Meta Shifts VR Focus, Scales Back Horizon Worlds
The company is doubling down on third-party games for Meta Quest while rethinking its metaverse ambitions.
- Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth announced a shift in strategy for Meta Quest, prioritizing third-party games.
- The Horizon Worlds metaverse experience will be scaled back on Meta Quest headsets and focus on mobile.
- Meta recently laid off 1,500 Reality Labs staff and closed most of its first-party development studios.
Gamers using Meta Quest headsets might be breathing a sigh of relief. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth revealed the company is recalibrating its approach to virtual reality, moving away from extensive first-party development and placing greater emphasis on content created by third-party developers. This change also includes scaling back Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest, with a renewed focus on mobile accessibility, starting with the removal of the Horizon Feed in the next software update, v85.
Bosworth detailed these next steps for Meta’s Reality Labs division during interviews at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos this week. The announcement follows last week’s news of 1,500 layoffs within Reality Labs and the closure of most of Meta’s internal game development teams, sparking speculation about the company’s commitment to VR.
“We had this integrated concept of where Horizon and VR were the same thing…That is a real challenging piece of work to land,” Bosworth told Axios. “There’s lots of people who put this headset on for different reasons. You want to support all those different use cases. The lack of focus comes at the expense of user experience and a great expense at development cost.”
Nearly two years ago, Meta integrated Meta Quest headsets more deeply with Horizon Worlds, renaming the Meta Quest store to the Meta Horizon store and prominently featuring free-to-play Horizon Worlds content. This shift resulted in a noticeable decline in game sales on the Quest, a trend supported by developer data.
The changes have drawn mixed reactions online, with some suggesting they are overdue. Several development studios have recently announced closures, citing both broader challenges in the video game market and specific issues within the VR space. Even developers of consistently popular games have announced layoffs, and reports suggest more may follow.
“We’re going to let VR be what it is and what it does great,” Bosworth stated. “We’re going to focus a lot more on the third-party content library and ecosystem that has developed there.”
However, interviews conducted after Meta’s studio closures on January 13, 2026, revealed that the company also reduced staff working with third-party developers and decreased funding for programs like Oculus Publishing. Bosworth did not address these cuts during the Davos interviews and has not publicly commented when asked on social media.
According to an interview with Bosworth, Meta is “still continuing to invest heavily in this space, but obviously, VR is growing less quickly than we hoped.” This trend began in mid-2025, although the Christmas holiday period saw the Meta Quest outsell even the Nintendo Switch 2 on Amazon. Despite this success and the launch of several new games, Meta appears to be shifting its focus away from first-party development.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey stated on social media, “Oculus had a strong internal mandate to NOT be Nintendo and instead build things that build the ecosystem. Returning to that is good.” He added, “This is not a disaster,” noting that Meta “still employs the largest team working on VR by about an order of magnitude. Nobody else is even close.” Whether this will be enough remains to be seen.
