Reality Labs, the Meta division that hosts the project, has racked up around $75 billion in operating losses since 2020.

The keynote featured a bonkers video of Zuckerberg jumping between various CGI-rendered depictions of the metaverse in virtual reality. He visited a spaceship where the company’s executives were playing poker, toured a tropical mansion with a floating fireplace and met CTO Andrew Bosworth’s Pixar-esque alien pet Oppy.

Meta’s “metaverse” has become the tech equivalent of Schrödinger’s Cat. It exists in a superposition of both life and death. Meta knows it can’t fully abandon VR, even if the hype surrounding the metaverse and its Horizon Worlds virtual environment has withered to a shallow husk of its initial promise.

Meta‘s metaverse ambitions are hitting a crossroads. In a move that marks a dramatic shift in strategy, the tech giant is shutting down the VR version of Horizon Worlds on Quest. Once hailed as the future of digital interaction,

Horizon Worlds was supposed to help make virtual reality mainstream. But now Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is scaling down the app's VR support to focus on mobile users instead.

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are scaling back their metaverse ambitions after accumulating over $80 billion in losses

Turns out Zuck's Metaverse really didn't have legs.