In a recent blogpost about the shutdown of MeetinVR, I wrote:
Facebook (which had gone to all the trouble and expense of rebranding as Meta during this ridiculous hype cycle) has dropped literally hundreds of millions of dollars into acquiring Oculus and trying to build a business metaverse platform, and failed to even to entice its own employees into using it (let alone anybody else)…
I predict that we are going to see a “metaverse winter,” much like the previous “AI winters,” when the initial promise and hype of the technology hits what the Gartner Group politely calls “the trough of disillusionment.” And I predict we are going to see a lot more shutdown announcements like this throughout 2026.
Well, guess what? Once again, I am late in reporting this, but Meta has finally shut down its Horizons Workrooms product, a social VR platform intended for business use. According to a Road to VR news report by Scott Hayden, Horizon Workroom’s final day was Feb. 16th, 2026.
This is hardly a surprise. As I said up top, I don’t think anybody was using Workrooms. I wrote about the launch of the open beta of Workrooms in August 2021, at a time when Facebook Horizon (as it was then called) was still in closed, invitation-only beta. One neat feature is that it allowed you to bring your physical keyboard into the virtual space via keyboard tracking (this only worked for certain models of keyboard, though). One month later, they announced a collaboration with Zoom, but I don’t know if that went anywhere.
By October 2022, rumours were rumbling, with leaks from internal memos stating that even Meta’s own employees were avoiding the use of Workrooms. Shortly thereafter, The Verge issued a savagely critical evaluation of Workrooms. The product was buggy, the avatars were cartoony, and compared to simpler solutions like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, there just seemed to be too high a cost to entry for its designated use case. Meta finally decided this year to take the ailing dog out back and shoot it. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. Scott Hayden reported:
For existing users, Meta has not announced a direct replacement for Workrooms; the company suggests users look into third-party apps such as Arthur, Microsoft Teams Immersive and Zoom Workplace.
Oh, and Meta has also been shelving projects, and laying off staff in its Reality Labs division, according to Scott’s article and CNBC. So it would appear that our metaverse winter is now in full swing.
But keep in mind that winter is only one season out of four. And winter has its own special beauty, even if it doesn’t seem like there’s very much going on under all that ice and snow.
Yes, we are probably going to see more platforms shut down, like Workrooms, and more companies go out of business (not Meta of course, smaller ones). But those of us who have already been active in the metaverse for many years aren’t going anywhere during these lean, cold times. We’ve found our people, our communities, wherever we happen to meet up, whether it’s a flatscreen virtual world like Second Life or a meetup in social VR like VRChat. We hop from world to world as needed.
Yes, the current marketplace struggles will still impact us all in some way. We can expect moments of panic and chaos (e.g. when Ready Player Me was bought out by Netflix, and thousands of developers had to scramble to replace their avatar systems). But we will hunker down, use the downtime productively, and wait for the next season to arrive.
