After spending over $70 billion on its vision of a persistent virtual world, Meta is officially pulling back. In the second week of January 2026, the company initiated a sweeping restructuring of its Reality Labs division, laying off approximately 1,500 employees (10% of the unit) and shuttering several high-profile VR projects.
While CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously claimed the metaverse would be the “successor to the mobile internet,” the company’s new focus is clear: AI-powered wearables and mobile-first social gaming.
The Shutdown of “VR for Work”
The clearest sign of this shift arrived on January 16, 2026, when Meta announced it would discontinue Horizon Workrooms, its flagship corporate VR collaboration platform.
- Deadline: The standalone app will shut down on February 16, 2026.
- Impact: Meta is also ending the sale of “Managed Services” and enterprise-specific VR headsets, effectively killing the dream of the “virtual office.”
Shuttering the “Oculus” Legacy
As part of a 30% budget cut for metaverse initiatives, Meta has closed three of its premier internal VR game studios:
- Sanzaru Games: Developers of the award-winning Asgard’s Wrath.
- Armature Studio: Known for the Resident Evil 4 VR port.
- Twisted Pixel Games: The team behind several VR titles.
Furthermore, Supernatural, the popular VR fitness app Meta acquired for $400 million, has been placed in “maintenance mode,” with no new content or feature updates planned for 2026.
The New Strategy: Mobile and Wearables
Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, confirmed that the savings from these cuts will be reinvested into the “Wearables” category. The company is doubling down on:
- Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses: Following record sales in 2025, Meta plans to triple production and integrate deeper multimodal AI.
- Horizon Worlds on Mobile: The “metaverse” is being repositioned as a cross-platform social space (similar to Roblox) accessible via smartphones, rather than a VR-exclusive experience.
- Orion AR Glasses: Strategic focus has shifted to “true” augmented reality, with a targeted consumer launch pushed to 2027.
| Strategic Move | Status (January 2026) |
| Reality Labs Layoffs | ~1,500 roles cut (10% of division) |
| Horizon Workrooms | Permanently Discontinued (Feb 2026) |
| VR Game Studios | Three major studios shuttered |
| Core Investment | Shifting from VR headsets to AI Wearables |
Conclusion
Meta isn’t “deleting” the metaverse, but it is fundamentally changing the definition. By cutting 1,500 jobs and closing its work-focused VR platforms, the company has admitted that the “headset-only” future failed to gain mainstream traction. In 2026, the Zuckerberg vision has become “humbler”: instead of asking users to step into a virtual world, Meta wants to bring AI into the real world through the glasses on your face.
