On December 4, 2025, Bloomberg reported that Mark Zuckerberg is preparing to slash Reality Labs’ budget by as much as 30% in 2026 — a cut of $4–6 billion that will be redirected almost entirely toward artificial intelligence and smart glasses. Reading the post-mortems feels uncannily like flipping through an aviation accident report: dozens of individually non-fatal mistakes that, once aligned, produced an unsurvivable outcome.

In a thoughtful Forbes piece titled “Requiem for the Metaverse: On Meta’s Missed Opportunity,” Cortney Harding captures the mood perfectly: what was sold as the next internet became, in just a few years, “Nothing.”

So what exactly went wrong with the project that was so important the company renamed itself after it?

1. Timing — the one thing you can’t buy back

The pandemic handed every tech giant a once-in-a-century tailwind. Billions of people were desperate for any semblance of shared space. Horizon Worlds was first shown in 2019 — seemingly perfect foresight — but the closed beta didn’t arrive until August 2020 (when the raw panic of early lockdowns had already subsided) and the public launch landed in December 2021, long after vaccines were rolling out and “return to normal” was the dominant narrative. The moment when VR could have felt like a lifeline had passed.

2. Strategy that never settled

From the beginning the vision lurched: social hub one quarter, fitness destination the next, enterprise training tool after that. Creator funds appeared and vanished; brand partnerships were announced with fanfare and quietly abandoned. The constant pivoting left developers, brands, and users perpetually unsure what Horizon Worlds was actually for.

3. The wrong people in the cockpit

Instead of leaning on the passionate, battle-tested VR community that had been living in virtual worlds for years, leadership was handed to internal executives — many of whom, by their own admission, had barely tried modern VR headsets. The “vibe” of embodied presence simply wasn’t in their muscle memory, and it showed in every design decision.

4. The Emptyverse

Big brands chased the buzzword without understanding what might actually make people stay. Meta itself forgot the playbook that made Facebook explode in the 2000s: give users addictive, community-driven reasons to return every day.

The result was a string of hollow corporate activations and sterile virtual plazas. Meanwhile, Roblox — with its laser focus on user-generated content, creator payouts, and genuine social glue — kept growing month after month.

Now, to avoid sleeping through the next tectonic shift (this time artificial intelligence), Meta has little choice but to raid Reality Labs’ budget. Yet Harding ends her requiem on a cautiously hopeful note: people are lonelier than ever, and AI-powered avatars, personalized worlds, and truly intelligent social experiences might still deliver the connection we crave.

Whether Meta learns from the cascade of small errors this time around remains to be seen. For the full, elegantly written obituary, read Cortney Harding’s piece here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cortneyharding/2025/12/04/requiem-for-the-metaverse-on-metas-missed-opportunity/