TL;DR: they are not getting out of VR, they are getting out of VR game creation and publishing.
I agree with Luckey that the doomer narrative of Meta abandoning VR is “obviously false", but it is too easy to say that "10% layoffs is basically six months of normal churn concentrated into 60 days". Technically this is true, and Meta has been through much larger layoffs, but what is special here is that this is only one of several concurrent events hinting at Meta reducing their VR engagement.
They not only fired a lot of people working on VR HMDs and Horizon Worlds, they also closed three of their gaming studios, killed several contracts with 3rd party studios for unreleased games, ended their program to support VR game developers financially, and finally killed their Quest for business program. So this is a lot more than just regular churn, this is a strategic move that they effectively announced before. Almost exactly a year ago a memo from Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth leaked saying that 2025 would be the most critical for VR:
This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.Interestingly he particularly pointed to Horizon Wolds on mobile, not even on Quest:.
And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.Even though most VR enthusiasts despise Horizon Worlds, it was their attempt to counter existing large virtual communities like Fortnite and Roblox that have been venturing out of their pure gaming focus, and turned themselves into large venues that draw millions of players/users/avatars in concerts etc., and come with very lucrative in-world economies, exactly what Meta was aiming for with their Metaverse. All the current cuts hint that their internal growth targets for Horizon World (on phones and in VR) clearly weren't met, and their evaluation of the whole VR venture turned more towards "legendary misadventure". But all this is about (multi-user) virtual worlds, basically the metaverse part, not XR as a whole. They are pretty much getting out of either creating or paying for any gaming content for HMDs, but that's not the same as dropping VR/XR. They will very likely push future HMDs more towards media devices like AVP and GXR at higher prices, with the long term of merging them into smartgasses. They will still support game developers, just not financially, and the vast majority of apps on the Horizon store will be games for a long time. But you may have to pay extra for controllers on Quest 4.
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