Meta announced that its Horizon+ game subscription service topped over one million active subscribers.
Reality Labs VP of Content Samantha Ryan revealed the figure in a developer blog post, noting the service now boasts a games catalog of over 100 titles in addition to its rotating dip of monthly games.
Popular titles include Ghosts of Tabor, Job Simulator, Red Matter, Red Matter 2, Cubism, Pistol Whip, Moss, Maestro, Into Black, Racket Club, Demeo Battles, and Asgard’s Wrath 2. You can see the full list here.
Notably, this is the first time Meta has revealed active subscriber numbers for Horizon+, which was previously known as ‘Quest+’ when it first launched in 2023.
Meta’s Q4 2025 earnings didn’t offer much granularity when it comes to Reality Labs revenue, however since Horizon+ costs $8 per month, or $60 per year, this could put its revenue somewhere between $60 – $96 million.
Granted, that’s provided the company isn’t actually counting users of its three-month trial period as ‘active’ members, an offer that automatically comes with purchase of any new Quest 3 and Quest 3S. It also assumes the one million subscriber figure was relatively stable throughout 2025, and didn’t see any dramatic spikes that would otherwise skew that estimation lower.
Additionally, Ryan notes Meta had “a tremendous holiday season that was on par with our 2024 results — all despite the fact that we didn’t launch any new devices for the year.”
Furthermore, Ryan says that total payment volume on the Quest platform remained similar year-over-year in 2025, with in-app purchases making a +13% increase.
Meta announced it’s separating Horizon Worlds from the Quest platform, as the one-time social VR app is going “almost exclusively mobile” moving forward.
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“Our goal remains constant: to empower developers and creators as they build long-term, sustainable businesses,” said Samantha Ryan, VP of Content at Reality Labs. “We used to have a pretty well-defined audience for VR, but as we’ve grown, we’ve attracted new audiences—who want different things—and the onus is on us to make sure that each of these distinct groups can find the apps and games that appeal to them.”
Here, Ryan is referring to evolution of it userbase. In February 2025, the company announced that younger users were helping to push a new emphasis on free-to-play content.
Image courtesy Meta
“That’s why we’re changing our roadmaps to increase your chances for success. We’re explicitly separating our Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform in order to create more space for both products to grow,” Ryan said. “We’re doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile. By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each.”
This largely echoes statements made by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth last month defending layoffs affecting 10 percent of its Reality Labs, wherein he explained that higher costs and a fractured development process led to the decision.
“Having to build everything twice—once for mobile and once for VR—is a tremendous tax on the team. You’d rather grow a giant audience and then work from a position of strength,” Bosworth said.
While Worlds promotion is being removed from Quest’s suggested content feed, at the time of this writing Horizon Worlds is still downloadable from the Horizon Store for Quest. It remains to be seen when Worlds will be decoupled entirely.
My Take
While Meta has never shared concurrent user numbers for Horizon Worlds, one of the key limiters in the beginning was undoubtedly the need for a Quest headset to play. It wasn’t available on anything else, which is fine when you have a addressable concurrent userbase in the multimillions—something even the most popular VR platform can’t claim at this point.
Notably, before Meta released on Android and iOS in late 2023, other social VR platforms had already made strides in the direction of bringing support to mobile, including class leaders VRChat and Rec Room. So, Meta followed suit, and quickly found out that kids with cellphones were spending more time and money in Horizon Worlds than Quest users.
And ultimately, some of this came down to control. Ostensibly hoping to avoid publicly-damaging controversy from the get-go, Meta initially kept a fairly tight leash on user-generated content, including complexity and visual richness of worlds. Even now, user avatars are fairly basic, with the pipeline of customization funneled to purchasable accessories rather than user-generated avatars, like you might see in VRChat.
That said, Horizon Worlds experienced a much slower and rockier start than Meta likely thought it would following its initial release on Quest in 2021. In retrospect, Meta’s more recent decision to mix user-generated Worlds with actual VR apps in the Store feed was probably a last ditch effort to get Quest users finally interested in Worlds—even if by accident.
