Meta is shutting down VR social platform Horizon Worlds in further pivot away from the metaverse

Bad news for the 6 people who ever used it.

They went all-in on this bullshit, and it just turned into a hangout spot for shrieking tween bullies. Good riddance.

I shut my closet door today. about as many people noticed

They changed the name of the company for this.

They've been chasing VRChat's tail for years, and stumbled every step of the way. Good riddance.

70 billion well spent

This kinda shit reminds me of Glass Onion, how we think Billionaires and executives are geniuses because how else could they have gotten there when in reality 99% are out of touch and have no idea what regular people want or can afford.

More Zuckerberg genius. It just flows doesn’t it.

I think I used that once (or maybe it was something else?) Anyway, I guess you could meet people's avatars in there, but I got in and it was just a bunch of morons saying the N-word.

Being on the inside of a game tech company during metaverse hype was f****** hilarious. Just executives losing their minds over vaporware nonsense. AI is so obviously just the thing they jumped to when they realized the metaverse was f****** bullshit lmao.

Imagine if that money was spent on making games, entertainment and creative apps instead of whatever the f*** Horizon was.

So...does that mean they're bringing back the previous environments when you start up the headset? For those that don't know, Meta used to have all these areas you start from. One was you were in an underwater area with whales/fish swimming around (my fav) and another was the dwarf caves in LotR. But then they forced us to go into Horizon Worlds when we boot up.

Companies need to learn to stop spending billions in development for something nobody ever wanted or asked for. I feel for the people losing their jobs, but such a failure couldn't have happened to a more deserving company.

I recall this being like a bad knockoff of Second Life in VR.

I have a Quest 3 I stopped using because the software is so bad. I couldn't play VR more than half the time I tried due to connectivity issues, due to software updates and glitches, just a mess. I ended up buying a used Pimax Crystal for a much better experience. Seriously, my Quest 3 is 10ft from me, and I haven't touched it in months. I like the hardware package. It's a good design in general. And then the software people just ruin the whole thing. Meta is a software company, and they fail at it. I guess that isn't a surprise. Facebook is a pile of trash now with only Marketplace as the sole redeemable element, but even then, that's just the users who create that content. The interface and search and ads are so-so at best. What a downfall of a software empire. I don't know what's wrong with the leadership, but man, it's rough to see a company literally OWN an entire market segment and just set it all on fire until it's smoldering ash.

It’s a good thing they didnt rename the whole company after this. What’s that?

Expect to see AI projects quietly "sunsetting" in the next year or so

Billions wasted on something that was vastly worse than an indie experience like VRChat or even just more useless than a decades old social virtual world like Second Life lol

This is the worst thing that happened to the Occulus Quest. The integration made my quest 2 virtually unusable with lag and battery issues.

The best part of the Metaverse was the launch video where Zuck made sure we all saw his tiny hands. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElfIo6uw4g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElfIo6uw4g)

Was not aware this existed so cool

First time i’ve heard of this 

Can I please have my old homes back now?

Yikes! The child predator community is going to be up in arms.

HAHAHAHA - \-AHAHAHAHAHA

Steam Frame can't come soon enough to claw back some legitimacy for VR. F*** Meta. They ruined the original Oculus Rift with their shitty meta integration. I just want more devices that aren't filled with malware spying on you or giving you the illusion of choice. Ever since I've started gaming on SteamOS I haven't missed windows in the slightest. I'm really hoping that Valve can pull it off with the Steam Machine/Frame because I am really starting to hate the direction most other companies are going with their software and hardware. 

**shrug* Can't 'second-screen' with a screen strapped to your face. -Netflix, probably.

Hahahaha They changed their entire company name to Meta to embrace the Metaverse. Now it's just pathetic. Didn't companies spend millions buying 'real estate' in the Metaverse when it first launched?

As a huge VR enthusiast, Meta has been a complete double edge sword to the entire concept of my hobby. I could spend all day typing out all this mistakes he's made. But I also own a 4k headset that cost me less than $500 when NOBODY was coming close to its quality. The Quest 3S outsold the PS5 and Xbox *combined* during the holiday season. Also, Meta has very quietly made it easier for you to install you own .apk files on it (V85). Before, you had to use SideQuest and it was a process. * Download .apk from file browser in the Quest * Go to downloads and click three dots next to file name * Open with > Package installer * That's it. Also, more and more 4k 180 3D videos are releasing on YouTube and people are experimenting. One person just released many scenes from Resident Evil Requiem to show you what it would look like if the game was in VR using Praydog mod. Also, many are using it all over the world. I've seen more of this planet in the few years I've owned a quest than I ever could in a hundred lifetimes. It remains to be the most important tech purchase I've ever made. I just with Meta would stop trying to kill VR with their poor decisions.

Wow, that whole Metaverse thing was a whole lotta expensive nothin', wasn't it? Some celebrities paid big money for virtual land.

So, changing the name back to Facebook or….?

No one saw that coming when Zucc totally bet the farm on this metaverse garbage. I'm shocked it took this long.

I hope they spent billions making it too.

