Tech giant Meta has reportedly announced that it is shutting down its metaverse project, which was a dream project of its founder Mark Zuckerberg, who had called it “the next frontier” upon rebranding
the social media company from Facebook to Meta in 2021. Four and a half years later and a total outlay of humongous $80 billion, the project has been dumped, making it a failed project.
The shift in Meta’s approach came at a time when generative artificial intelligence (AI) has become the new hotbed for tech companies, with capital expenditure reaching trillions of dollars and a heated race to dominate the market.
Meta announced that Horizon Worlds, its social VR platform, will be removed from Quest headsets entirely by June 15.
What went wrong, and what was the Metaverse project?
Mark Zuckerberg had announced a major strategic shift by rebranding Facebook, which until now had been perceived as a social media company, into Meta, a complete tech company, competing against other giants such as Google and Microsoft.
Meta launched a mega project known as Horizon Worlds in late 2021, aimed at bringing people into a virtual reality.
Think of it as a virtual and immersive digital world where people can interact, work, play and socialize using technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
Zuckerberg had promised once that metaverse would bring a billion people and generate hundreds of billions in business.
However, Meta had failed to attract large numbers of users into the metaverse, making it unsustainable for the long-term.
Reality Labs, Meta division for VR and metaverse development, has suffered a loss of $80 billion since 2020.
Meta had laid off about 10 per cent of its employees in Reality Labs, as the division alone reported a loss of $6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025. Several VR game studios were shut down, too.
However, it hasn’t completely abandoned but reduced to only smartphone.
ChatGPT Brings The Last Straw
Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the company’s focus has entirely now shifted towards generative AI and the development of large language models.
Meta has expanded its AI division, long led by Yann LeCun and doubled down its investment to build LLM models and associated technologies.