Scott Myers, Snap’s top executive in charge of Specs, has left the company ahead of the planned release of its consumer AR glasses.
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Myers reportedly left his six-year tenure at the company due to a dispute with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, tech outlet Sources claims, characterizing the dispute as a “blow-up” centered around the company’s strategy.
A Snap spokesperson confirmed Myers’ departure on Reddit, nothing that Specs are still on track for release this year:
“Scott Myers has decided to step down from his role at Snap. We thank him for his contributions and wish him the best in his next chapter. We can’t wait to bring Specs to the world later this year. We remain focused on disciplined execution and long term value creation for our developer partners, community and shareholders.”
Myers came to Snap in 2020 to oversee all aspects of Specs, including hardware, software, product and operations. He previously held senior positions at SpaceX, Apple, and Nokia, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Snap Spectacles (gen 5) | Image courtesy Snap Inc
This comes at a critical moment for Snap. In September 2025, Spiegel noted in an open letter that the company is heading into a make-or-break “crucible moment” in 2026, positioning Specs are an integral part of the company’s future.
“This moment isn’t just about survival. It’s about proving that a different way of building technology, one that deepens friendships and inspires creativity, can succeed in a world that often rewards the opposite,” Spiegel said.
The consumer version of Specs is set to be the company’s sixth generation glasses following the release of its fifth-gen hardware in 2024. As ‘true’ AR glasses (re: not smart glasses like Meta Ray-Ban Display), the device is ostensibly set to frontrun some of Snap’s largest competitors.
My Take
It’s uncertain why Myers left Snap; the company even disputed the “blow-up” narrative with TechCrunch, providing no other reasoning, which makes Myers’ departure an even greater mystery—especially on the eve of the company’s big consumer AR glasses launch.
Speculatively speaking, there is at least one recent sign that could point to trouble brewing in the background. Myer’s departure follows a recent move by the company to form a wholly-owned subsidiary dedicated to Specs.
Snap says the so-called ‘Specs Inc’ subsidiary will primarily allow for “new partnerships and capital flexibility,” including the potential for minority investment. More concretely, Specs Inc also insolates Snap from any potential failure.
Whether that betrays a lack of confidence is unclear, although the top executive who oversaw the release of the fourth and fifth-gen versions—notably the only two with displays and AR capabilities—doesn’t smack of confidence.
Pico announced that it’s showcasing the core OS and platform capabilities of its upcoming XR headset ‘Project Swan’ at next month’s Game Developers Conference (GDC).
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Project Swan is going to be Pico’s next flagship XR headset, the company says in its GDC session description, which is also slated to run PICO OS 6, the next version of the company’s Android-based operating system.
While the company hasn’t expressly said it will also reveal Project Swan’s hardware at GDC in March, Pico says it will provide “an overview of Project Swan’s graphics performance, multimodal interaction system, and developer toolchain, as well as practical guidance on bringing existing apps or games into spatial computing workflows,” which is set to include “concrete examples and live demos.”
Pico 4 Ultra | Image courtesy Pico Interactive
“This session introduces the core OS and platform capabilities that enable developers—from XR specialists to non-XR app, web, and game creators—to build or adapt content for this emerging medium,” Pico says. “It presents a new paradigm for spatial experiences in which games and apps coexist, allowing a primary experience to run alongside companion applications in a shared environment.”
The Information initially reported last summer that Project Swan is set to be a slim and light headset weighing in at around 100 grams, which allegedly features a hybrid design that offloads processing to a tethered compute puck. Other reported features include hand and eye-tracking for input.
Then, in November 2025, Zhenyuan Yang, Vice President of Technology at Pico parent company ByteDance, revealed the headset will house a self-developed chip with a custom microOLED display, the latter of which is said to approach 4,000 PPI—slightly higher than that of Apple Vision Pro’s 3,386 PPI.
Furthermore, Yang said Pico’s microOLED displays reach an average 40 PPD (over 45 at center), and addresses brightness limitations by incorporating microlens (MLA) technology and optical compensation for uniform color and luminance.
