Meta Horizon Worlds Moving To Mobile Like It Is 2018

Stop trying to make the metaverse happen!

-The market, to Zuck, for the last five years

Zuck has decided he’s going to let somebody else create the metaverse.  He would still like it to be on his platform, but he has now decreed that it will be on your phone.

As has been documented in multiple places, Zuck has poured around $80 billion into the Reality Labs division of his empire since 2020 in a futile attempt to make the metaverse a thing and, more importantly, to make himself the king of it.  He and his bride were to be the leggy lord and lady of the land of the otherwise legless.

And I say Zuck rather than Meta or Facebook or Reality Labs or some other organizational indicator because he set up Facebook so that he has absolute control over the company.  Nobody is funding projects of any size without his direct say so.  If Facebook does bad things, it is because Zuck approved them or simply couldn’t see or didn’t care about consequences.

And therein lies the problem of Facebook or Meta or whatever it will be called when Zuck decides to rebrand to show he is focused on AI or whatever trend he is arriving late to; Zuck isn’t a genius.  He has no real vision.

Zuck is still the creep who managed to turn his “hot or not” site, where he and his buddies would rate his classmates at Harvard, where he could afford to go due to his father’s successful dental practice, into a social media site at the exact right moment in history where the internet was looking for something like a common platform that would allow people to connect.

And it made him a billionaire at age 23.

But it was mostly luck, a matter of being in the right place at the right time with a platform that filled a vacant niche.  He made a place on the internet for old people.  And he knows this and, like so many people who were successes early in their career, has become obsessed with proving it wasn’t a fluke, proving that he is a genius, that he does have vision.

He wants a second act.  He wants to be Steve Jobs.  Every rich young success wants to be Steve Jobs.  But whatever technical acumen he has won’t make him Steve.  Very few people get a second act.  Even Einstein’s career was overshadowed by work he did while a patent clerk.

The mistake Zuck has made is believing that if he throws enough money at an idea, he can manifest a vision into being, make it popular, have it adopted by millions.

And so it went with the metaverse.   He had already bought out Carmack’s VR company… the one thing money can do is buy out the ideas of others, so Meta has Instagram and WhatsApp, which were already successful when purchased… so why not go all in on the metaverse boom?

Now, some six years down the road, we have something of an admission that maybe it isn’t going to happen as they announced on Friday that their Horizon Worlds game/platform/whatever is going to migrate to being a mobile app.

From the press release:

We’re explicitly separating our Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform in order to create more space for both products to grow. We’re doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile. By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each.

So they are trying to salvage something from the virtual world they made by putting it on phones, while claiming they are “doubling down” on the VR developer ecosystem.

Between those two points, the virtual world product they made and the tools to allow developers to make apps for their Occulus VR platform, is the metaverse vision where most of that $80 billion went.  Those people are being laid off or reassigned to AI or updating their resumes with the certainty that they are next.

The upshot of the press release, besides the shift to mobile as the platform for Horizon Worlds, is that they want to make the tools and let somebody else create the content… which is probably the only viable move, the way to salvage something from the mess of the last half decade.

And who knows, maybe some third party will be able to make legs work.

Anyway, the whole press release is linked below.  It contains all the usual optimism that PR people can muster.  Very much an “Exciting new deck chair placement options!” from the Titanic sort of thing, if you can read between the lines… and that isn’t hard, given the crayons level of effort they put in.  No doubt somebody in management kept asking for them to turn optimism dial to 11.

• Meta – Meta Horizon: Our Renewed Focus in 2026
• Ars Technica – Meta’s flagship metaverse service leaves VR behind
• Tech Crunch – Meta’s metaverse leaves virtual reality
• Business Insider – Meta’s metaverse is going mobile — and leaving VR behind
• GamesIndustry.biz – Meta “shifts focus” of Horizon Worlds platform from Quest VR to mobile