Meta plans to bring its Metaverse social platform Horizon Worlds online, said Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Meta’s CTO in a tweet on Thursday. Being available online would mean a big expansion for the platform, which is currently only available on their Quest VR headsets.
A web version isn’t the only one in the works – this week Meta VP of Horizon Vivek Sharma told The Verge they’re working on bringing Horizon to mobile later this year and are in “early discussions” about to bring it to game consoles. However, it’s still unclear when exactly Horizon will expand to the web, and meta spokeswoman Iska Saric said there were “no timing details to share at this point” when we inquired.
Boz’s tweet was included in a thread Defending Horizon’s newly announced fee structure for creators, which has come under some scrutiny. On Tuesday, Meta announced that Horizon purchases would require a 25 percent cut of the remaining percentage after any platform fees.
For the Horizon web app, that means Meta would only take 25 percent, as Boz pointed out. But for 30 percent fee platforms, like Meta’s own Quest Store, there would be 25 percent out of 70 percent. This means that for goods sold in Horizon on a Quest VR device, Meta takes on a staggering 47.5 percent of every transaction.
When the web version of Horizon is launched, the Horizon platform fee is only 25% – a much lower rate compared to other similar world-building platforms.
— Boz (@boztank) April 14, 2022
Boz claims the rate is lower than some other “world-building platforms” — a shot that seems partly aimed at Roblox, which has also been criticized for how it pays developers. In a chart showing “estimated usage of every dollar spent on Roblox,” Roblox states that it only pays developers 28.1 percent of every dollar, meaning Meta’s Horizon cut, even with Quest headset purchases, seems to be lower than what Roblox assumes its platform. And as VR expands to platforms like mobile and the web, Meta will attack Roblox head-on, so this may not be the last time Meta throws some harsh words at Roblox.
Meta has also often criticized Apple for taking a 30 percent cut on many App Store transactions — Boz did also in his thread on Thursday — and Apple had its own sharp language for meta. “Meta has repeatedly targeted Apple for charging developers a 30% commission for in-app purchases on the App Store — and has used small businesses and developers as scapegoats at every turn,” Apple spokesman Fred Sainz said to MarketWatch. “Well – Meta tries to charge the same creators significantly more than any other platform. [Meta’s] Announcement exposes Meta’s hypocrisy. It shows that while they’re trying to use Apple’s platform for free, they’re happy to benefit from the developers and small businesses using their own.”