We expect to learn more at GDC next month, which takes place March 9th – 13th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.
My Take
Project Swan is slated to mark a significant next step for the company. Pico’s parent company ByteDance ostensibly isn’t throwing money at its XR division like it was before though, so it’s a new game.
Battle lines have shifted since Pico first launched its Pico 4 series headsets in 2022 though. Back then, Pico was nipping at Meta at its peripheral territories in East Asia and Europe, relying on its unique access to the Chinese market, and leaning heavily into enterprise. It also released Pico 4 Ultra in 2024, a direct competitor to Quest 3.
That same year, Apple released Vision Pro, priced at $3,500. A year later, it followed up with an M5-based hardware refresh at the same price point, while Google formally launched Android XR alongside Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset, priced at $1,800—moves that effectively reframed the competitive landscape.
Rather than racing to the bottom, companies are increasingly targeting the high end, as early expectations around mass-market consumer adoption seemed to have faltered, with Meta’s recent pullback from funding first-party Quest content possibly signaling a broader shift in how the industry approaches the consumer XR segment.
That said, I’d expect Project Swan to straddle the prosumer-enterprise segment, as the company’s next flagship probably won’t be cheap enough to make any grand overtures to consumers while simultaneously offering the very same consumer-oriented platform Pico built up over the years, which hosts a wide array of XR games and apps.
To me, this increasingly puts Pico more in competition with visionOS and Android XR, rather than as a direct competitor to Horizon OS. That said, Meta’s upcoming headset could possibly arrive next year, which is reportedly also a slim and light headset tethered to a compute puck, which may put all four—Apple, Google, Meta and Pico—in the same boat.
Apple is reportedly accelerating the development of smart glasses, as the company is ostensibly making a shift toward AI-centric hardware.
According to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is ramping up development of its forthcoming smart glasses, which are slated to head into production as early as December 2026, with public release expected sometime in 2027.
Apple’s smart glasses are being positioned to compete with Meta and EssilorLuxottica’s most recent smart glasses, the report maintains.
While this mostly echoes previous reports from last October, Apple appears to be accelerating development, having recently distributed a broader set of glasses prototypes within its hardware engineering division.
According to an all-hands meeting with employees earlier this month, CEO Tim Cook supposedly also hinted that Apple would be pushing hard into AI devices, noting that the company was working on new “categories of products” centered around AI.
“We’re extremely excited about that,” Cook said in the internal meeting, saying “[t]he world is changing fast.”
Citing people familiar with Apple’s plans, the smart glasses (allegedly codenamed ‘N50’) are said to include two cameras: a high-resolution camera for photos and video, and another dedicated to computer vision tasks. The high quality onboard cameras and overall build quality are expected to set it apart from competing products, the report maintains.
Array of Meta smart glasses | Image courtesy Brad Lynch
Similar to Meta’s audio-only smart glasses though, Apple’s N50 hardware isn’t expected to include a display of any kind, instead relying on cameras, speakers and microphones for things such as phone calls, AI queries, listening to music, and capturing images.
Apple allegedly floated the idea of partnering with eyewear brands—similar to Meta’s partnership with EssilorLuxottica or Google’s partnership with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster—the company seems to have more recently decided on developing in-house designs, which are said to arrive in a variety of sizes and colors.
“Early prototypes of the glasses connect via a cable to a standalone battery pack and an iPhone, but newer versions have the components embedded in the frame,” Bloomberg reports. “The design uses high-end materials, including acrylic elements intended to give the glasses a premium feel. Apple is already discussing launching the device in additional styles over time.”
This comes as Apple is investing more heavily in AI in effort to better compete with Google and OpenAI, which comes part and parcel with a critical redesign of Siri. The report also maintains Apple is working on an AI-powered pendant and AirPods with expanded AI capabilities—all three of which will rely on visual input.
Notably, the report maintains that all three will rely on connection to iPhone. Apple did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment.
Apple Vision Pro just got a new update that brings Foveated Streaming to the headset, essentially the same bandwidth-saving feature Valve is bringing to its upcoming Steam Frame headset.
