In October 2021 Mark Zuckerberg renamed one of the biggest companies in the world after… a concept. Facebook became Meta, because the metaverse was going to be the future of the internet. Billions of dollars a year poured into Reality Labs to prove it.

In 2026 that same company quietly walked away from the metaverse as a strategic imperative.

This is the biggest twist of the whole Meta Wars saga — and ironically, the company that gave our series its name is its main character. Let's look at what actually happened. 🎬

"Make or break" — the memo that predicted the end

In early 2025, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth wrote an internal memo that later leaked: this year would decide whether the company's XR efforts go down in history as "the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure".

A year later the answer arrived — but not the one metaverse fans were hoping for. Meta made an aggressive strategic turn: cuts at Reality Labs, an end to big bets on virtual worlds for meetings and work, and full focus on… glasses.

The important caveat: Meta is not leaving XR. The Quest platform continues and will keep evolving naturally — it's just that nobody is trying to force the metaverse into existence anymore. The difference is between "we are building the new internet" and "we sell good devices people actually want".

Why the glasses won the internal war

The answer is brutally simple: the numbers.

While Quest headsets struggled to grow, smart glasses shipments jumped by more than 110% in the first half of 2025 alone. Meta's Ray-Ban partnership with EssilorLuxottica turned out to be the surprise hit of the entire portfolio — people didn't want to "enter the metaverse"; they wanted a camera, headphones and an AI assistant on their nose, without looking like cyborgs.

In September 2025 Meta took the next step: Ray-Ban Display — its first glasses with a built-in display, controlled by a "neural wristband" that reads micro-movements of the wrist. This is no longer an accessory. It's a prototype of the device Meta believes will replace the phone.

And the roadmap is even more telling: the maker of the waveguides in Meta's glasses already has a production-ready display with a 70° field of view — a step towards the full AR glasses Meta showed as the Orion prototype back in 2024. Quest 4? Pushed out to around 2027, and rumoured to look more like glasses than a headset.

The irony of the war

Remember the scorecard from Episode 1: in 2023 we were all watching the headset clash — Apple vs Meta, spec vs spec.

Three years later both giants reached the same conclusion by different routes: Apple paused Vision Pro and redirected teams to glasses; Meta buried the metaverse and bet the company on Ray-Ban. A war that started over your head will be decided on your nose.

Who is left holding the headset front? Google and Samsung with Galaxy XR — the newcomers who arrived exactly as the veterans pulled back. Whether that's a genius move or a trap is a topic for another episode.

What this means for your business

If you have invested (or plan to invest) in XR solutions, Meta's reversal carries three practical lessons:

Quest isn't dying. The platform remains the most accessible, mass-market headset available — for VR training and event activations it is still the workhorse with the best cost-to-impact ratio.
Don't build on a single platform. If 2025–2026 proved anything, it's that the giants' strategies can flip within months. That's why we build with WebXR where it makes sense — the experience lives in the browser and survives any platform war.
Glasses are coming faster than you think. When Meta, Apple and Samsung all bet on the same form factor at once, it stops being a niche. Brands that experiment early will reap first.

The next front is right there — smart glasses. ⚔️

Part of the Meta Wars series — the chronicle of the war for the next computing platform.