The most uncomfortable possibility in the metaverse story is that Zuckerberg built the foundation on which someone else will eventually succeed. Meta has shut down Horizon Worlds on VR — off the Quest store by March, terminated on June 15 — after close to $80 billion in losses. Mark Zuckerberg’s investment in VR hardware, spatial computing research, and consumer VR infrastructure may ultimately be more valuable to his competitors than to his company. The pioneer who funds the infrastructure often does not capture the value of the ecosystem built on it.
The infrastructure Zuckerberg built is real. Meta’s Quest headsets have advanced consumer VR hardware significantly and helped establish a device ecosystem that other VR developers and content creators can build on. The research into avatar representation, spatial computing interaction, and social VR dynamics has produced knowledge that is applicable beyond Horizon Worlds. The standards and conventions developed through years of Horizon Worlds operation provide a foundation for future platforms.
The entity that benefits most from this infrastructure may not be Meta. Gaming companies, social media competitors, enterprise software providers, and new VR-native startups are all building applications on the Quest hardware and spatial computing foundations that Meta’s investment created. Their success, if it comes, will be partly built on the close to $80 billion that Zuckerberg invested in proving out the technology and building the hardware ecosystem.
Reality Labs’ layoffs of more than 1,000 employees in early 2025 and the formal AI pivot reduce Meta’s active participation in the VR and spatial computing space. The infrastructure investments remain, but the organizational capacity to build on them has been significantly reduced. Competitors who now build on Meta’s VR hardware foundation will do so without the organizational competitor that created it at full strength.
History has precedents for this pattern. The companies that funded early internet infrastructure often did not capture the most value from the internet economy. The companies that funded early mobile infrastructure saw smartphone software companies capture more of the value. The metaverse’s infrastructure investments may follow the same pattern — valuable for the ecosystem, less directly valuable for the company that funded them.
