Facebook parent Meta Platforms will charge creators around 47.5 percent on sales of digital assets and experiences made inside the company's virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds.
The overall charge comprises a 30 percent hardware platform fee for sales made through Meta Quest Store, where it sells apps and games meant for its virtual reality headsets, and a further 17.5 percent cut as its Horizon platform fees, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday.
On Monday (local time), the tech giant said it would start testing tools for creators to sell digital assets and in turn make money on Horizon Worlds, a key part of its plan for creating a metaverse.
Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has been a critic of Apple app store fees of 30 percent, but Meta's latest move to charge creators nearly half their sales on its own platform has angered many of them.
"The future of work is giving Meta 47.5 percent of your salary, apparently," one wrote.
"Crazy. The reality is that this will onboard millions to the metaverse world, NFT’s and crypto. And then there’ll be a platform mass exodus after onboarding when they realise 47.5 percent is asinine and they don’t need them to be successful," another tweeted.
The Facebook parent company, which changed its name to Meta last year, has invested heavily in virtual and augmented reality to reflect its new bet on the metaverse, a futuristic idea of a network of virtual environments accessed via different devices where users can work, socialise and play.
Meta's Horizon Worlds, an expansive VR social platform, and Horizon Venues, which is focused on virtual events, are early iterations of metaverse-like spaces.
Meanwhile The Verge has reported that CEO Zuckerberg wants the company's augmented reality (AR) glasses to be an "iPhone moment".
According to the website, the first version of the glasses, known as Project Nazare, is designed to work without a mobile phone.
Instead a wireless, phone-shaped device will help deliver the computing power the glasses require to operate
"A marquee feature will be the ability to communicate and interact with holograms of other people through the glasses, which Zuckerberg believes will, over time, provide people with a more immersive, compelling experience than the video calling that exists today," the website reported.
However, despite spending billions of dollars on developing the glasses, internally the company expects to sell only tens of thousands of the device, with decisions yet to be made on whether the company will subsidise the cost of the hardware to encourage buyers.
Newshub / Reuters
