Meta has reversed its decision to close down its virtual reality platform, 'Horizon Worlds’, only one day after the initial announcement.
The backtrack was confirmed via a, now expired, Instagram story from Meta's Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth.
In a Q&A answer, Bosworth said it was due to an outpouring of responses from “heartbroken” fans.
“We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR,” he wrote.
Horizon Worlds launched at the end of 2021, with a mobile version in 2023, but struggled to gain continued success.
Designed as a VR social environment for Meta's Quest headsets, it allowed users to create avatars, play games with one another and socialise.
But despite billions in investment and development, the platform never took off the way Mark Zuckerberg hoped for, with its peak monthly user count sitting at approximately 200,000, and is now shutting down as Meta shifts focus towards artificial intelligence instead.
The misguided venture was a costly one, with the Reality Labs unit of Meta reporting an operating loss of US$6.02 billion last quarter.
