DIGITAL LIFE

Mark Zuckerberg has already forgotten about the metaverse?

After changing the company's name and investing billions in digital worlds, Meta begins 2026 retreating from the metaverse. Layoffs, record losses, and a strategic shift toward AI-powered devices are reshaping the future of virtual reality. Experts explain why the original vision failed—and why this may, paradoxically, strengthen the sector.

The turn of the calendar to 2026 marked a turning point for the metaverse. What Zuckerberg presented as the next chapter of human interaction lost prominence within Meta itself. The company reduced teams, absorbed billions in losses, and repositioned priorities. Still, the end of the "metaverse era" does not mean the end of virtual reality—on the contrary, it may be the beginning of a more pragmatic phase.

In early January, Meta announced cuts of about 10% in its Reality Labs division, affecting data engineers, software engineers, and game developers. Shortly after, the fourth-quarter balance sheet confirmed the magnitude of the blow: the virtual reality area accumulated losses of US$19.1 billion in 2025, with US$6.2 billion in the last quarter alone.

In the conference call with investors, Zuckerberg made it clear that the company will continue investing in extended reality (XR), but with an increasing focus on wearable devices with AI — such as smart glasses partnerships with Ray-Ban — while virtual worlds lose centrality.

According to experts interviewed by Euronews Next, the change of course does not need to be read as a structural defeat for VR, but rather as the end of a narrative inflated by unrealistic expectations.

Billion-dollar investment and low adoption...Since its announcement, Horizon Worlds has been ridiculed by users around the world. In addition to the interface lacking detail and poor graphics, the main reason was the size of the investment for such a result: according to the company's own annual reports, Meta invested $36 billion in the project. For comparison, this amount is greater than NASA's annual budget in 2024, which was almost $25 billion. All this to show a world where the avatars didn't even have legs.

Those who tried to access it and gave it a chance were also disappointed. Users reported headaches and dizziness after prolonged use of the virtual reality glasses, a sparsely populated and lifeless world, and without much purpose – nothing presented there was revolutionary, necessary, or offered a more practical way to perform a job or even to socialize. In reality, it was more complicated to do things through Horizon Worlds than through other conventional methods. In 2023, a YouTuber decided to conduct an experiment and spend a week living on the platform, and noticed that the population was almost nonexistent: less than 1,000 daily users.

Decentraland – one of the most expensive projects within Horizon Worlds – cost $1.3 billion and in October 2022, had 38 daily users.

Security...Although the company has taken more effective measures to preserve user data and also their security while on the platform, initially, Meta Horizon Worlds was accessed by teenagers and children without parental control. In 2024, Meta announced the official opening of its metaverse to children and with this announcement, a series of measures to facilitate parental control over the type of content that could be accessed by children within the platform.

In 2022, however, this did not exist. Newer users of the platform also report that the parental control system's features are insufficient or can be completely ignored, depending on the information passed to the company's software, such as age.

Why the metaverse didn't take off...When Meta doubled down on the metaverse, the context seemed favorable. The world was still emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work was growing, and socialization had migrated to screens and platforms like Zoom. For George Jijiashvili, senior analyst at the consulting firm Omdia, that was the perfect time to try to create the next great computing platform.

There was also a strategic incentive: to reduce dependence on the mobile ecosystems controlled by Apple and Google. The ambition was clear: to lead the "post-smartphone era." The problem is that the leap was too big.

The technology is still expensive, uncomfortable for long periods of use, and unconvincing to the general public. In addition, there was a lack of truly indispensable applications. Without a "daily reason" to put on a headset, the metaverse remained restricted to niches — gamers, enthusiasts, and companies in pilot projects.

Add to that unintuitive interfaces, graphics below expectations, and a learning curve that alienated ordinary users. The result was a promising product on paper, but far from mass adoption.

Meta's retreat opens space for a more down-to-earth approach. Instead of persistent universes and ubiquitous avatars, the market tends to advance through specific use cases: corporate training, industrial design, immersive education, healthcare, and entertainment.

Lighter devices, mixed reality experiences, and integration with artificial intelligence point to a less grandiose—and more useful—future. Smart glasses, for example, can gain traction by combining computer vision, AI assistants, and contextual information in the real world, without requiring complete user isolation.

For developers and startups, the departure of the "totalizing" metaverse can be liberating. With less pressure to build a single universe, the diversity of solutions, platforms, and business models grows.

Meta paid a high price for trying to accelerate the future. But its investment also pushed the sector forward, funding research, hardware, and talent. Now, the industry has the chance to learn from its mistakes: focus on concrete experiences, reduce barriers to entry, and deliver immediate value.

No one seems to lament the end of the metaverse as a universal promise. In its place, a more modest, fragmented, and practical virtual reality emerges—exactly the type of evolution that, in the long run, tends to transform experimental technologies into everyday tools.

by mundophone