Metas Metaverse kills VR and relies on smartphones in the future

Originally, VR glasses were supposed to be the indispensable gateway to the Metaverse. But Meta is now turning its back on this vision and making the smartphone the primary access for Horizon Worlds. The social world is strictly decoupled from the quest hardware.

Meta’s new metaverse strategy

The Facebook Group Meta is realigning its strategy for the Metaverse in February 2026. In the future, the company will strictly separate the virtual reality platform Quest from the social world Horizon Worlds. The latter is to be developed almost exclusively for smartphones. The company is reacting to the slow growth (read: huge losses) in the VR sector and positioning itself against established mobile competitors such as Roblox. The goal is to dramatically increase the number of users, which previously could not be achieved with pure VR headsets.

The decision marks a departure from the original vision, which saw VR headsets as an essential gateway to the Metaverse. Instead, the smartphone now serves as the primary access point. Users control their avatars through virtual worlds via touchscreen, similar to classic mobile games. The VR version of Horizon Worlds remains, but loses its status as a lead platform. Meta hopes that the low barrier to entry will finally reach a critical mass of users that is attractive to advertisers.

The company confirmed details of the realignment in a meta blog post. In it, management emphasizes that the Quest VR platform will be explicitly separated from the Worlds platform in order to give both products room to grow. Meta increases the focus on the ecosystem for third-party developers in the VR sector, while Horizon Worlds is aimed almost exclusively at mobile use.

High costs and hurdles

The change in strategy comes against the backdrop of massive investments. Since Facebook renamed Meta in October 2021, the Reality Labs division has accumulated operating losses of over $60 billion (approximately €51 billion).

Despite technical advances in the Quest series, sales fell short of expectations. For a long time, the Metaverse was a losing business that had to be cross-financed by profits from the classic advertising business on Instagram and Facebook. The history of the platform was marked by problems from the beginning: When Mark Zuckerberg introduced Horizon Worlds, the graphical representation caused ridicule.

The lack of legs in the avatars in particular was criticized for months until an update in 2023 corrected this detail. User retention was also problematic: many curious people tried the world once and never returned. With the opening up to smartphones and the decoupling of expensive hardware, Meta is now trying to finally overcome these hurdles. Whether this will succeed is still questionable.