Highlights –

  • After app store fees, Horizon Worlds will take a 25% cut of any sale.
  • Horizon world will be soon available on mobile phones and possibly on gaming consoles tool as well.

Meta is testing new features within Horizon Worlds, the company’s social Metaverse platform for Quest VR headsets, to allow creators to make money. The initiative will enable a handful of creators to sell virtual items and make money within Horizon Worlds.

While talking to Vidyuu Studios, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared that creator monetization and the Metaverse economy are important as well.

Horizon creators can now sell virtual items and effects in the worlds they created for others to explore. According to Meaghan Fitzgerald, the creators can sell everything from access to a VIP section of their world to virtual items, the product marketing director for Horizon.

With this test of “in-world purchases,” Meta is parallelling Roblox and Rec Room, which are among the other top 3D social platforms that let creators sell items made by them. Roblox has made a huge business from this model, while Rec Room is growing at a faster pace and is prioritizing creator monetization as well.

Meta will be taking its share out of what the creators sell; it’s complex to understand what that cut can be. For Horizon purchases, Meta charges 25% cut of the percentage that’s left after a platform fee.

With platforms charging a 30% fee, like Meta’s own Quest Store for VR titles, creators will get a little over half of the sale price (which means that Meta is charging 25% of 70%).

“We think it’s a pretty competitive rate in the market,” said Vivek Sharma, Meta’s VP of Horizon. He added,  “We believe in the other platforms being able to have their share.” (Even still, Meta has repeatedly called out Apple’s 30% take rate as too aggressive for the iPhone ecosystem and intentionally lowered its rate on mobile for certain in-app purchases.)

Horizon currently doesn’t have advertising beyond a recent Wendy’s-themed world cringely referred to as “Wendyverse.” While the focus is on monetization for creators now, ads “may be an area we want to explore in the future,” said Fitzgerald.

Meta is also working on a “goal-oriented bonus program” to motivate creators to use its tools and build their worlds. These bonuses will not be chargeable and will be paid in full. According to Sharma, they are mainly determined based on the engagement a creator’s world receives.

Creators dealing with in-world purchases and taking creators’ bonuses must stick to the company’s VR conduct policy and prohibited content policy for Horizon Worlds. Creators who don’t follow those rules will be removed from the program, said Fitzgerald.

Talking about Meta’s plan to expand, Sharma said that the company is planning to bring Horizon Worlds to mobile phones later this year and is in “early discussions” about being on game consoles.

“If you imagine what some future metaverse [at] some point down the line [would look like], clearly the ability to sell virtual goods and take them with you from one world to another is going to be an important part of it. But first, there need to be things that people want to buy to get that economy going. So I think that sometimes the stuff that ends up working in these digital products ends up being a little bit different from what you’d expect from the physical world,” Zuckerberg told creators. “So, it requires a lot of experimentation and creativity from the people who are building the worlds and building these experiences and all kinds of different things.”