Meta Plans to Take Almost Half of Creator Income in Metaverse Content

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says the “metaverse” is the future, and it will naturally tie into Meta products like social networks and virtual reality. It appears the metaverse will also have high fees, if the company’s own Horizon Worlds is any indication. Meta recently revealed how it will support selling user-created content in the VR experience, and creators will be left with just half the money after Meta’s cut. The future is starting to look like a worse version of the past.

Zuckerberg’s obsession with the idea of the metaverse stretches back years and has no doubt influenced the companies Facebook (now Meta) has acquired and the technologies it has pursued. Virtual reality is a big piece of the puzzle, and Meta is leading the pack with the VR products formerly under the Oculus brand. Horizon Worlds, which launched late last year, is essentially a modern take on experiences like Second Life and VRChat, but with a little more polish.

One of the key features in Horizon Worlds is the ability for players to create virtual goods and sell them for money. In the future, that could mean cryptocurrency, which Facebook has experimented with for several years. For now, though, it’s good old cash money. It’s common for the operator of a platform like the App Store or Google Play Store to take a cut of developer revenue, but there has been increasing pushback on the standard 30 percent rate. Meta is using that as a starting point, but it gets worse.

According to Road to VR, the company has decided that sales in Horizon Worlds will be split 70-30, with Meta taking the smaller cut. However, there’s an additional fee of 25 percent on the remaining amount, bringing the total for Meta to 47.5 percent. Yes, Zuckerberg and co will get almost half of all sales revenue from items sold in Horizon Worlds.

All purchases in Horizon World, and presumably future VR experiences, will be limited to the world in which it was purchased. You’ll also make those purchases with the account info connected to your Facebook/Meta account. So, prices should be shown in your local currency, barring any future move to cryptocurrency, Facebook gold, or whatever else they devise to wring more revenue from each user.

The current selling tools are limited to a small group of creators, and Meta says it will monitor feedback to refine the system. Hopefully, that involves reevaluating the high fees, something Zuckerberg himself has railed against in the past. Although, he was talking about fees on other platforms.

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