Dec 8, 2025

What You Missed in Worlds This Quarter

Is it just us, or did 2025 fly by faster than your prompt bar can spin up an AI-generated mesh? One minute we’re launching our $50 million Meta Horizon creator fund, we blink, and suddenly it’s almost 2026.

It’s a little surreal to think that when we kicked the year off, the Worlds Desktop Editor was still being finetuned for a public launch, generative AI tools were still baking in the oven, and mobile worlds were more of a novelty than the status quo.

Simply put, 2025 has been a whirlwind of progress and opportunities. We’ve made major improvements and we couldn’t be more excited about where the platform is going. Creators are earning real money, thanks to creator competitions and new monetization features with the Meta Horizon Creator Program (MHCP). They’re also reaching bigger audiences with mobile worlds that let players dive into the fun anytime, from nearly anywhere. And last but not least, creators are building more complex, rich, and engaging worlds at a pace that would have been impossible just 12 months ago.

This quarter in particular was brimming with updates. We launched new ways to earn, design, reward players, and show off your worlds across Meta Horizon. There are enhanced creation tools, smoother workflows, bolstered monetization features, and a whole new wave of players discovering the fun of worlds on mobile.

So grab some water and get comfy. Here is everything that dropped this quarter and how it can improve your world design, grow your audience, and boost your earning ability. If you’re busy, jump to a section you want to learn about:

Avatar clothing

Item traits

Avatar items as quest rewards.

Social Following feature

Record features in the Worlds Desktop Editor

Instagram Horizon promo shelf

Build 2D UI with NoesisUI

Expanded NPC voices with ElevenLabs

New creator analytics

World orientation settings

Creator-led migration to Horizon tools

New Ways to Engage Your Audience, Grow, and Earn Money

Avatar Clothing: Build a Brand, Boost Sales and Show Up Everywhere

If we know one thing for certain, it’s that our creator community is always looking for more ways to make money and engage their audience. Avatar clothing does both.

With nearly limitless customization potential, avatar clothing is one of the most fun and creative ways to build your brand across Meta Horizon. You can use unique textures and logos to design items that players can purchase directly inside your world, adding a new revenue stream and a new reason for players to stay locked in.

Here are a few things you should know:

Holiday clothing templates are now available, making it easier to release seasonal content without starting from scratch.

Leverage an easier creation workflow. Meta AI helps generate textures you can fully own, download and edit. You can also upload hand-made textures if you prefer more customization and flexibility.

Reach new audiences. You can opt in to be featured in the Avatar Editor so players can discover your clothing items outside of your world. You can also share storefront links, item links and share your avatar on Instagram Stories. Clothing travels with players across Horizon, so your brand appears wherever they go, as long as they have it equipped.

To start creating and selling avatar clothing, join the MHCP and visit the documentation.

Item Traits (in beta): Give Your Items a Boost

The item traits feature lets you attach custom data to your avatar clothing items so you can create apparel with real in-game benefits and meaning. These benefits can include stat boosts, in-game effects, or world-specific logic that makes your digital goods feel more important and worth obtaining.

With traits, you can:

Increase item value with game-changing attributes

Build deeper, more dynamic worlds

Unlock new monetization approaches by selling enhanced items

Tailor items according to your world

Get started by visiting the documentation.

Avatar Items as Quest Rewards (in beta)

Now you can reward your most dedicated players with portable avatar items that they can use anywhere across Meta Horizon. These items can also include traits, which means your quests can hand out rewards that mean more to your audience.

The benefits of quest reward items are twofold. First, you encourage players to stay more engaged and complete in-world quests. Second, they give players something to show off, but more importantly they provide you with more visibility as players carry their items across the platform.

Currently, you can offer up to two avatar items as quest rewards in any of your worlds that have had at least 100 mobile visitors and 50 hours of total time spent within the last 28 days. To learn more and get started, visit the documentation.

Grow Your Social Following

If you build the best world around but no one sees it, does it really exist? We apologize for our cringey platitudes, but you get the idea. Building a great world is only half the task at hand. The other is growing your audience, and as you create more worlds, it's important to share them on social media to boost visibility.

