Meta previously announced it was shuttering the VR version of Horizon Worlds, but now it seems the company has changed course, revealing that some experiences will still be accessible on Quest moving forward.
Meta said earlier this week that it was removing Horizon Worlds and Events from the Store on Quest on March 31st, and shutting down VR access to the app entirely by June 15th—essentially making it a flatscreen-only experience for mobile and PC.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth took to Instagram yesterday in one of his usual Q&A sessions though to announce that some worlds will, in fact, remain VR-accessible for the time being.
“We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games to support the fans that’ve reached out […], who really care about that,” Bosworth says.
According to Bosworth’s statement, it appears Horizon Worlds legacy worlds will be VR-only, suggesting that it’s going to be a hard platform split.
“The Horizon Unity runtime games—they’re not going to work on mobile, they’ll just be working in VR. We’re not bringing new games. Again, most of our energy is going towards mobile and the Meta Horizon Engine there. The reason for that is that’s where most of the consumer and creator energy already was, and so we’re kind of leaning into that,” Bosworth says, noting that the legacy version of Horizon Worlds app will be VR-accessible for “the foreseeable future.”
Notably, all of Horizon Worlds was based on the Unity game engine from its 2021 launch up until very recently. At Connect 2025 last September, Meta announced that its own Horizon Engine would be replacing Unity, which is said to speed up loading times and allow “well over 100” users in a single space.
At the time of this writing, Meta hasn’t released more detailed plans on how it’s going to accomplish the platform split. We’ll update this article as soon as we know more.
