Meta’s CTO has responded to speculation of VR being “dead” at the company.
After reports from outlets like Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider suggested that Meta is “considering” a cut “as high as 30%” for its “metaverse” teams, Meta issued an official statement confirming “shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables”.
“Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables given the momentum there,” the official statement read. “We aren’t planning any broader changes than that.”
David Heaney
Following this, in an “ask-me-anything” session on his Instagram page, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth was asked the question “Is VR dead for Meta now? You seem to have moved on to glasses and AI?”.
Here’s how Bosworth responded:
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Every now and then there’s just a narrative that people cannot help writing, and I’ll give you the way to know.
First of all, the answer is no: VR is not dead. We’re also investing a lot in glasses and AI, and that’s the trick.
The way to know if there’s a convenient narrative is if it appears zero-sum. Meta is a big company. We can invest in many things. We can invest in VR, glasses, and AI — and by the way, we have been for years.
Every year we go through a budget process, and in that budget process, we ask every team, “Hey, can you do the same work more effectively?” We’ve got better tools, we’ve got AI, we’ve got things. You’re trying to right-size it. How big is the market? How fast is it growing? Is that what we expected? If it’s slower than we expected, let’s make sure our burn rate is lower. If it’s faster than expected, let’s double down and make sure we take advantage and don’t cede it to other people. You’re being smart about it, but it’s normal stuff.
Bosworth’s response doesn’t contradict Meta’s official confirmation of shifting some investment “from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables”, but seems to push back on the idea that an up to 30% spending cut means the company is no longer investing at all, suggesting that it can work on VR, glasses, and AI concurrently.
David Heaney
Meta’s funding shift from Horizon Worlds and VR to smart glasses comes just over a year after a leaked memo from Bosworth told Reality Labs staff that 2025 will determine whether their projects are “the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure”.
In the memo, Bosworth described 2025 as “the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs”, and told staff they “need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR”. Note that at the time, Meta was using MR to refer to VR too, a nomenclature that it ended earlier this year.
“And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance”, Bosworth followed that sentence with.
Since then, Reality Labs saw its highest-ever quarterly revenue in Q4 2024 with the launch of Quest 3S, which was the top-selling console on Amazon US for Christmas. But this momentum did not carry through into 2025 at all.
The first two quarters of 2025 saw Quest sales decline year-over-year, revealing that while Quest 3S was a popular stocking stuffer, it simply is not a successful year-round product. While Q3 saw a rebound, Meta explained that this was due to retailers stocking up on Quest 3S for this year’s holiday season.
Meanwhile, Meta has continued to push its Horizon Worlds “metaverse” platform with multi-million-dollar creator competitions, especially focused on smartphone-only worlds, as the company hopes to scale the platform from a social VR space to a cross-platform Roblox and Fortnite competitor. But this doesn’t seem to have gained much traction.
David Heaney
This relative stagnation in its Quest and Horizon Worlds efforts comes as the company is seeing skyrocketing sales and significant public and investor interest in its smart glasses.
Back in February, in its Q4 2024 earnings call, Meta’s partner EssilorLuxottica said that the Ray-Ban Meta glasses had sold 2 million units, and in its Q2 2025 call in July said that sales had more than tripled since last year, performing “exceptionally well”.
In its Q2 2025 call in July, the company said that the glasses were performing “exceptionally well” in the market, with sales having more than tripled compared to 2024.
David Heaney
This doesn’t mean Meta isn’t working on new headsets, though. Leaked memos reveal that it plans to launch its rumored ultralight headset with a tethered compute puck in the first half of 2027, and that it recently started work on a gaming-focused Quest 4 set to be a “large upgrade” over Quest 3, though at a higher price.
