Highlights
- Meta is "explicitly separating" its Quest VR platform from Horizon Worlds to shift Worlds "almost exclusively" to mobile, setting up a direct challenge to Roblox.
- Reality Labs cut roughly 1,500 jobs in January 2026 and closed three VR studios, including the teams behind Asgard's Wrath 2 and Resident Evil 4 VR.
- Zuckerberg is trading VR immersion for Roblox-style mobile scale, redirecting resources toward AI features and Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Meta is splitting Horizon Worlds from its virtual-reality division and rebuilding it as a mobile app, a move that puts the platform on a direct collision course with Roblox. The move, laid out in a Feb. 19 blog post by Samantha Ryan, vice president of content for Reality Labs, amounts to the sharpest reversal yet of the immersive-headset vision that defined the company's 2021 rebrand from Facebook.
The restructuring follows a round of cuts that began in mid-January 2026, when Meta eliminated roughly 1,500 jobs, about 10% of Reality Labs staff, according to reports from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The company also closed three VR game studios: Sanzaru Games (Asgard's Wrath), Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR) and Twisted Pixel Games (Deadpool VR). Meta froze new content for the VR fitness app Supernatural and killed its enterprise Horizon Workrooms product.
Ryan said the mobile shift was driven by internal experiments in 2025 that showed real user growth was coming from flat-screen devices, not headsets. Mobile-only worlds on the platform grew from zero to more than 2,000 in a single year, and mobile monthly active users increased more than fourfold, according to Meta's own developer blog.
Why Meta is abandoning VR for a Roblox-style mobile strategy
The target is Roblox Corp., whose platform reported 79.5 million daily active users in its most recent quarter. Meta is betting that user-generated mobile games, not VR immersion, will power its next phase in gaming.
The company has already been seeding this shift. In February 2025, Meta launched a $50 million Creator Fund to pay monthly bonuses to developers of mobile and mixed-reality worlds. It followed that up with a series of competitions through 2025, including a $1 million "Open Source Champions" contest for developers building remixable, headset-free mini-games. The logic is straightforward: replace the friction of strapping on a headset with the ease of tapping an app on a device people already own.
Meta Store
Horizon Worlds' mobile-first content is already replacing VR experiences
Signs of the pivot predated the official announcement. In late 2025, Meta's internal studio, Ouro Interactive, released Super Strike, a team-based shooter that launched without VR support. Meta later added "experimental" VR functionality after community backlash from Quest owners, but the message was clear: mobile came first.
Other recent Horizon Worlds hits, including Grow A Garden, Steal A Brainrot and Yeet Yourself, borrow heavily from the chaotic, kid-friendly format that made Roblox a fixture among younger players. Steal A Brainrot alone became the first Roblox game to surpass 25 million concurrent users before its clone appeared on Meta's platform. The blog post credited Do Big Studio, Steal A Brainrot's developer, as a top creator on Horizon Worlds.
According to Kotaku, the original version of Meta's blog post named all three games. Meta quietly removed mentions of Grow a Garden and Yeet Yourself shortly after publication. The edit suggested some discomfort with comparisons to the low-quality content that has dogged Roblox's reputation.
How Meta went from "bringing the metaverse to life" to going all-in on mobile
When Mark Zuckerberg rechristened Facebook as Meta on Oct. 28, 2021, Horizon Worlds was positioned as the centerpiece of a new immersive internet. He said at the time that the company hoped the metaverse would reach a billion people within a decade and host hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce.
The reality fell short. The platform drew mockery for crude graphics and struggled to retain users. Horizon Worlds never attracted more than a couple hundred thousand monthly active users, according to CNBC. Meanwhile, Reality Labs has accumulated nearly $80 billion in operating losses since late 2020, according to Meta's Q4 2025 earnings report. In Q4 2025 alone, the division lost $6.02 billion on just $955 million in revenue.
"We started Worlds for VR with a small crew of dedicated creators who set out to build immersive experiences on their own. Last year, we began to experiment with Worlds as a mobile platform, and we saw positive momentum. Now, to truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we're going all-in on mobile."- Samantha Ryan, VP of Content, Reality Labs
What happens to Meta's VR headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses
The company says it is not exiting hardware. Future VR headsets remain in development, and Ryan noted that 86% of the time people spend in Meta's headsets is already with third-party apps, not Meta's own software. But with Horizon Worlds now decoupled from Quest, the work of building a gaming ecosystem falls largely to outside developers building for phones.
Zuckerberg is redirecting resources toward two bets with stronger commercial traction: AI-powered social features across Meta's apps and the Ray-Ban smart glasses line. Sales of the smart glasses grew 211% in 2025, according to analyst estimates, and manufacturing partner EssilorLuxottica has reportedly discussed scaling production from 10 million to as many as 30 million units. At Meta's Connect conference in 2025, no new VR headset was unveiled for the first time. The company showed off its $799 Ray-Ban Display glasses instead.
Quest headset shipments fell 16% year-over-year in the first three quarters of 2025, totaling 1.7 million units, according to IDC. Global VR headset shipments declined 17% in Q3 2025. Zuckerberg reportedly told executives in late 2025 to cut up to 30% of Reality Labs spending and halt some projects, according to Bloomberg.
For a company that staked its identity on building the metaverse just over four years ago, the mobile pivot is an admission: the future it sold Wall Street in 2021 is not the one it is building in 2026. Whether millions of mobile users will care about Horizon Worlds the way they care about Roblox is the question Meta has yet to answer.
