Meta’s flagship metaverse service leaves VR behind

Some of the changes, like removing individual worlds from the VR Store, are presented by the company as efforts to make the Store a better discovery platform for third-party developers.

In general, Meta sees many of its recent developments as a move away from proprietary development of VR experiences to focus on an ecosystem of third-party developers, with statistics such as “86% of the effective time people spend in their VR headsets is with third-party apps.”

“We will continue to support the third-party community through strategic partnerships and targeted investments, as we have since the beginning,” writes Samantha Ryan, vice president of content at Meta Reality Labs.

Meta launched a Horizon Worlds mobile app last year and found that it attracted an influx of new users interested in the social gaming aspects of the service, with the exception of the VR element. It appears the mobile launch was successful enough to merit focusing the entire service on that platform and audience, rather than shutting it down amid other internal content project closures.

As far as we know, Meta plans to continue designing, manufacturing and selling VR hardware and maintaining the storefronts on which third-party developers sell for these platforms. It won’t create much content internally, and there’s not much talk anymore about the promise of an overall transformational metaverse.

Instead, Meta’s speculative investment appears to focus on smart glasses, as well as AI models, technologies and applications.