Discussion

Updates to Your Meta Quest Experience in 2026

darth_avocado: Layoffs are probably on the horizon

bhouston: Okay, how long until Meta Quest is discontinued/sunset?I believe there is no expectation of a Meta Quest 4 right?

etchalon: Zucker just keeps failing up.

amazingamazing: And soon 20% of meta too

xd1936: Unbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?

cheriot: Condolences to those that about to be laid offContext: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/14/meta-reportedly-considerin...

drivebyhooting: When will horizon worlds be axed entirely? It has something like fewer than 10,000 active users at any given time.

robot_jesus: From the article:> By March 31, 2026, Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer appear in the Store on Quest. Also, Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay worlds will no longer be available in VR. You can still jump into your other favorite worlds in VR until June 15, 2026, after which the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from Quest, and Worlds will no longer be available in VR.

t-writescode: They were trying to compete with an existing, VERY good couple of alternatives, and the people most actually likely to use that product were already on those services.It was a losing play that didn’t know what market it was actually entering.

jryio: Historians will write about the 'metaverse' as the last software frontier humanity embarked on before AI.What a shame. Hopefully capitalism and AI research does not produce equally bad products and ideas.

ncallaway: I do not think historians will write about the metaverse at all.Maybe it'll be a case study in business schools for a while, but I think that'll be the extent of its legacy

tyleo: Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for.They feel a bit directionless to me. They are still making money but even their AI attempt feels half hearted. I think they are really trying but I’m not sure they can build the engineering muscle to move in new areas with the brand damage they’ve sustained.

IncreasePosts: It makes sense to rebrand anyway, because I'm sure they don't want people to only think of "that social media site" for all of their other ventures. Just like Google rebranding as alphabet

tyleo: IDK, I still call Google "Google". I even hear employees refer to the entity as "Google". The Meta rebranding seems different.

daverol: Where will all those Meta Avatars go? Is there a retirement home in the Metaverse?

bhouston: > Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for.It was clearly the wrong bet. He pumped something like $100B into the endeavour and it is just slowly dying as we speak. He has to give up on it, although I am sure it will be called a "pivot" into AR glasses.

tyleo: Yeah, it was a bizarre decision. There isn't a clear ROI on games and that's what Horizon Worlds has been the whole time. There's no equation that says a 100M game automatically makes 100x more than a 1M game on average. If anything the equation is sub-linear. 100B just doesn't seem like the right size for a game investment.

cammikebrown: What are some alternatives?

t-writescode: VRChat is the most popular one. Age verification. User generated models. Just generated worlds. Revenue sharing in worlds. For-sale models and props. It’s quite feature rich now.

LorenDB: Meta has very recently had leaks of an upcoming lightweight headset. So maybe not a Quest 4 as a direct successor to the Quest 3, but a new headset is in the works.

malfist: Dang, that's fast. 13 days to market place removal, 90 days until complete shutdown.

sergiotapia: The quest is such a beautiful device. I hope they continue to work on it and release new versions. VR is so good and still in it's infancy.

robot_jesus: I have to agree. Is it perfect? Hell no. Is it an insane value for the $250 I paid for my Quest 3s last year at Target? Hell yes.My kids and I use our two headsets a lot. Sure, it's not a daily driver for workflows, but the uniqueness of many of the game experiences just can't be replicated on desktops/consoles.It's a damn shame because Facebook bought up Oculus, poured gasoline on a fire by pumping $100B dollars in and now seems set to walk away because it didn't make a $100B + 1 dollars.In its current state, it was never going to be a replacement for PCs or phone experiences. It's just a different lane all together. But Beat Saber, or Walkabout mini golf, or the I Expect You to Die series are insanely fun and unique. I'll be sad if they fold the quest down entirely, but I hope that Valve or others take up the banner. VR doesn't have to be a $100B industry to be viable, especially in its infancy.Meanwhile, Apple tosses a $3,500 headset onto the market and then is surprised that it's treated as a novelty. Why is it so hard for these companies to get their strategies right? Maybe it's because it's not a product suited (today, at least) for two of the largest companies on earth to focus on. These are moonshot companies who make products that half of the globe uses on a daily basis.I just want a solid VR platform with a healthy pipeline or quirky, interesting games.

kemotep: Billions. Facebook has spent billions and billions over the past decade in VR. Starting with the Oculus merger and then in 2021 with the rebrand.10 billion a year supposedly for the past 5 years now.

