Tuesday, 25 June, 2024 UTC
Summary
Meta's Horizon Worlds "metaverse" platform is finally rolling out to all countries where Quest headsets are sold.
Currently Horizon Worlds is only available in the USA, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Ireland, and Iceland. Now the platform is coming to the remaining Quest supported countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, South Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan.
Meta says this "rollout" will begin this week and take a "few months" to complete, so it could be quite a while before users in these new countries actually get access.
The app is restricted to users 13 and above in most countries except for Spain and South Korea, where the minimum age is 14.
Horizon Graphics Overhaul Debuts With FPS From New Studio
Meta started a new studio to build Horizon Worlds games with early access to model & texture importing. Its first title is a shooter called Super Rumble, out now.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
Over the past year Horizon Worlds has gone through significant changes that make it a very different platform compared to a few years ago.
Originally all its worlds were created inside VR using primitive shapes and an in-VR visual scripting system, but now the leading worlds are built by professional game studios using traditional 3D asset creation pipelines and scripting.
Some worlds are now also available on phones via the Meta Quest app, and on the web too.
The platform's avatars even got legs, solving the problem it was previously widely ridiculed for.
Meta Launches Horizon Mobile & Web Beta, See Footage Here
Meta has opened a closed beta of Horizon Worlds on smartphones, and the first footage has emerged. The mobile avatars have legs.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
By February Horizon Worlds had become one of the top 10 most used apps on the Quest Store in the US, and it remains in this ranking. That's a vast improvement for a platform that back in 2022 by Meta's own admission had "not found product market fit", and a global rollout could accelerate this newfound success.
Still, despite being in the top 10 the platform remains less notably popular than its primary competitors Rec Room, VRChat, and Roblox, even with Meta's efforts to integrate it into the Quest system software.