Neal Freiman

My dog of the week is the Metaverse.

The promise of an immersive 3D world filled with cartoonish, legless avatars appears to be over after Meta announced this week it would be shutting down its VR social network, Horizon Worlds, for Quest VR headsets in June.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, yesterday clarified that Horizon Worlds will actually remain on VR after hearing feedback from fans, or fan, but it will essentially be in maintenance mode with limited support.

In other words, it'll be a zombie.

Meta had high hopes for the Metaverse, to say the least.

After all, Mark Zuckerberg even changed the company's name in 2021 from Facebook to Meta to reflect what he called technology's next frontier.

Speaking that October, Zuckerberg predicted, "...our hope is that within the next decade, the Metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers."

It has done none of that.

In fact, maybe the only thing it's been good at is setting money on fire.

In total, Meta's poured $73 billion into Reality Labs, its virtual reality division that has never turned a profit and cost Meta billions of dollars in losses every single quarter.

To lose maybe a little less money, earlier this year, Meta cut more than 1,000 employees from its VR unit.

Toby Zuckerberg's vision of the Metaverse was widely mocked, even as he touted it as the next evolution of the internet.

Turns out the haters were right.

RIP, rest in pixels.

Yeah, the VR, people don't want to live in virtual reality, at least not yet with the current product suite available.

The MetaQuest headset sales were down 16% year over year from 2024 to 2025.

The overall industry has declined for the last three years.

Apple rolled out this $3,500 Vision Pro headset a few years ago.

It's scaling back production.

So no company has nailed this yet.