Meta's Metaverse Leaves Virtual Reality 14
Meta is pivoting Horizon Worlds away from its original VR-centric metaverse vision and toward a mobile-first strategy, "explicitly separating" its Quest VR platform from the virtual world. TechCrunch reports: By going mobile-first, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete with popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. "We're in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world's biggest social networks," Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs' VP of content, said in the blog post. "You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it's our main focus." Ryan went on to note that Meta is still focused on VR hardware. "We have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures," Ryan wrote.
Wait, what? (Score:2)
Horizon Worlds still exists?
Re: Wait, what? (Score:2)
But.. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
everyone just wants their VR headset t9 be a Panoramic Desktop view of multitasking environments and remote access and virtual device control
Literally no one wants this. Virtually (pun intended) all use of VR headset is special purpose apps, e.g. 3D model reviews of industrial installations (we actually use this at work, I've seen many of our peers do too), jacking off to porn or gaming - this one is probably 90% of all VR use.
That said I agree with you about Meta's motives on this.
About time (Score:2)
Should've done this from the beginning. It never made sense to require VR for something that you desperately need users to populate your empty virtual worlds.
Re: (Score:2)
The point of buying Oculus for the VR hardware was to create the Metaverse where everyone would put on a VR headaset and log into Facebook to do things with their friends and relatives. But that market was taken by apps like VR Chat.
Obviously the plan was dumb, but it was a plan.
Re: (Score:3)
Should've done this from the beginning. It never made sense to require VR for something that you desperately need users to populate your empty virtual worlds.
Actually it made perfect sense. There's plenty of VR users to populate this world. It could be full to the brim. But reality: It was bad. REALLY REALLY BAD. It has no purpose, it has no fun, there's nothing to do in it. It is just BAD.
Now I will bet you a kidney, now that Horizon Worlds is targeting a mobile platform it will,... still remain unpopular, empty and hopefully quickly die into obscurity.
I do hope Meta now return to focusing on what made VR and Oculus headsets popular in the first place, but give
And the next gen fail is incoming at Meta (Score:2)
Zuck the Fuckup cannot perform. He got lucky once.
Horizon Worlds: mind-boggingly, breathtakingly bad (Score:2)
I tried this out and I am just stunned by how terrible, badly implemented, utterly devoid of anything cool or interesting this is.
Any random place on the last-millenium Secondlife site is orders of magnitude better, more interesting, more engaging.
That this utter trash is still around is a miracle to me: who actual goes there and enjoys it?
Re: (Score:2)
That's been the bigger problem for them. Fortnite and Roblox thrive on pop culture tie ins and creative freedom. Meta has largely gone the PlayStation home approach where only what they curate is there, but even worse as Sony had a bit more creativity at least.
You basically have Nintendo Miis running around bland environments with nothing to do or look at. Nintendo Miis got boring over decade ago but Meta still seems hung up on the concept..
Breaking the vr dependency is unlikely to do anything for the con
What did happen to Metaverse ? DOA (Score:3)