on things like that instead of gimmicks that nobody cares about. For example, I have never once played a game in VR that didn't force me to sit or stand in a specific position, meaning to play it, I have to go out of my way to do so.
- Raed667 7mo agoThey just wanted a platform they control instead of apple or Google
- zamadatix 7mo agoThe last 10 years of the VR industry has been about trying to find users beyond the hardcore nerds who want to virtually meet up with friends every night or try out experiences/demos for more than a few days. The moment that hope goes away so do the tens of billions of investment as it was never really about finding out what that group of users wanted.
- wolvoleo 7mo agoThere's a lot of nerds around the world. Plenty for a decent market. Also it isn't this weird an idea. Could you imagine explaining to someone in 1995 that everyone would be chatting on a small touchscreen instead of calling each other on the phone? You'd be laughed out of the door "typing is not real communication". Yet these days it's the main mode of communication. I do think AR/VR has a chance. Just not until the hardware is truly hassle-free.
- paxys 7mo agoIt’s wild how much mismanagement Zuck is able to get away with just because he controls majority voting shares in Meta. At this point all of the missteps by the company in AR/VR, AI and everything else can directly be traced back to him. Half-baked vision, massive spending and no accountability. The company desperately needs a Sundar/Satya type leader.
- Traster 7mo agoAt the end of the day the core business is throwing off tonnes of money and is run fine. Would it be better not to throw billions at the next cool thing? Who knows. Probably. But Google does the same thing and they've actually built some cool stuff.
- pjc50 7mo agoReturn it to the shareholders!
- p_j_w 7mo ago>The company desperately needs a Sundar/Satya type leader. For the sake of the world's sanity, I'd rather see them go belly up.
- ryandrake 7mo agoYea, we're all lucky that the company is so badly managed and lacks vision and execution. If they were visionary, competent and effective, Meta products would be an even bigger menace and more destructive than they already are.
- JCharante 7mo agoHe has accountability. If people don't like his choices they can sell their shares and he can be a majority voter in a worthless company. People holding says otherwise. It's good to see companies actually try things instead of sit there and not innovate.
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- atrus 7mo agoDespite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision. Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990. Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to create the iPhone, in any of its varations? Absolutely not, there too much research, too much to invent, too much to program and not nearly enough talent and money for one company to manage.
- yallpendantools 7mo agoI think you make a good point but also, honestly, VR seemed so beyond Facebook's depth. Zuck, IMO, was reaching for a pie on a table at the other end of the room. I understand the whole point of acquiring Oculus was to get allies on that table at the other end but---excuse my corpo-speak here---I don't think Oculus ever had synergy with the rest of Facebook's business. This is just my 2c as an outside observer, software engineer ofc. I'm sure some MBA could make a case for said synergy. But it made sense to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp, for instance, because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks. But Oculus?!?!?! IMO Facebook had a better chance opening a cloud computing division. So, achieving the Metaverse dream with the money Zuck has spent was always gonna be a tall order at this point but if anyone could've made it work, it wasn't gonna be a social media company.
- alex1138 7mo ago> because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks Another point of view: antitrust. What Zuck did with Whatsapp at a minimum ought to be highly illegal. He's a black hat hacker from his history and WA is more of the same. Brian Acton said "it's time, delete Facebook". That's not mutual benefit, that's conquering
- alexchantavy 7mo agoHaha FB Cloud sounds so wild to imagine
- FartyMcFarter 7mo agoIs this a prelude to a huge downsizing in reality labs? I wonder what percentage of RL is working on this app.
- GenericDev 7mo ago[dead]
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- tren_hard 7mo agoRight as AI world models like Genie 3 are taking off too. Seems like a great fit for VR.
- neosat 7mo agoThe sign of a company in absolute decline is when the worst possible place to get info about it, is their official announcement. Whoever wrote the announcement went out of their way to obfuscate the crux of the announcement (compare the clear heading on hackernews to their own heading) If your (well paid) job is to write and communicate clearly, and for a major announcement you come up with this...not much left to say.
- wolvoleo 7mo agoYeah the whole positive spin about doubling down on VR was completely ridiculous. The only thing left making money now is the store. Which means they'll just have to hope some others will make stuff that's worth selling because they've also shut all their own studios.
- XCSme 7mo agoI have a Quest 2, I only use it to play Eleven Table Tennis VR. I don't understand what Horizon Worlds is or the other thing mentioned.
- XCSme 7mo agoIt will be Gemini World instead ...
