It Sure Looks to Me Like Meta Is Winding Down Its V.R. Efforts ⇥ developers.meta.com

Samantha Ryan, “VP of Content” at Meta’s Reality Labs:

We’ve recently made some pretty big changes, including right-sizing our Reality Labs investment to ensure that our efforts remain sustainable over time. We’ve been in this space for over a decade, and we aren’t going anywhere. We’re in it for the long haul.

By “right-sizing”, Ryan means laying off ten percent of the Reality Labs workforce, and pouring money into the Ray-Ban partnership instead of metaverse initiatives. By “in it for the long haul”, Ryan means shifting the definition of the “metaverse” to meet Mark Zuckerberg’s latest obsession. They did not whiff by renaming the entire company around a crappy update to Second Life; you just are not getting it.

Ryan:

Our goal remains constant: to empower developers and creators as they build long-term, sustainable businesses. We used to have a pretty well-defined audience for VR, but as we’ve grown, we’ve attracted new audiences — who want different things — and the onus is on us to make sure that each of these distinct groups can find the apps and games that appeal to them.

That’s why we’re changing our roadmaps to increase your chances for success. 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.

Meta can say it is “doubling down on the V.R. developer ecosystem” all it wants, but it announced in January it would be shutting down its work-focused V.R. app with only a month’s notice, and it has cancelled third-party headsets. Now, it is saying Horizon Worlds is basically a phone app. Last February, Andrew Bosworth wrote in a memo about the importance of this very strategy:

[…] And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. […]

As I write this, Meta Horizon is the fifty-seventh most popular free game in the Canadian App Store, just two spots behind Hole.io, “the most addictive black hole game”. Maybe people do not, in general, want to wear a computer on their entire head — not for the thousands of dollars Apple is charging, and not for the hundreds Meta is.