After $80 billion and four years of promises, Meta is pulling the plug on Horizon Worlds VR on June 15 2026.
The CX industry should take a moment to reflect on what it was sold, and what, quietly, it actually built.
Meta announced this week that Horizon Worlds will be removed from the Quest Store by March 31, 2026, with all VR access shutting off entirely on June 15.
The platform will survive in name only, reduced to a mobile app. For a company that staked its corporate identity – and a reported $80 billion – on the metaverse becoming the next great digital frontier, it is a remarkable retreat.
The reaction online has been predictably ruthless. Reddit threads have lit up with a mixture of told-you-so cynicism and genuine frustration from the small but committed community of Quest users who actually showed up.
Meanwhile, the broader tech press has been quick to file this under "hype cycles that didn't survive contact with reality." They're not wrong.
But for the CX and customer service industry specifically, the story is more complicated than a simple failure narrative.
While Meta's virtual social world never came close to delivering on its promises, the technology underpinning it – VR headsets, immersive environments, and avatar-based interaction – found a genuine, quieter home inside the contact center.
Back in February 2022, at the height of the metaverse hype, Gartner Research Vice President Marty Resnick made two predictions that seemed bold even at the time:
- “By 2026, 25% of people will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse for work, shopping, education, social and/or entertainment.”
- "By 2026, 30% of the organizations in the world will have products and services ready for metaverse.”
As we all know, it’s easy to pick holes in things after-the-fact and with hindsight, but there’s no denying that those forecasts turned out to be pretty wide of the mark – at least in the consumer-facing sense Resnick seemed to envisage.
Where VR Actually Made a Difference in CX
The metaverse as a customer-facing service channel never materialized in any meaningful way.
Although Nike built Nikeland on Roblox, Samsung created a virtual replica of its New York flagship on Decentraland, and a handful of luxury retailers experimented with AR try-ons – these were marketing exercises as much as they were genuine service propositions.
For the most part, customers didn't follow brands into virtual worlds with any enthusiasm.
However, where the investment in immersive technology did pay off, was behind the scenes: in the training rooms and onboarding programs of some of the world's largest customer-facing organizations.
Verizon has been running VR-based training for its contact center agents since 2021. The problem they were trying to solve was that traditional role-play exercises couldn't replicate the emotional weight of dealing with a genuinely angry customer.
In a VR environment, agents are confronted by an avatar – a ‘face’ to go with the frustration – and have to practice de-escalation in a way that feels real rather than performative.
Walmart took a broader approach, rolling out VR training at scale across its store network in partnership with Strivr. The program not only targeted de-escalation, but also new technology adoption, compliance, and soft skills, including empathy and customer service.
And the results were impressive.