By Milena Di Nenno, AGORA Doctoral Candidate on Metaverse and Responsible Business Models, hosted by INNOV-ACTS LTD and pursuing her PhD at Cyprus University of Technology (CUT).
In March 2026, Meta announced that Horizon Worlds, the virtual social platform at the heart of Mark Zuckerberg’s much-publicised bet on the metaverse, would be removed from Quest VR headsets. The company had spent over $70 billion on its Reality Labs division since 2021, the year it changed its name from Facebook to signal its commitment to building the next frontier of the internet. Now, in 2026, that frontier seems to have been abandoned in favour of artificial intelligence.
It would be easy to read Meta’s retreat as proof that the metaverse doesn’t work. But that is probably the wrong lesson to take from it. Several of the questions that should have been asked before Horizon Worlds launched, and before the broader wave of metaverse initiatives that followed, were never properly addressed. Who could actually access these platforms? What would motivate people to create content within them? These questions matter because a metaverse without users, creators, and businesses is just infrastructure. Nobody wants to spend time in an empty virtual world, and nobody wants to build content for one either. Yet they are also the kind of questions that market logic alone rarely incentivises anyone to ask before launch, because the costs of not asking them only become visible later. Asking who benefits, who bears the costs, and whether the thing you are building will actually work for the people it is supposed to serve (before launch, not after) is how you avoid building something expensive that nobody uses because they cannot perceive its value or trust it (Klausing et al., 2024). In the broader literature on digital technologies, this kind of thinking falls under what scholars call digital responsibility (Recker et al., 2025).
Digital responsibility in virtual worlds: what it means for each actor
Digital responsibility is the idea that the organisations that develop, deploy, and use digital technologies have obligations that go beyond legal compliance and consider the broader impact of their decisions on users, on society, and on the people who participate in their ecosystems (Recker et al., 2025; Urban & Plattfaut, 2025). But what does this actually look? It depends on who you are in the ecosystem.
Platform owners, the companies that build and manage the infrastructure on which the virtual experiences of the metaverse are hosted, make decisions that shape everything else in the ecosystem. How they govern participation, protect user data, and set the terms for developers and businesses who build on their platforms has consequences that extend far beyond their own commercial interests. For example, if platforms collect sensitive biometric data (e.g., gaze patterns, emotional responses, physical movements) without transparent policies, users lose confidence in the platform’s safety; or if platforms set developer commission rates so high that creators are pushed towards aggressive monetisation strategies, developers lose the incentive to invest in building quality content (Dwivedi et al., 2023).
Developers who build virtual environments and assets within metaverses carry a different set of responsibilities. They control what users experience, what data gets collected, and how engagement works in practice (Jung et al., 2025). That means being upfront about what is being tracked, not engineering experiences to keep people hooked longer than is actually good for them, and making their monetisation strategies somewhat visible rather than hiding them in the design of the experience (Huang et al., 2023).
Businesses adopting the metaverse for training, customer engagement, or internal collaboration are in a slightly different position when it comes to their responsibility in the metaverse. They are not building the infrastructure or the environments, but are using what others have built. Still, if a company collects behavioural data from customers in a virtual showroom, those customers deserve to know about it. If immersive training tools are introduced solely to cut costs rather than to genuinely develop the workforce, it will have a negative impact on both employees and results. Or if a digital twin simulation delivers efficiency gains by cutting out suppliers who cannot afford the technology to participate, that is worth thinking hard about before celebrating the savings (Lehoux et al., 2021; Paul et al., 2024).
Why does this matter commercially, not just ethically?
The obvious objection is that responsibility costs money. Sometimes it does. But the metaverse failures of the last few years suggest that the opposite might be riskier. Building something nobody trusts or sees enough value in to use is probably more dangerous.
Users who feel a platform genuinely protects their experience tend to stick around and engage more (Nadeem et al., 2025). The same logic applies to developers, those who build for genuine engagement rather than psychological manipulation earn the community trust that holds up over time (Zhang et al., 2024). Businesses that integrate virtual worlds in ways that deliver real value attract the kind of sustained customer and employee engagement that drives long-term returns (Lehoux et al., 2021).
Meta’s Horizon Worlds never found more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users despite years of investment and marketing. But accessing the platform required expensive hardware that most people could not afford or did not see the value in purchasing, offered content that was rarely compelling enough to justify the effort and investment, and never communicated a clear and credible vision for what it was actually for (Marabelli et al., 2025). In hindsight, those were not technical problems. They were the predictable result of not asking the right questions early enough.
What should come next?
The consumer metaverse got most of the attention, but it was never the whole story. Industrial and enterprise applications (e.g., digital twins, immersive training, remote collaboration) have been developing more quietly yet more steadily (World Economic Forum, 2026). With them, the metrics for their potential benefits are easier to measure and to understand. For example, a reduction in the cost of a training programme or the optimisation of a production process are easier to measure than ‘building the future of social interaction.’ And also, investment horizons are longer too. But even here, responsibility considerations ought to be made. Industrial virtual worlds involve large volumes of sensitive data, complex relationships with partners and suppliers, and processes with real consequences for workforces (Luo et al., 2024). The organisations building and adopting these technologies need to ask early and honestly how the benefits and risks will be distributed among everyone involved.
The metaverse hype cycle may be over, yet, in various forms and across various sectors, the metaverse is not going away. The organisations that will build sustainable value from it are likely to be those that treat responsible design not as a constraint to be managed, but as the foundation on which everything else is built.
References:
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