Key points:

• Horizon Worlds axed from VR by June 15
• Reality Labs lost nearly $80B since 2020
• META stock shrugs off the news

Horizon Worlds, the reason behind Facebook’s big rebranding, is getting unwound after $80 billion in investments did nothing to bring in users.

🌐 The Metaverse Dream Is Officially Over

• The big news we’ve been expecting for years? Meta META announced Tuesday that Horizon Worlds, its virtual reality social network for Quest headsets, will be removed from the Quest store at the end of March and fully removed from VR platforms by June 15.
• After that date it will survive only as a standalone mobile app, which is roughly the digital equivalent of being sent to the kids’ table. Against that backdrop, the stock was showing no reaction. ⏳ No Surprises Therer
• The closure comes weeks after Meta cut more than 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the division responsible for the metaverse vision.
• The sequence of mass layoffs followed by product discontinuation is the corporate equivalent of quietly cleaning out the office before the official announcement. Nobody in the building was surprised.
• Horizon Worlds never managed to attract more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users at its peak, a number that looks especially small when measured against the scale of ambition that accompanied its launch and the billions spent trying to make people care about it.

💸 $80 Billion Incinerated

• Reality Labs has accumulated nearly $80 billion in losses since 2020, posting an operating loss of more than $6 billion in the fourth quarter alone.
• To put that in perspective, $80 billion is roughly the GDP of a mid-sized country, spent building a virtual world that the general public decided it did not want to live in.
• In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta and declared the metaverse “the next frontier” of human connection. He wrote at the time that within a decade it would reach a billion people. That didn’t age quite so well.

Source: Tradingview