What ever happened to the metaverse?.

Adam Spencer
2 days ago
4 min read

Monday was meant to be the VR death of Horizon Worlds: a 15 June shutdown Meta set in March, but then hastily reversed. The real question, after four years and roughly 80 billion dollars in Reality Labs losses, is why none of us live in the metaverse.

The belnded Northern Star Trail above Kitt Peak. — ('The whataverse?': created via imagen)

(First published on my Substack where you can get #NerdNews, marvellous maths and general geekery.)

Build it and they … won't come.

If you strip away the spin, the answer is blunt. Meta pitched a world that billions of people are simply not interested in. At least with nothing like the fervour Meta brought to the sales pitch.

If you rename one of the world’s most recognisable brands after a new idea, which the public then overwhelmingly fails to buy, you’ve gone well beyond a quarterly sales hiccup.

In many ways this seems like one of the epic corporate fails of recent years.

"I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet." —Mark Zuckerberg, 2021.

Meta is not alone in copping the blowback.

Apple, for all its design pedigree found that its many-thousand-dollar headset, fared no better. By IDC estimates it shipped roughly 390,000 Vision Pros in 2024, but only about 45,000 in the crucial 2025 holiday quarter.

At the same time Apple were shifting iPhones and Macs by the millions. The icy winds seem to be blowing category-wide: IDC has VR and mixed-reality headset shipments falling more than 40 per cent in 2025.

Full disclosure: I have worn a Vision Pro, and the immersion watching live sport was genuinely cool. But that is oceans away from wanting to kick back in the office cafeteria, a brick strapped to my face, right-swiping emails to squeeze a small but vital per cent of efficiency out of the afternoon.

So did AI eat Zuck's homework?

Then the ground shifted. Generative AI exploded, handing Meta a better place to put its money and its boss's attention.

In some ways the metaverse was not so much killed as abandoned for a shinier prospect.

Meta has guided capital spending of up to 135 billion dollars for 2026, up from around 72 billion in 2025, with the majority for AI infrastructure, not VR.

Most telling, by some accounts Zuckerberg did not say "metaverse" once on the recent earnings call, while Reality Labs bled billions.

"I think the metaverse as a pitch was a mistake." — George Jijiashvili, Omdia analyst.

Chill out Spence. This is a long game.

Defenders will say take a breath: the billion-user goal ran to the early 2030s, the trillions-in-value one to 2030, so the deadline stands. Fair. But that counts for little when the sales trajectory points the wrong way and the chief backer seems to have walked away.

You do not reach a billion from a few hundred thousand regulars while pulling VR back to fund AI and glasses.

The Horizon reprieve said it all. Meta kept the lights on, then made the roadmap mobile-first.

So what is the ’verse today?

Four metas and a funeral.

Meta has kept existing VR worlds playable in maintenance mode, bug fixes but no new features, while moving all new development to the phone. In other words, largely an app.

You open Meta Horizon on iOS or Android and roam the same social worlds as an avatar on a flat screen with no headset. It is closer to Roblox than to the immersion once promised.

The truly immersive pieces are going quietly. Four flagship VR worlds were pulled in March, VR world-building ends in June, and Horizon Workrooms, Meta's separate VR meeting app, was switched off outright in February, its user data deleted.

Maybe the future wears shades?

This is where it gets interesting. Yes, the headset metaverse flopped then flipped to mobile. But lightweight AI smart glasses are booming.

The smart-glasses side of the extended-reality market grew more than 200 per cent in 2025, according to IDC, and Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley sales more than tripled to over seven million units. Even Apple reportedly paused its cheaper headset to chase glasses. Perhaps the grand vision is not dead, just shape-shifting: from 3D worlds you step into to ambient AI you glance through.

Perhaps the real metaverse is turning up four years late, wearing Ray-Bans? — NerdNews.

Crystal balls and cracked screens.

So why aren't we living in the metaverse?

Because billions were sold a future they never asked for, AI offered a better one, and the only deadline left is bolted to a vision its creator has outgrown.

It's a tale as old as prediction itself. The loudest forecasters are often wrong. The biggest swings often miss. The metaverse was going to eat the world? Well, it cleared about as much of its plate as 3D televisions and Google Glass.

But perhaps the buffet remains open?

Next time someone swears they know how AI will reshape your life, quickly check if they were also certain you'd be reading this with a headset on your face.