is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Two months before it changed its name to “Meta,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally introduced us to his metaverse for work: Horizon Workrooms, envisioned as a virtual space for workers to collaborate. Today, the company announced it’s shutting that space down: “Meta has made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app, effective February 16, 2026,” reads the note tucked away on a help page.
Meta will also no longer sell its headsets and software as a service for businesses, another help page reads: “We are stopping sales of Meta Horizon managed services and commercial SKUs of Meta Quest, effective February 20, 2026.”
Meta just laid off roughly 10 percent of its entire Reality Labs division, over 1,000 jobs. In the aftermath, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Zuckerberg has changed his mind about what the word “metaverse” actually means. Mobile yes, smart glasses yes, but maybe not VR.
Mark Zuckerberg in an early version of Horizon Workrooms. Image: Meta
First, we learned that Meta’s layoffs had completely shuttered three of Meta’s hard-won VR game studios, after previously closing another in 2024. Soon, it came out that it’s abandoning future development on Supernatural, its standout VR fitness app, and that it has reportedly gutted the studio behind Batman: Arkham Shadow as well.
What’s next, Horizon Worlds? Maybe Meta will draw the line there, because it’s one of the few VR experiences Meta has made available on mobile phones too; Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth already said the company’s Horizon team will “double down on bringing the best Horizon experiences and AI creator tools to mobile” in a memo obtained by Bloomberg.
Bloomberg writes that “Meta will continue to develop the metaverse, but with a focus on mobile phones instead of the fully immersive VR headsets that the company initially imagined.” To be clear, the term “metaverse” was coined by Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson to describe a fully immersive shared VR world, but I suppose mobile makes sense if you consider Fortnite to be a metaverse and don’t need the “fully immersive” part.
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