Raed667: I kept saying to myself, they must be seeing something I'm not... I guess not

Eufrat: > VR is so good and still in it's infancy.I believe 30% of the population cannot use VR in any way shape or form because your inner ear has decided the floor is the only place you can be.

ed_elliott_asc: There are some really good ar glasses for a couple of hundred dollars, I think they are going to end up really cheap and not the 100 billion investment that facebook needs.

xd1936: I meant hundreds of millions on Horizon Worlds specifically. Virtual concerts and the like. Big "Hello Fellow Kids" energy.

senderista: Imagine what $100B could have done for medical or energy research.

jeffbee: Almost nothing. That is a few weeks of global medical R&D spend, spread over more than a decade.

LorenDB: But Horizon Worlds will continue to be available on mobile, so it's just the Quest ecosystem losing access in favor of a phone-first platform.

squidsoup: Don't forget the deranged furries.

ralusek: Maybe I'm just naive but I don't really understand discontinuing things like this. Like, unless there are like 100 people using this, how can it not be possible to just leave this running at like 0.5% of its former capacity. Just leave up like 1 server, collapse all of the DBs into one, and let these few autists have their stuff.

bathwaterpizza: They had the money to try something, did it, didn't work. Not unheard of. Still a >$1T company.

gcr: A phone-first VR platform?

paxys: It’s wild how much mismanagement Zuck is able to get away with just because he has majority voting shares. At this point all of the missteps by Meta in AR/VR, AI and everything else can directly be traced back to him. The company desperately needs a Sundar/Satya type leader.

PLenz: It's not slowly dying, it was dead on arrival and never had any real traction

jesse_dot_id: I never understood why they were trying to recreate real life social interactions in VR, because it's worse by default, and the majority of the nerds who buy this tech are probably trying to escape that on some level. I know that any time I went into Meta Horizon Worlds, I didn't want to hear 95% of the people I heard talking.What I do use VR for is Bigscreen VR nearly every night to watch stuff with my friends. Scrolling through reels in a movie theater is pretty fun and even though I never do it solo on my phone, I will sit there for like 3-4 hours in VR enjoying communal brain rot.Perhaps they should focus on things like that instead of gimmicks that nobody cares about. For example, I have never once played a game in VR that didn't force me to sit or stand in a specific position, meaning to play it, I have to go out of my way to do so.

reaperducer: 10 billion a year supposedly for the past 5 years now.Imagine being able to solve world hunger, and then… not.

Anon1096: It's supposed to be a Roblox competitor, which does print money, though probably not to the extent of how much they invested.The problems are 2 fold:People/kids don't want to put on a VR headset to play Roblox. I guess they're conceding this point by pivoting to mobile.Meta is the opposite of cool. Real name requirements, only humanoid avatars, super corpo branding, etc really seriously hold them back from competing with VRChat or Roblox. This one is terminal it'll never be fixable as long as Meta is at the helm.

tyleo: Even Roblox doesn’t print money if you look into that business. They print engagement but are still fighting tooth and nail to make a dime on it.I can see Meta wanting the engagement though.

paxys: Annual R&D spending of pharmaceutical companies:Merck - $17.9BJohnson & Johnson - $17.2BRoche - $14.6BAstraZeneca - $13.6BAbbVie - $12.8BBristol Myers Squibb - $11.2BEli Lilly - $10.99BMeta’s losses on Metaverse last year - $19.2BSo, simply redirecting their spending in that division would instantly propel Meta to be the biggest medical researcher in the world. And as a bonus they’d get a real return out of it.

t-writescode: The suspiciously wealthy software developers, astronauts, pharmacists, game devs and artists that build high quality 3d models, Blender and Substance Painter tutorials and add-ons that prop up a good percentage of the VR headset market, Patreon market, and have a thriving artisan ecosystem?

rhcom2: The most obvious and expected outcome to everyone except Zuck.

renewiltord: Zuck has become a very rich man avoiding all the obvious and expected outcomes. When Facebook stock hit its low a few years ago, HN was explaining why it was doomed. The man has founder mentality at the helm of a trillion-dollar company. It is no wonder he is what he is.

riskable: They just used their war chest to buy a bunch of companies to diversify their revenue stream. It's not like Meta made some massively profitable innovations or new services.

michelb: So, a fraction of the AI investments? It’s pretty clear where the focus is bow and who/what no longer has a future at Meta.

