What you want to know
- Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth defined that Meta is altering focus from first-party improvement to focus primarily on third-party video games for Meta Quest headsets.
- Horizon Worlds is now taking a mobile-only strategy and will probably be scaled again from the Meta Quest’s Horizon OS.
- Oculus Founder Luckey Palmer says, “the narrative that Meta is abandoning VR is clearly false.”
Practically two years in the past, Meta made strikes to extra deeply combine Meta Quest headsets with the corporate’s Horizon Worlds metaverse. The Meta Quest retailer turned the Meta Horizon retailer, and free-to-play Horizon Worlds content material was prominently positioned in entrance of customers as a substitute of extra conventional gaming content material. The consequence was a considerable decline in sport gross sales on the Quest, backed up by tons of developer knowledge to show it.
Many on social media are saying the adjustments are too little, too late. A number of improvement studios have introduced closures these days, some citing broader challenges throughout the online game market, whereas others have attributed them particularly to the VR market. Even builders of video games that repeatedly keep within the top-20 best-sellers have introduced layoffs. Allegedly, extra are additionally on the way in which.
“We’ll let VR be what it’s and what it does nice,” Bosworth continued. “We’ll focus much more on the third-party content material library and ecosystem that has developed there.”
However in keeping with a number of interviews I carried out after Meta’s studio closures on January 13, 2026, Meta let go of a number of employees who labored with third-party builders and lowered funding to packages like Oculus Publishing. Bosworth wasn’t requested about this matter in both of the Davos interviews, however has to this point did not remark publicly when requested on social media.
Heath’s interview with Bosworth revealed that Meta is “nonetheless persevering with to speculate closely on this area, however clearly, VR is rising much less shortly than we (Meta) hoped.” We noticed this pattern start in mid-2025, though the Christmas vacation interval noticed the Meta Quest outsell even the Nintendo Change 2 on Amazon. Even with that success and the success of a number of new video games, Meta appears to be like to be shifting priorities away from first-party improvement.
As Palmer Luckey, founding father of Oculus, stated on social media, “Oculus had a powerful inside mandate to NOT be Nintendo and as a substitute construct issues that construct the ecosystem. Returning to that’s good.” “This isn’t a catastrophe,” Palmer adopted up with. Meta “nonetheless employs the biggest staff engaged on VR by about an order of magnitude. No person else is even shut.” Time will inform if that continues to be a superb factor.