The new Social Following feature helps you improve discovery by letting you add your Instagram and Horizon profiles directly into your worlds. Visitors can follow you without taking off the headset or switching devices. That means no friction, no lost in-world progress, just more followers.

Here’s a quick look at what you can access with the Social Following feature:

An asset template that streamlines setup

A clean in-world follow panel that makes it easy and intuitive for players to follow you

A privacy-first, standardized way to share your social handles

To get started, visit the documentation.

Record (and Share) Your World with the Worlds Desktop Editor

For what feels like forever, creators have vocalized their need for an easier, faster way to record in-world, high-quality footage. We listened, and now we’re excited to deliver.

Our new camera tool enables you to capture crisp, clean footage using the Worlds Desktop Editor. This feature provides a simple way to capture clips that you can use in quick social teasers, trailers, tutorials, or behind-the-scenes content.

No two worlds are the same. That’s why we designed the tool with customization at its core. Simply put, you can customize almost everything, from camera angles and camera speed to choosing what UI or audio gets captured.

If you need new content for your Reels or posts to look professional, this is the tool for you. Check out best practices and steps to get started by visiting the documentation.

Get a Visibility Lift with the Instagram Horizon Promo Shelf

In case you missed it, we’re still running our Instagram promo shelf experiment through the end of the year. What does this mean? It means your content, if selected to be included, could reach even more people beyond your followers when engagement and spending peak during the holiday season.

High-quality content captured with the camera tool we just covered gives you the best chance of being featured on the promo shelf. If you’d like to be considered for inclusion, submit your video(s) via this form.

Shareable Links: Let Players Find You Anywhere

Have a new weapon that gives your players the upper hand? Or a fresh avatar fit you crafted in a stroke of fashionista genius? You can now share direct links to individual items or full storefronts. These links can be posted on your favorite social platforms, added to bios, marketing emails, or wherever you reach your audience. By making it easier to find specific items and in-world storefronts, you can:

Drive consistent traffic

Boost item discoverability

Grow your playerbase with simple, shareable surfaces

To get started, visit the documentation.

Incentivize Players to Migrate to Mobile

This year, we also started making worlds accessible on Facebook and Instagram as an easy visibility boost for creators and an accessible entry point to worlds for more than three billion active users across the globe.

To help more players make the jump from our family of apps to the Meta Horizon mobile app, we created app migration tools like the Player Migration API. This tool can help you create a seamless experience as people transition between platforms, and enable platform-specific features or rewards.

In general, migrating people from Facebook or Instagram to worlds on the mobile app tends to lead to better engagement rates and retention. Here are some strategic ways you can use the API to incentivize the switch:

Offer exclusive items or XP boosts for users who switch to the mobile app

Let users play on Facebook or Instagram, while highlighting that rewards or in-world progression are mobile only

Reserve specific content, systems or levels for players in the mobile app

To learn more and get started, visit the documentation.

Avatar Posts

Sharing static images of new clothing items is neat, but if you really want to flex your latest digital goods, avatar posts can do the trick. This feature enables you to create short avatar videos wearing your clothing items and post them to Instagram Stories.

In just a few quick steps, you can set an emote, generate a background, and customize your avatar’s look prior to sharing. When people see your Instagram Story, they can even click on a link and go straight to your Horizon profile. It’s a fun, easy way to showcase your work, generate visibility, and build community around your styles. To get started, visit the documentation.

Leaderboards

If your world thrives on competition or racking up points, our World leaderboard gizmo offers a great way to showcase it inside the Meta Horizon mobile app. All you need to do is choose a default leaderboard, mark it as public and customize properties to tailor how it appears to players.

To see how easy it is for yourself, visit the documentation.

Now that we’ve covered the many ways in which we’ve made it easier to grow and succeed as a creator, let's look at how we’re improving the actual world building experience with flexible systems, better tools, and deeper insights.

Enhance World Design And Your Creator Experience

Try customizing new NPC animations

Animation plays a key role in helping non-playable characters (NPCs) feel believable and dynamic. And now with our new set of animation behaviors, creators can make their NPCs even more expressive and responsive.

