What is the Facebook Metaverse? Everything you need to know
September 27, 2023In a bold move in 2021, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, signalling its commitment to exploring the concept of the metaverse. What exactly is this metaverse, and how does it affect you? This article looks at Meta's journey into the metaverse, how its plans have changed since the rebrand and what they mean for the future.
When Meta changed its name in 2021, it heralded a new era focused on building a metaverse. At the heart of this endeavour is Horizon, Meta's metaverse platform. Meta began testing Horizon back in 2020, setting the stage for its ambitious metaverse vision.
How to enter Meta's metaverse
When this article was first published in September 2023, the usual way into Horizon was a Meta Quest 2 VR headset. Its price had risen from $299 to $399 in August 2022 and returned to $299 in June 2023, and in September 2024 Meta announced that it was winding down Quest 2 sales. Its replacement as the entry-level model, the Meta Quest 3S, launched in October 2024 at $299.99 for the 128 GB version, while the price of the higher-end Quest 3 was cut to $499.99 for the 512 GB version when the 3S was announced. Horizon Worlds itself is free to enter, with optional in-app purchases.
Horizon had humble beginnings as a social virtual reality app in 2020, initially undergoing closed alpha testing. Horizon Worlds launched in the US and Canada in December 2021 and became Meta's primary gateway to the social metaverse, while Horizon Workrooms was aimed at the workplace metaverse.
Meta has also moved the metaverse beyond VR headsets. Early-access web and mobile versions of Horizon Worlds arrived in September 2023. In February 2026, Meta announced that it would separate Worlds from its Quest VR platform and focus mainly on the mobile version, and in March 2026 it said that no new games would be added to the VR version, although existing ones would continue to be supported.
A divisive rebrand
The rebranding from Facebook to Meta in late 2021 was far from unnoticed. Meta's Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, expressed concerns that the shift might go unnoticed, but in reality, it stirred quite a divisive response.
By May 2023, Ed Zitron declared the metaverse "dead" in an Insider obituary caused by the rise in generative AI, which propels abandonment by the business world. Other voices, like Phil Libin, former CEO of Evernote, found Horizon "tolerable for a few minutes" and criticised it as an "old idea" that had never worked. In February 2022, Meta's stock lost roughly a quarter of its value in a single day, wiping out some $230 billion of market capitalisation.
Meta faced significant challenges with a loss of over a million daily active users and substantial layoffs. In November 2022, 11,000 employees, about 13% of the workforce, lost their jobs. In March 2023, Meta announced a further 10,000 job cuts and the closure of 5,000 open positions, carried out in several rounds over the following months. The layoffs hit employee morale.
To address concerns about virtual harassment, Meta introduced a "Personal Boundary" feature in February 2022, an invisible boundary that prevents other avatars from coming within about four feet of yours.
Horizon faced criticism for glitches and a lack of user engagement. In response, Meta placed Horizon in a "quality lockdown" for the remainder of 2022, pledging to focus on bug fixes. However, this move raised concerns among investors, given the substantial investment—over $36 billion—made in the metaverse.
A very long-term bet
Mark Zuckerberg, during a Meta earnings call, described the metaverse as "a very long-term bet". While he couldn't guarantee its success, he believed it reflected the direction in which the world was headed. Following his remarks, Meta's stock rose by 7%.
The bet has stayed expensive. Reality Labs, the division behind Meta's VR and AR products, lost about $19.1 billion in 2025, and by January 2026 its total operating losses since late 2020 had reached around $80 billion. In January 2026, Meta cut about 10% of Reality Labs jobs as it shifted resources from VR towards AI-powered wearables.
Another IT company, Apple, entered the metaverse conversation by announcing its mixed-reality headset, Vision Pro, in June 2023; it went on sale in the US in February 2024. Interestingly, Apple opted to use the term "spatial computing" rather than "metaverse", potentially due to the latter's lack of consumer recognition. Meta's Andrew Bosworth compared this confusion to the early days of the internet, suggesting that while it may be hard to define, it could become integral to our lives, just like the internet itself.
