The social world the metaverse was designed for has not yet come into being. Meta has shut down Horizon Worlds on VR — off the Quest store by March, terminated on June 15 — after close to $80 billion in losses. Mark Zuckerberg designed a platform for a world in which millions of people would habitually gather in virtual spaces, conduct commerce in digital environments, and maintain social relationships through avatar-mediated interaction. That world does not yet exist. Close to $80 billion confirmed that the design preceded the reality by too wide a margin.
Successful social platforms are designed for the social world that already exists. Facebook was designed for the social world of college students who wanted to stay connected with peers — a social world that already existed and that Facebook served more effectively than existing tools. The platform did not need to create the social world; it needed to serve it better. Organic adoption followed from the fit between the platform’s design and the social world’s actual shape.
Horizon Worlds was designed for a social world that would need to be constructed rather than served. The platform required users to establish new social habits, develop new communities in virtual spaces, and maintain social relationships in forms that had no existing equivalent. The social world it was designed to serve had to be built from scratch simultaneously with the platform itself. Building two things at once — platform and the social world it serves — is exponentially harder than building one.
Reality Labs spent close to $80 billion attempting to build both simultaneously. The platform was built; the social world it required did not form at the needed scale. Monthly active users in the hundreds of thousands represented a social world too small to sustain the platform’s ambitions. Layoffs of more than 1,000 Reality Labs employees in early 2025 and the AI pivot acknowledged the dual-construction approach had not worked.
The social world the metaverse was designed for may yet come into existence. VR adoption is slowly broadening; digital social norms are evolving; the technology is improving. But it will not arrive on Horizon Worlds. The platform is closed. When the social world finally arrives, it will need a new platform designed for the social world as it then actually exists.