Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest bet has backfired, with Meta walking away from the metaverse after losses approaching $80 billion. The company announced the removal of Horizon Worlds from the Quest VR store by the end of March, with a full virtual reality shutdown scheduled for June 15. The app will continue in mobile form only — a vastly diminished version of what Zuckerberg originally envisioned.
The metaverse gamble took shape in 2021 when Zuckerberg pivoted Facebook away from its social media roots and rebranded the company as Meta. He was convinced that virtual reality would define the next generation of the internet and poured enormous resources into making that prediction come true. His public statements were full of optimism about digital economies and billion-person virtual communities.
Horizon Worlds, the main product of this vision, never gained traction. Reported monthly active user figures never exceeded a few hundred thousand — a small and stagnant audience for a platform operating at enormous cost. Reality Labs, the Meta division overseeing the project, logged losses of nearly $80 billion between 2020 and early 2025.
Meta began addressing the failure publicly in early 2025, cutting more than 1,000 Reality Labs jobs in January. The company announced a realignment toward AI and wearable technology, signaling that the metaverse no longer represented its core growth opportunity. The formal announcement about Horizon Worlds completed the picture.
Social media users were quick to seize on the story. Commentary ranged from pointed economic observations to outright mockery of the cartoon avatars that became associated with Meta’s metaverse effort. For Zuckerberg, the episode is a defining one — a massive, public, and costly illustration of the difference between vision and product-market fit.