When a biological ecosystem starts to collapse, organisms tend to drop out one by one, faster than your flaky friends at your birthday party. Unfortunately, the same is true of virtual hubs right now.

Over the last few years, a string of immersive platforms has quietly shut down as dwindling player numbers and economic pressures have broken funding models. AltSpaceVR disappeared in March 2023. Rec Room has announced it will close in June 2026. And the VR version of Meta Horizon Worlds was announced for closure, before a last-minute reversal bought it a little more time. (If you listen carefully, you may hear the whistle of the guillotine swinging).

The trouble extends beyond VR headsets, too. Epic Games laid off around 1,000 people, largely because Fortnite's growth had stalled. This is significant. Fortnite, one of the biggest games on the planet, the one every publisher has spent years trying to replicate… was struggling to grow. It is the lucrative, money-dripping pie that everyone sought after, picking up crumbs during the scramble. So much so that Sony tried to chase that model with a hard pivot toward multiplayer games, then quietly slowed down after Concord failed.

It’s not all bad news. Roblox is the obvious counterexample, and its success comes from a specific structural advantage: a creator ecosystem that produces content for free. Those creators build careers off the back of it, and the platform keeps going as a result. The strategy is similar to TikTok; let an army of young people make content for free, and let the platform grow via networking effects. The strategy works, as the platform hit 47mn concurrent players in 2025. It’s incredible what free talent can do.

So the problem is beyond VR. Across the board, most virtual hubs are shrinking. Players have stopped attending virtual concerts and conducting virtual meetings. They've moved on to other things (hello YouTube). So what happened?

On the VR side, there's been a consistent pattern. Beyond the committed enthusiasts who genuinely love the technology, the wider market just hasn't materialised as expected since 2021. Meta itself has noted that the number of Quest owners who continue using their headset long-term drops off after purchase. You can shift millions of VR headsets; but if player numbers drop off, then it’s much harder to monetise them over time.

But the bigger issue, in my view, is the astronomical costs of running these platforms. Tim Sweeney has said repeatedly that running Fortnite is one of the most expensive things Epic does, even accounting for the revenue it generates. “We're spending significantly more than we're making,” he said in a recent post. Reports differ, but Fortnite generates billions in revenue while costing billions to run. The Fortnite pie has a paper-thin crust.

What does all of this tell us, and what’s next? Well apart from Roblox, the era of the “behemoth platform” is over. In my view, the business case for building and maintaining a single massive virtual world — whether in VR or not — has proven weak. VR still has genuine traction in areas like training (and I have a soft spot for VR films), but as a social destination it hasn't delivered. And as a virtual hub for players to play and hang, the economic case has proven to be incredibly hard to validate.

What comes may look less like a singular hub and more like the internet itself. Like real life, the connections will be more scattered, ad hoc, and woven into life rather than separate from it. That's part of why smart glasses have generated real excitement; they meet people where they already are. They complement the smartphone rather than replacing it, and they integrate with real life rather than asking users to opt out of it. I am confident that this is a stronger use case than locking away in an immersive space.

Well, maybe.

That might not happen. We may see smart glasses fall on its face, similar to other “exciting” technologies of the past. But the real tests will come this and next year. (I do not trust statistics on this today, as it’s all hypothetical still, with few proven products that match the vision of what users expect).

We'll see a lot more smart glasses over the next year or two, and I'll be watching closely to see whether the form factor actually matches how people want to live. Glasses can act as a universal complement, like ketchup. If it does, the adoption curve could look less like a flat line and more like a hockey stick. Virtual hubs are fading… but the desire to connect hasn't gone anywhere.

Note: The Immersive Wire is run by Tom Ffiske, who also works at Accenture. The contents of the newsletter should not be regarded as Accenture’s views.

All spelling mistakes are deliberate, actually.