I bet both of those users are going go be sad.

Horizon Worlds f****** sucked. Good riddance!

Trying to compete with VRChat will do that.

So am i finally going to get an updated os on my quest that doesnt attempt to open worlds and tries to eat away the headsets already-poor connection? Would be pretty neat to not be tied to meta...

A shout out to my old-school Slashdot crowd when I say… “And nothing of value was lost…”

I said it when they announced it and I guess I'll say it again, VRchat had already beat Meta to the whole online VR communities thing, and ultimately did it better than what Meta had planned for.

Does that mean we can finally uninstall the bloatware "experiences" on the headsets? 🤞

They spent so much money on that terrible product, lol. 100's of millions on marketing alone....lool

GOOD. Roblox has been under a well deserved spotlight for how attractive it was for child predators, but they had nothing on Horizon Worlds. Last time I tried it I was *deeply* uncomfortable in the way the funnelled everyone to a kind of 'hub' space to make it look populated, but that just pushed all the adults and the kids wanting to play 'Gorilla tag' knockoffs together. I had 3 kids under 10 or so years old come up to me and beg me to talk and play with them. I just went "This is a class action waiting to happen" and havent touched it since.

Been praying on its demise ever since they took away our custom home environments.

Wait… that was still running!?

Wow the 3 people using it will be so disappointed

I told you so. This is hilarious. It lasted longer than I expected.

Is Horizon Worlds that thing I’d ignore on my way to VR p***?

Eighty billion dollars. Gone. To build a digital ghost town where legless cartoons stood around doing nothing, because Mark Zuckerberg looked at Facebook – a website people use to congratulate their grandma on their birthday – and thought: what this needs is a worse version of reality. He was wrong. Historically, catastrophically, trouserlessly wrong.

On one hand it's funny to see Meta's billions of dollars be for naught. On the other hand, if they aren't investing in this space, well virtually no one else is either. So VR is pretty much dead or at least on ice for a decent while. Which is sad as someone who actually enjoys VR stuff.

This is the first time I've ever heard of this platform.

A few billion down the drain

Are they going to rebrand to the next hot thing? We are now "AI Company"

Remember this when they claim we have to embrace the next big tech thing, just because it's "inevitable" rather than because it's good.

The person who came up with the metaverse lost a lot of money for meta and shareholders. They should get fired.

So when will they go back to being Facebook?

Lol...but but THIS ai investment is gonna be a W*****....

Dude put on an Occulus headset and got a hardon. “Oh, THIS is the future…even if I have to burn through billions to force people to like it”

I wonder how that guy who spent $300,000 on a house in the metaverse is doing. I hope he's taking it well.

Vr hardware and games safe? If so, then who cares about vr chat/hangouts.

I didn't even know this existed until I read the headline.

I didn't know they had even launched it.

Weirdo alternate reality being sued much

horizon world. i went once..... could leave fast enough. It was the Commodore 64 doing VR.

The company named META?

I hate how meta buys out oculus, then basically loses interest in developing vr and moves on to something else because it can no longer be bothered

Hey, I used that! Can I give an analogy between Meta Horizon Worlds and the early days of using mice? When mice + graphics first came out, the resulting apps were always a weirdo mishmash of paradigms. For this task, you used a mouse and then typed; for that task you had to use the keyboard; for some other task you had to read the manual... And then the whole thing settled down as all the designers and programmers got used to what a mouse and GUI could do and started to the follow the design guidance. Meta Horizon Worlds always felt like that first thing: everything was wonky; the expectations in one place never matched the expectations somewhere else. One great example was "using VR while seated" -- something I always did because *I have a dog*. I could do VR while walking around, but only at the constant risk of tripping over my dog, who was delighted to see me wander around the living room! But many games would half-ass the "works while seated" mode. And uggg, as a software developer and a PM, the horrible clunky work flow for setting up a connection to the PC was appalling!

What a waste of billions of dollars.

You mean it actually came out? I didn't know it was ever finished. I thought all the Metaverse plans were shelved like 5 years ago. They had that whole "hello, fellow teenagers!" ad campaign, all those clips of what amounted to VR phone games, and...what else? Nothing about it appealed to anyone.

I wonder how Mark feels about the whole Oculus purchase at this point. Can't feel great after fumbling the whole platform. 🤣

Aaaaaaand SecondLife and VRChat are... still going strong. What a waste of bandwidth this blip of technology was.

When's the robot in charge of the company gonna rename it from Meta to AI? "tO sIgNifY oUr cOmMitMent to AI!!!!1111"

I do find it hilarious how so many companies jumped on the "verse" trend. For examplae, Mihoyo went from a unique sounding company name to f****** hoyoverse. It just sounds stupid. Now they are stuck with a stupid ass name or they have to swallow their pride and change it again haha.

Just upset i wasn't able to get in on any of those billions they spent on this failure.

This shit was way too early and the tech wasn't there. Imagine if, in the near future, when WW3 kicks off and the Oasis from Ready Player One becomes available without Zuckerbergs weird ass face all over it. Licence to print money.

I hope they sell Oculus back to the good devs lol