These new behaviors can be scripted and assigned to NPCs in the Worlds Desktop Editor for everything from a simple thumbs up to action-oriented sequences like swinging a one-handed item. This batch includes more than 25 behaviors that you can start adding today across four key categories: Gestures, Actions, Movement, and Combat.

To explore the animations, head to the Asset Library and select “Avatar Animation,” then filter by “MetaHorizon.” Check out the documentation for tips on integrating animations into your gameplay logic and character systems.

NoesisUI: Performant UI Without the Pain Points

NoesisUI is now integrated into the Worlds Desktop Editor to help you visually design better UI with less coding and faster rendering.

With a robust 2D UI framework, NoesisUI provides:

Rich features for building custom 2D UI

High performance rendering and fluid animations

A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) visual editor for easier iteration

If you want your UI panels to look great, feel intuitive, and perform smoothly, NoesisUI is a solution you don’t want to overlook. To get started, visit the documentation.

Horizon AI Updates: ElevenLabs Voices Arrive

We’ve partnered with ElevenLabs to bring enhanced voices to Meta Horizon. Starting in November, we opened access to a broad set of curated voices that help you create NPCs that sound and feel truly realistic. And later this month, you’ll be able to generate custom voices using text prompts and assign them to your NPCs.

With rich voices, limitless customizations, and high-quality audio, your NPCs can finally sound as imaginative as they look. This will unlock deeper storytelling, more believable conversations, and ultimately deeper immersion.

To learn more, visit the documentation.

New Analytics: Demographics and Traffic Attribution

When it comes to growing your world’s audience, your intuition can only go so far. But with new analytics, you can make more informed, strategic decisions using insights that tell you who visits your world and how they find you.

Demographics: See aggregated info about your players, including age, country, language and gender. This information can help you tailor content, optimize experiences and target the right audience.

Traffic Attribution: Understand where your traffic comes from, whether players are coming to your world from mobile, web, Meta surfaces, or other worlds. With a better look at the source of your traffic, you can plan better promotional strategies, improve player acquisition, and target the right channels.

To learn more about analytics in Worlds, visit the documentation.

World Orientation Settings for Mobile

New world orientation settings now enable you to design worlds specifically for portrait or landscape view on mobile, depending on what fits your gameplay. That means mobile players can jump into your portrait worlds without flipping their phones around.

To learn more, visit the documentation.

Creator Portal to Developer Dashboard Migration

Earlier this quarter, we started migrating the Creator Portal into the Developer Dashboard to provide developers and creators one unified place to manage worlds and apps. All the workflows, tools, monetization features, and world management options you leveraged in the Creator Portal are still available in the Developer Dashboard, with all of the same functionality.

This shift will make it easier for us to deliver improvements across Meta Horizon for creators and developers alike.

Bonus Feature: New Asset Requirements and Creator Competition Highlights

Before you publish your next world or apply that new update you’ve been working on, keep in mind that 9:16, 1:1. and 16:9 preview assets are now required during the publish flow. Strong preview assets can make a huge difference in clicks and engagement, so we’ve also put together best practices and creative guidance that you can find in the documentation.

Last month, we also announced the winners of our Mobile Genre Showdown: Reloaded competition, which saw hundreds of creators build and enter mobile worlds for a chance to take home a share of $2.5 million in total cash prizes. From dinosaur supermarkets to K-pop dance challenges, these worlds flexed creators’ imagination and technical prowess to prove why worlds on the small screen still pack a huge punch.

Check out the winners and runners-up!

Looking Ahead

As we head into 2026, we couldn’t be more excited to see how you use these tools and features to push the limits of your creativity, accelerate your workflow, and optimize your promotional strategies. Every feature we shipped this quarter was designed to give you more control, creative range, and ways to grow your audience and creator business.

If you haven’t already, be sure to join the Meta Horizon Creator Program to unlock all of the latest features and start earning money from what you build. We can’t wait to see what you create next.

Find this content helpful? For more creator news, tips, and success stories, check out our weekly release notes, subscribe to our monthly newsletter and follow us on X and Facebook.

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