Sep 18, 2025

Meta Connect 2025: The Top Four Reasons to Build Worlds for Meta Horizon

Meta Horizon started in VR, and thanks to the innovation and collaborative spirit of the creator community, the platform is evolving beyond headsets and redefining how people connect on the go. With mobile worlds surging this year, worlds are reaching more players and beginning to be integrated with Facebook and Instagram, which reach more than three billion people every month.

Today, Horizon is a platform where creativity and community turn into real opportunities. With new ways to build, better tools to bring your ideas to life, and more ways to earn, it’s never been easier to jump in.

At Meta Connect, we laid out what’s next for creators. If you missed the livestreams, here are the top four reasons to be excited about the future of worlds and why you should start building worlds for Horizon today.

Reason One: Our Best-in-Class Suite of Generative AI Tools is Growing

Whether you’re building fully immersive or mobile-friendly games, generative AI on Meta Horizon has been nothing short of a game-changer.

Our suite of integrated generative AI tools is the most comprehensive in the industry, giving creators the ability to rapidly prototype at a pace that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. With these tools, you can spin up assets, sounds, environments, and even non-playable characters (NPCs) to handle some of the trickiest parts of early world building.

Next, we’re taking things a step further with two brand-new generative AI tools launching later this year.

Create an Avatar with Prompts

Great worlds start with great scenes, and when you add unforgettable characters into the mix, the experiences you create can truly come to life. That’s why we’re expanding our generative AI tooling suite to help you create new types of fully-rigged avatars from simple prompts.

Our NPC generation tool already makes it easy to build embodied and non-embodied human characters, and with these new features, we’re opening the door to far wilder possibilities. You can match the vibe of your world with bipedal characters that push the limits of imagination, whether that means bandana-wearing robots on roller skates, sea-faring pirate gorillas, or anything in between. Here’s how it works:

Type a prompt like “a cyborg robot ninja yeti with red eyes and a red bandana.”

Pick one of four generated options, and the tool will instantly create a 3D mesh that’s rigged, textured, and ready to use out of the box.

Decide if you want the character to live as a non-playable character, or let players embody it by making it available as an avatar for purchase or download.

New generative AI features push the limits of NPC generation with nearly endless character options to fit the theme and style of your world.

Create a World with Prompts

With just a few text prompts, you’ll soon be able to create and share fully built worlds that include game mechanics, environments, and NPCs in minutes. By cutting down on the time required to build and iterate, you get more time and energy to refine the details and experiment with the creative side of building.

In just a few clicks, creators will soon be able to generate complete worlds filled with unique textures, meshes, characters and more in minutes.

Check out the full list of generative AI features along with links to get started below.

AI-Enabled Features Available Now	What It Is
Creator Assistant	AI agent to partner with you on creation and orchestration of tooling and world building
Environment Generation	Creating immersive environments in your world
Style Reference	Allows you to easily generate, save, and reuse specific styles, ensuring consistent results across your creations
Mesh Generation	AI-enabled 3D mesh generation
Texture Generation	Use AI to easily re-texture assets
TypeScript Generation	Create TypeScript code using generative AI
Skybox Generation	Use AI to easily generate the sky for your world
SFX Audio Generation	AI-enabled sound effects generation
Ambient Audio Generation	AI-enabled ambient audio generation
AI Clothing Retexturing tool	Let AI generate new clothing textures
NPCs (Embodied and Non-Embodied)	AI-generated non-playable characters. These are characters that can be created with AI and also use AI to interact with players in a game

Great ideas can strike at any time, and now generative AI makes it easier to turn those sparks into tangible experiences. It’s a faster way to experiment, engage, and create moments that connect people. And soon, those creations will not only function well, but look even better (more on that next).

Reason Two: More Ways to Earn Money From Your Creativity

Avatar Clothing

Earlier this year, we launched a $50 million Creator Fund to invest in our Meta Horizon Creator Program (MHCP) and fuel the community shaping our platform.