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As noted by VR supply chain analyst Brad Lynch, foveated streaming has arrived on Vision Pro via the latest visionOS 26.4 beta update, which landed on February 16th.
Much like Valve’s foveated streaming solution for Steam Frame, Apple’s implementation uses Vision Pro’s eye-tracking to optimize the streamed image to serve up the highest quality at the very center of your view, according to recent Apple developer documentation.
If you have an existing virtual reality game, experience, or application built for desktop computers or a cloud server, you can stream it to Apple Vision Pro with the Foveated Streaming framework.
Foveated Streaming allows your endpoint to stream high quality content only where necessary based on information about the approximate region where the person is looking, ensuring performance.
Additionally, Apple notes that on Vision Pro, foveated streaming allows for a sort of hybrid approach to computing: you can display visionOS spatial content alongside streaming content, such as a flight simulator rendering a cockpit using RealityKit while processor-intensive landscapes are streamed from a remote computer to the device.
The key difference is the focus and implementation. Valve seems to be applying Foveated Rendering globally, meaning all Steam apps will benefit out of the box. Valve’s focus is also on local PC streaming, which is done via a direct Wi-Fi 6E connection.
Instead, Vision Pro apps and games need to be specifically integrated with Apple’s version of the technology, with Apple additionally supporting NVIDIA’s CloudXR SDK, which allows developers of existing VR apps created for desktop computers as well as cloud servers to stream to Vision Pro.
My Take
On the face of it, it looks like Apple is matching Valve punch-for-punch with foveated streaming, although I wouldn’t take this as Apple meaningfully looking to compete with the upcoming Steam Frame on the consumer end of things.
The $3,500 Vision Pro M5 refresh likely won’t come down in price anytime soon, and I don’t suspect Apple is trying to get a bunch of PC VR developers onboard to create consumer-facing versions of their apps that will need to be specifically integrated with Vision Pro foveated streaming.
If I were an enterprise user though, I would may be pretty interested in the new update, as this opens up one of the key features Steam Frame is bringing to the table.
Being able to push more compute-intensive apps to a headset they likely already own could stop some companies from justifying a Steam Frame(s) purchase, which Apple is all too happy to oblige—especially as the recent memory and storage crisis has seen components shoot up in price so dramatically, causing Valve to take reassess pricing and release date of Steam Frame.
SlimeVR has launched its next crowdfunding campaign, this time looking to get backers excited about its next-gen ‘Butterfly’ body trackers, which promise to be thinner, lighter, and offer a longer-lasting battery.
SlimeVR’s crowdfunding campaign for the new Butterfly Trackers quickly crossed its $180,000 funding goal when it went live on February 9th, now sitting at over $347,000 from nearly 760 backers.
Much like the original SlimeVR Full-Body Tracker, which attracted more than $9 million in 2021, the IMU-based body tracking solution lets VR users better articulate their avatars without the need of base stations or external sensors of any type. It’s also handy for things like motion capture and VTubing.
Image courtesy SlimeVR
That said, Butterfly Trackers are built using the same tracking technology and the ICM-45686 IMU chip by TDK as the original, something SlimeVR notes also includes the same long drift reset times and tracking quality.
The key innovation however is the inclusion of a custom 2.4 GHz dongle instead of Wi-Fi, which essentially allows the trackers to be smaller, lighter, and have a longer battery life. SlimeVR estimates each tracker can last up to 48 hours on a single charge, which is more than double its original Full-Body Trackers.
And because they’re so thin and light, this also includes a few new methods of attachment, including directly via straps, clips, and even iron-on patches.
Image courtesy SlimeVR
Notably, all SlimeVR trackers are compatible with standalone headsets, including Meta Quest, Pico, or Steam Frame, as well as any headset that uses SteamVR.
The campaign’s lowest backer tier is the ‘Core Set Bundle’, which includes six Butterfly Trackers for $279, which are estimated to ship by Aug 31st, 2026. SlimeVR says the six-unit bundle is enough to track the position and rotation of your hip, knees, and chest, as well as the position (re: not rotation) of your feet.
