Meta keeps rolling out negative news for VR.
Meta keeps rolling out negative news for VR.
Just two months prior to its rebranding to “Meta,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally presented his vision for metaverse work: Horizon Workrooms, designed as a virtual workplace for collaboration. Today, the company revealed it is closing that space down: “Meta has chosen to discontinue Workrooms as a separate app, effective February 16, 2026,” states a note hidden on a help page.
Furthermore, Meta will cease selling its headsets and software as business services, another help page indicates: “We are halting sales of Meta Horizon managed services and commercial SKUs of Meta Quest, effective February 20, 2026.”
Meta recently laid off about 10 percent of its entire Reality Labs workforce, exceeding 1,000 jobs. In the wake of this, it’s increasingly evident that Zuckerberg has reconsidered what the term “metaverse” actually signifies. Mobile yes, smart glasses yes, but perhaps not VR.
Initially, we discovered that Meta’s layoffs had entirely closed down three of Meta’s hard-earned VR game studios, following the earlier closure of another in 2024. Soon, it was revealed that it’s giving up on future development of Supernatural, its notable VR fitness app, and that it has allegedly dismantled the studio behind Batman: Arkham Shadow as well.
What comes next, Horizon Worlds? Perhaps Meta will stop there, since it’s one of the few VR experiences Meta has made accessible on mobile devices too; Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has already stated that the company’s Horizon team will “focus on enhancing the best Horizon experiences and AI creator tools for mobile” in a memo acquired by Bloomberg.
Bloomberg reports that “Meta will keep developing the metaverse, but with an emphasis on mobile phones rather than the fully immersive VR headsets that the company originally envisioned.” To clarify, the term “metaverse” was coined by Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson to depict a fully immersive shared VR world, but I guess mobile makes sense if one regards Fortnite as part of the metaverse and does not require the “fully immersive” aspect.
It’s disappointing for the true believers in Oculus VR, and for those who expected more to result from Facebook acquiring all those VR game studios. However, it seems the main demographic for Meta’s VR headsets is now younger teens and kids, leading to the notion that business-oriented VR may not be where the investment should lie.
It looks like Meta Workrooms will abruptly cease operations on February 16th, meaning that “all data linked to Workrooms will be erased.” The company suggests exploring Arthur, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom Workplace instead, while also noting that the Meta Quest Remote Desktop app will remain available if you wish to simulate multiple virtual screens in your headset.
Regarding Meta Horizon managed services, the company states that current users can retain access until January 4th, 2030, and that licenses will be complimentary after February 16th of this year.
