In Defence of Meta Horizon Worlds

I am one of the five people.

When Meta announced on March 17, 2026, that Horizon Worlds would be removed from Quest VR headsets by June 15 ¹, the reaction from the technology press was predictable. The jokes wrote themselves. Commenters recycled the same memes about legless avatars and empty virtual plazas that had circulated since 2021. TechCrunch described the reversal of the shutdown decision as "a huge relief to, like, five people." ² The dominant narrative was clear: Horizon Worlds was a punchline, and its closure was the overdue delivery of that punchline's payoff.

I am one of those people. And I can tell you that what we built inside Horizon Worlds was not a joke. It was a home.

How I Found the Metaverse

I came across Horizon Worlds by accident at the start of last year, after getting my VR headset. I didn't even know what the Metaverse was. One of the first places I found was the Soapstone Comedy Club, and I fell in love with it immediately.

The Soapstone was founded by comedian Aaron Sorrels — known in the Metaverse as The Unemployed Alcoholic ³ — and it has grown from a simple VR open mic into one of the most vibrant creative communities on any platform, virtual or otherwise. It has been featured by The New York Times and Vice News ⁴. It has hosted professional comedians including Jay Pharoah, Pete Holmes, Natasha Leggero, and Ron Funches in a VR comedy series produced in partnership with Sony Pictures Television ⁵. It has drawn tens of thousands of weekly visitors ⁶. And it did all of this not through corporate mandate, but through the organic, stubborn work of a community that believed in what it was building.

I became a host for a show called Sunday Improv at Soapstone NYC. A typical session for me is logging on half an hour before the show, syncing up with my team, and then running the performance. I also do comedy sketches in VR, so I'm often on my Soundstage world where we have a bunch of film sets the community built together. When people ask me about my fondest memory in Horizon Worlds, I can never pick just one. It's the community itself. It's been like nothing else.

More Than a Game

The easiest way to dismiss Horizon Worlds is to call it a game. I reject that framing entirely. This is not a game to us. It's where we connect with those we love.

That distinction matters. What Horizon Worlds offered, at its best, was something genuinely difficult to replicate: the ability to be physically present with people from entirely different parts of the world, in a shared space, doing things together in real time. Not typing in a chat window. Not watching a stream. Standing on a virtual stage, hearing laughter, reading the room, feeling the particular electricity of a live performance — even if the room was made of polygons and the performers were avatars.

For me, the platform's greatest gift was the opportunity to connect with people from all over the world. You get to understand so many different cultures when you interact with them like this. I met some of my best friends inside the Soapstone. These are not casual acquaintances formed through a shared hobby. These are relationships sustained through weekly collaboration, shared creative work, and the kind of mutual dependence that comes from building and running a live show together.

A Safe Space — Including for Children

One of the most persistent criticisms of Horizon Worlds — and the Metaverse more broadly — is that it is overrun with unsupervised children causing chaos. I have heard this complaint many times, and I think people who repeat it owe themselves the effort of actually looking.

I see so many people writing that the Metaverse is filled with screaming kids running around. To them, I wish they would give it a try to find the actual good spaces in the Metaverse.

The Soapstone operates two worlds. Soapstone NYC is an adults-only venue — a structured, curated comedy club where only adults are allowed, and it's a really cool place. But the second world, Heckler's Bay (formerly Hanalei Bay) ⁷, tells a different and arguably more important story.

Heckler's Bay welcomes younger users, and the kids there are always super polite. But what people don't understand is that the Bay is one of the few places on the internet that is truly a safe space for kids. They can play with their friends and perform on shows, and there is always a bunch of trusted adults there who look out for them. Some of these children may have it really rough at home, so for them to be able to come to this place with adults who care about them and can listen is so important.

In an era when every major social platform is under scrutiny for its failure to protect young users, what the Soapstone community has achieved here is quietly remarkable. Not through algorithmic moderation or AI content filters, but through the old-fashioned mechanism of a community that actually pays attention to its members.

Accessibility and the Social Lives We Don't See

There is another dimension to this story that tends to be invisible in the coverage. Horizon Worlds was, for some users, the only viable social life they had.

The Metaverse is also an important place for adults who may have disabilities or social anxiety. For them, this is a place where they can actually have a social life, and that is so important to mental health.

This is not a peripheral benefit. For people with conditions that make leaving the house difficult or impossible — chronic illness, mobility impairments, agoraphobia, severe social anxiety — virtual reality offers something that no other medium quite matches. Video calls are flat and exhausting. Text chat lacks warmth. But VR places you in a room with other people in a way that activates the social instincts we evolved to respond to: spatial awareness, eye contact, gesture, proximity. It is not a perfect substitute for physical presence, but for those who cannot access physical presence, it is transformative.

To shut down the VR version of Horizon Worlds — the version that provides this embodied sense of presence — and redirect users to a flat mobile app is not a lateral move. It is the removal of the very quality that made the platform meaningful to its most vulnerable users.

The Right Word Is Grief

When people ask whether "grief" is the right word for what we are feeling, I don't hesitate. Absolutely. It feels like the loss of a home.

When the closure was announced, I, like everyone, was devastated. I've invested a lot in the show, and I was really worried about my friends who really need this place. The Soapstone is home to so many people, and everyone feels like they're losing their home.

That Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth partially reversed the decision just two days later — after fans reached out to say they were "heartbroken" ⁸ — is both a testament to the passion of this community and a sobering illustration of how small we are in Meta's eyes. Existing VR worlds will remain accessible for now, but no new content will be developed, no new games will be added, and the company's engineering resources will flow entirely toward mobile ⁹. The reprieve is real, but it is also precarious. Meta has chosen not to demolish a building it has already decided to vacate, because the remaining tenants asked nicely.

What We Lose When We Laugh at the Metaverse

It is perfectly reasonable to criticise Meta's execution of the metaverse vision. The company spent over seventy billion dollars on Reality Labs since 2021 ¹⁰ and never attracted more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users to Horizon Worlds ¹¹. The initial graphics were widely mocked. The corporate pitch was overblown. Much of the criticism is earned.

But there is a difference between criticising a company's strategy and dismissing the lived experience of the people who found something real inside that strategy's most unlikely product. The Soapstone Comedy Club is real. The friendships formed there are real. The children who found safety and belonging in Heckler's Bay are real. The adults who found a social life they could not access any other way are real. I am real.

The dominant media narrative treats Horizon Worlds as a cautionary tale about corporate hubris — a story about money burned and bets lost. That narrative is not wrong, exactly. But it is incomplete. It leaves out the people who were not building a metaverse empire or chasing a stock price, but who were simply showing up every week, doing improv on a virtual stage, looking out for kids, and connecting with friends they would never have met in the physical world.

We deserve better than to be the collateral of someone else's punchline. And our grief — quiet, uncool, easily dismissed — deserves to be taken seriously. Because if the Metaverse taught us anything worth keeping, it is that community can take root in the most unlikely soil. The mistake is not in mourning its loss. The mistake is in pretending there was nothing there to lose.