- 9864247888754 7mo agoWhat a joy to see their Metaverse crash and burn. They were never able to define this vacuous concept or any value proposition.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- DeepYogurt 7mo agoMMOs must be expensive to run
- beloch 7mo agoI find it utterly fascinating how VR and 3D keep coming back in cycles every couple of decades, but ultimately fail to stick. 3D film was big in the 1950's, but fell out of fashion as colour film processes became cheaper and more ubiquitous. The 3D technology of the day couldn't handle colour film, and colour was a bigger leap forward in immersion than 3D. The 3D surge that happened a couple decades ago was in full-colour, but still subsided. Home video was on the rise, and the expense of 3D in the home was probably to blame, as well as half-baked solutions. I owned a 3D capable projector for a while, but it had to be run at a reduced refresh rate and took a big brightness hit in 3D mode. I watched 3D movies only a couple of times, and stuck to good old 2D after that. I no longer own a 3D capable display. There was a big content problem with 3D movies. Some movies attempted to WOW you with 3D gimmicks. Scott Cameron's "Ghosts of the Abyss" was guilty of this. It was a mostly 2D documentary that occasionally rammed a robot arm in your face or had a collage of images popping out of the wall for no particular reason. The result was that you were more frequently distracted from the experience by 3D gimmicks than further immersed in it. Other films took the approach of making both 2D and 3D versions available, but this made 3D non-essential to the experience. 3D just didn't add much. I often found myself preferring the 2D version because so many cinemas have brightness problems with 3D projection. VR was big in the 90's, mainly in VR Cafes. The technology was cool as hell in concept, but the reality was underwhelming. Computers of the day just weren't fast enough, and the results were literally nauseating. VR fell out of fashion, the cafes went out of business, and that was mostly it for VR until a few years ago. The current surge has much better hardware and far more compelling experiences. Valve's Alyx is just plain brilliant! Unfortunately, it's still nauseating for some and a truly civilized VR experience seems just beyond the capabilities of all but the most ridiculously expensive hardware at present. As a result, adoption is poor and the current wave of VR is petering out, like 3D did a decade or so ago. There aren't many VR headsets out there, so there isn't a lot of compelling software, so there isn't a lot of reason for more people to buy expensive headsets, and so on. For my money, the problem is that VR and 3D aren't as big a leap forward as they need to be in order to justify by their current expense and downsides. People can use their imagination to immerse themselves through a 2D window really effectively. VR probably isn't going to catch on until it's cheap and trouble-free. Eventually, it'll be better/cheaper at delivering a big 2D window than a physical 2D screen can, but it's probably not going to succeed until then.
- minihat 7mo agoI met some of my best friends in VR, and had life-changing social interactions in some VR games on the Oculus platform... Especially EchoVR. I'm still a true believer in VR as a medium. It'll go mainstream one day, and there will be a Meta-sized company built upon it. They had lightning in a bottle and somehow lost it. Honestly it might have been hiring Carmack that sent them down this path. Moving away from PCVR expanded the market, but it also killed the magic. Now the quest store is a wasteland of what look like low budget mobile apps.
- wolvoleo 7mo agoVery good take. I still love VR and I use it a ton. But yeah PC is where it's at.
- seabre3z3e 7mo ago[dead]
- bentt 7mo agoSoon: company rebrand to MetAI
- maieuticagent 7mo agoDon't be surprised when the hypetrain derails, take the vibeverse less traveled by, and it will make all the difference.
- thoman23 7mo agoDoes this mean my prime virtual real estate next door to Snoop Dogg's house isn't going to work as my retirement plan anymore?
- steve1977 7mo ago"Updates to Your Meta Quest Experience in 2026" - I like the euphemism
- umeridrisi 7mo agoWow, Meta just doesn't know what to do with this AI thing, and they are just doing whatever they think is right to just get into AI. However, they are just spending billions, yielding nothing in return. Insane.
- gizzlon 7mo agoOutput from Kagis LinkedIn Speak -> English. Probably more accurate? : "Earlier this year, we admitted we have no idea what to do with VR or Horizon. We’re splitting them up because they’re both failing in different ways, and we’re turning Horizon Worlds into just another shitty mobile app. This mess is going to break everything, including the app on your phone. To "streamline" things—which is code for cutting costs—here is everything we’re taking away from you through 2026. • Meta Horizon Worlds: By March 31, 2026, we’re pulling Horizon Worlds and Events from the Quest Store. We’re also killing off Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay in VR. You can play your other favorite VR worlds until June 15, 2026, but after that, we’re deleting the app from Quest entirely. If you still want to use it, you’ll have to stare at a tiny phone screen like everyone else. • Meta Horizon Hyperscape Capture (Beta): By March 24, 2026, you can’t watch Hyperscape captures in Horizon Worlds anymore. They’re stuck in some beta app in your library that nobody uses. You can still record stuff, but you’ll be doing it alone because we’re killing the social features. • Meta Horizon Plus (MH+) Perks: By March 31, 2026, we’re stripping the Horizon-specific crap—like Meta Credits and digital clothes—out of your subscription. We’re charging you the same price for less stuff, but hey, you still get the monthly games. We’re still spending money trying to make the Quest suck less—we added a keyboard and let you move windows around, and we’re forcing a new interface on you whether you want it or not."
- hamo_vv93 7mo ago[flagged]
- zipping1549 7mo agoThe moment I tried their "Meta horizon worlds" I thought "This'll totally be discontinued in the next few years". What makes it extra stupid is that the entire Quest experience revolves around it.
- phoenix027745 7mo ago[dead]
- malwrar 7mo agoI really didn’t want this to succeed, could you imagine an alternative future where people are strapping these things to their faces and immersing their full FOV in a zuck-controlled virtual shopping mall? The Facebook brand is absolutely toxic imo, I think it’s an incredibly understated reason for this product’s failure. I’d love to develop for these devices though if I could somehow avoid interacting with Meta beyond as an OEM.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dramm 7mo agoHorizon Worlds was always going to be a disaster. Complete crazy goals. An embarrassing mess of dopey looking legless avatars, then trying to force Meta employees to use it (everybody I knew there hated it). At this point I would like Palmer Luckey to take back what is left of Occulus, the tech has (much more modest) opportunities in gaming, entertainment, enterprise, military uses. Zuckerberg should pay him to take it.
- gmerc 7mo agoWhen they started it they decided to ignore all the in house experience they had for former game developers and instead to "reinvent animation and collision systems from scratch". Even without legs, it was a damn failure
- damnitbuilds 7mo agoThe Madness of Billionaires.
- BigTTYGothGF 7mo agoEvery dollar facebook spent on this is a dollar they couldn't spend on doing the really heinous stuff, so to me it's a shame it's being shut down.
- Bishop197 7mo ago[dead]