Since then, creators have been earning bonuses, selling digital goods, and winning competitions while building real, sustainable businesses in the process. Now, we’re adding another path to the mix for all MHCP members: avatar clothing.

Customizing avatar clothing with unique textures provides creators with a new way to earn and enhance their worlds.

Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, we’re not just aiming to give you more ways to earn — we’re opening up possibilities for what you can create. Avatar clothing does both. You get to flex your style, enhance your world, and sell your designs across worlds and the Avatar Editor, all while players get new ways to express themselves.

Join the MHCP to start creating custom avatar clothing with tools that let you design manually or leverage generative AI for textures. Whether you’re putting out a one-off statement piece or a full collection tied to your world, once someone equips your design, it stays with their avatar wherever they go.

Introducing the Next Creator Competition: Mobile Genre Showdown Reloaded

Beyond avatar clothing, we’re also opening up more ways to earn with our fourth creator competition of the year: Mobile Genre Showdown Reloaded.

Now through October 30, you can join the MHCP and build new mobile worlds in Meta Horizon for a chance to win a share of $2.5 million. Participants are invited to create and design mobile experiences centered around a specific genre, including Simulation, Roleplay, or a genre of your choice.

The top four winners in each genre will each take home $200,000, with another 31 creators sharing $1.7 million across multiple genres. To learn more and enter your world into the competition, review the competition details.

Reason Three: A New Engine to Boost Quality and Depth

At Connect, we pulled back the curtain on the next evolution of world building with the new Meta Horizon Engine. The preview showed off bigger and more beautiful spaces, smoother gameplay, and the kind of rich textures, sharp details, and seamless travel that make everything feel noticeably more alive.

This engine is built for scale and ambition. It supports infinite connected spaces, more realistic physics, and higher player counts, opening the door to deeper experiences that simply weren’t practical with our previous tools, all while delivering better performance.

To help you tap into that potential, we’re building Meta Horizon Studio, a more powerful and stable world building tool designed for next-level creation. With higher capacity that can support deeper, UI-heavy experiences, Horizon Studio puts more creative freedom at your fingertips for both mobile and VR.

If you want to be among the first to explore it when it launches later this year, apply for beta access. And stick around, because next we’re diving into the kinds of experiences the new engine makes possible and what you can build with Horizon Studio.

Reason Four: Worlds Are More Connected Than Ever Before

Even with countless worlds, every galaxy needs a center. That’s the idea behind Horizon Central, a new immersive hub built on our new engine.

We’re making it easier than ever for people to explore, connect, and discover, bringing everything together across three distinct but linked spaces:

Immersive Home is your personal space where you can explore different vistas and get ready to travel to other worlds. With the v81 release, we’re delivering a significant refresh to this space with more areas you can navigate, interact with, and customize.

Horizon Central is the social heart of Worlds, supporting 5X more people in a single space than was previously possible. It’s a lively space where you can shop, play games, and discover new activities across social discovery areas.

Arena is a dedicated space designed for performances and big moments, putting you in the front row for live events.

Horizon Central connects three distinct spaces built to help players connect and explore worlds and events.

Horizon Central introduces new ways for people to discover your creations and start engaging with your worlds and digital goods. This includes Central Shop, an early version of our immersive store experience, where users can explore and acquire digital goods. Stocked primarily with creator-made goods that refresh regularly, it gives players more reasons to drop by and more ways for your work to be noticed.

We’ve already started rolling out Horizon Central to select groups of players, and in the coming weeks we look forward to ramping up the rollout so everyone can experience this new immersive hub in Meta Horizon.

Get More Details with Connect Sessions On Demand

Momentum in Worlds is building, and we’re all-in on giving you more ways to build, grow, and earn. From the launch of Horizon Central and the new Central Shop to generative AI tools and the upcoming Horizon Studio, there’s never been a better time to start creating. If you want to dive deeper into everything we announced, stay tuned for digital sessions coming to the Connect session library and our YouTube playlist soon.

For more of the latest creator news, be sure to check out the weekly release notes and follow us on X and Facebook.

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