After Meta's course change: This is how the metaverse continues

Last week, Meta laid off around 1,500 employees in the VR division. The personnel cut corresponds to about ten percent of the Reality Labs department, which develops VR headsets and smart glasses. Meta explained that it would redistribute investments from the metaverse towards AI glasses and wearables. A business area that currently shows significantly stronger growth signals than virtual reality.

A week later, Reality Labs head Andrew Bosworth took a stand for the first time on Meta's course change. He explained why the cuts occurred and what the new metaverse strategy looks like. In line with this, Meta announced changes to Horizon OS, the operating system of the Meta Quest VR headset, in the same week.

The metaverse project lives on – but on smartphones instead of VR

"Virtual reality is obviously growing slower than we hoped," Bosworth admitted in an interview with the tech newsletter Sources. Meta is sticking to significant investments in the metaverse but wants to ensure that the expenses are appropriate.

While Meta is reportedly continuing to work on new VR hardware, the real upheaval is happening on the software side.

The new VR strategy hits the core of Meta's metaverse bet: its own metaverse platform Horizon, to which the operating system and user experience have been tailored in recent years. Horizon was supposed to become the VR equivalent of metaverse platforms like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft, but it was widely rejected by many VR users. Furthermore, Meta competed directly with external studios through free Horizon content, which led to fierce criticism from developers.

The message from consumers and developers has now reached Meta. In an interview with the US portal Axios on YouTube, Bosworth explained that they would "let VR be VR" in the future and focus on content from external studios and the existing ecosystem.

Horizon, which was originally developed for VR headsets and has also been available for smartphones for some time, will now be almost exclusively focused on the latter devices. "We shifted our focus to the mobile market last year, and that's going really well. So we want to expand this area further now," said Bosworth.

First Horizon features disappear

Words were followed by action: On Wednesday, Meta announced that it would remove the Horizon Feed, which is disliked by many VR users. The start page, which opens unprompted every time the headset is started, has long been used to push free content from Horizon onto users. The Horizon Feed will be replaced by a new user interface that puts the app library and the store at the center.

Is Meta really abandoning its destructive metaverse vision and turning back more strongly to the needs of independent VR developers? The departure from Horizon at least suggests this. The closure of almost all first-party studios also supports this thesis: until now, the company has competed directly with external studios with multi-million dollar in-house productions. An unequal fight that now seems to be over.

On the other hand, it remains unclear how much substance Meta's commitment to the ecosystem actually has. According to rumors, funding and incubator programs for external studios have been cut. Furthermore, the widespread Quest piracy continues to be tolerated by Meta. Whether the course change will be maintained or will merely prove to be another fleeting episode in Meta's erratic VR strategy remains to be seen.

(nie)