FartyMcFarter: Can someone give a summary for those of us who don't use these products?Is this something huge like a change of strategy / greatly downplaying the metaverse, or just a minor rearranging of chairs on the Titanic?

riskable: Rumor is it that the focus of this new headset is AR. Not VR.So once again they're making a stupid business decision based on wishful thinking.Exec 1: "Surely, people will want to wear this headset all day while they work! Because the only reason why anyone would NOT want to do that is the weight of the thing!"Exec 2: "Exactly! Gaming makes us a lot of money—and it's the only reason anyone ever bought our VR headsets—but imagine how much more money we could be making from business customers/apps that currently have no need for such devices. If we build it, they will come though! Can there be any doubt?"Exec 3: "Not to mention that the data we collect from gamers has almost no value! We need to be collecting intimate details about everyone's lives, not their best Beat Saber scores!"Exec 4: "You know what? Let's get rid of the controllers entirely. Sure, they're absolutely 100% necessary for decent gaming but I seriously doubt the business applications of AR that we're pretending is a $100 billion market won't need it."Exec 5: "I'm concerned that end users will be able to do what they want with OUR devices that we're so graciously selling them the privilege to use. We need to ensure they're NOT at all like generic PCs that allow anyone and everyone to run whatever software they want and attach 3rd party hardware. It's not like such capabilities of general purpose hardware were what set off the PC revolution or anything!"

mosura: The usage numbers probably reflect what happened in this house: since the pestering to confirm age and the horizon worlds update the Meta VR devices have literally not been recharged.They had the foundation of something half reasonable at one point, but their product management clearly got in the way.

aaronbrethorst: but their product management clearly got in the wayI'm pretty sure the buck stops with Mark Zuckerberg.

mosura: Zuckerberg wants a cyberpunk future, not some 3D immersive HR department on your face.

riskable: FYI: This is usually solved by placing a fan on the floor in front of your boundary (designated play area). This isn't just a "community tip", it's been studied:https://www.computer.org/csdl/journal/tg/2025/05/10916971/24...

Traster: I was at Intel for a while and there was one glaring problem - they have one product that spins off a huge amount of cash. This means a few things: First, that one product is really where the things that matter happen. But second, they have all this money and they don't know what to do with it, they can't spend it all on their core product because that looks terrible - they're already throwing off money, investing more probably just makes your company look bad (you're spending more to get the same revenue). SO instead you have to take that money and make bets. But not just any bets. You need a bet that (a) matters if it pays off, and (b) looks favourable compared to the core business. So you buy Mcafee and Altera and MobilEye, 5G was the future once...So to take the Meta example, they need something that is going to have revenue upside similar to Meta advertising revenue (one of the most profitable things in the universe), and that has better margins that the advertising business (basically impossible).So the only logical thing to do is to make grotesquely large bets on things that are extremely speculative. You can't bet on things that are well known - because nothing known has the properties from earlier that you're looking for, and you can't bet small because you've got to convince people you're the pay off is of a similar size to your existing business.In Intel's case they lost focus on the core business and so that died and their other bets didn't matter because the core business was dead. With Meta the core business in't dead, but it's only a matter of time before it's seriously threatened and so they're going to attack that threat with everything they've got - and they have a tonne of resources.

einsteinx2: Sounds a lot like Google as well

paxys: The stock lows was a market overreaction, and it corrected itself soon after. It’s not like Zuck got the company out of the hole by making some genius moves. Quite the opposite. Meta would be in an equally good or better position today had Zuck just done nothing for the last decade.

TacticalCoder: > So, a fraction of the AI investments? It’s pretty clear where the focus is bow and who/what no longer has a future at Meta.And the tens of billions spent on AI at Meta... As a result, we're all using "Meta Code CLI" and "ChatBook" and "Geminizuck" right?Seriously: while we're all on Claude Code using the Anthropic models and many are happy with Gemini and ChatGPT for other stuff, where is Meta's AI offering? I love their Segment Anything Models (SAM) but what the heck has Meta to answer to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI?

riskable: They're not all deranged! Some are completely productive, functional furries. Probably. Maybe.Also, your statement is far too reductive! There's plenty of avatars with scales! Also, don't forget the anime girls that are actually middle-aged men and the occasional sentient burrito.

CobrastanJorji: They also renamed the entire corporation from "Facebook" to "Meta" to prove how serious they were about it.

tavavex: While simultaneously renaming the VR headsets to also use Meta branding instead of Oculus, even though Oculus was a great brand and the most recognizable name in the VR industry. What made it worse is that by that point they'd produced lots of headsets with Oculus branding, including an Oculus button on one of the controllers. So, they had to change that button to also have a different logo and name, and have the software presumably recognize which revision you had to draw the correct controller model in the VR view. It's insane how far they went in pursuit of what they saw as the next NFTs.

FartyMcFarter: There might be expensive non-technical maintenance required, such as checks for illegal user content.

OrangeMusic: The app will still exist, but only on mobile (which is absolutely inexplicable).