After criticizing the 15%-30% fee Apple charges for certain types of sales and subscriptions in the App Store, Facebook parent Meta Platforms will charge creators around 47.5% on sales of digital assets and experiences made inside the company’s virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds.
The overall charge comprises of 30% 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% cut as its Horizon platform fees, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday.
Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has been a critic of Apple Inc’s app store fees of [up to] 30%, but Meta’s latest move to charge creators nearly half their sales on its own platform has angered many of them.
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.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s Meta Platform’s store. They own it. They should charge whatever rates the market will bear. If they’re charging too much, their store will flop. They can charge whatever they want.
Yes, after criticizing Apple, Zuckerberg is a hypocrite. He fits into Silicon Valley perfectly, he does.
And we would have called it “Horizon Events.”
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Another Facebook mess as usual. Two-faced SOB’s at that company who don’t care about fouling out Democracy. Get off of Facebook and stop buying their crap.
People always like to criticize what Apple is doing and it’s usually because they’re just jealous of how much money Apple is making. Those people should really be complaining about the big pharmaceutical companies and how much they’re charging people for medications necessary for their health and survival. No one is forced to buy anything from Apple to live or to stay healthy.
Zuckerberg is basically living off Facebook subscribers by using their personal data. Facebook hates Apple for trying to give consumers a choice of not being tracked by advertisers, so it’s understandable they don’t want to see Apple getting all the money. I’m sure Zuckerberg thinks a 47.5% cut is fair and reasonable for anything to do with Zuck’s metaverse platform. I’m sure developers will be willing to pay for the honor of being part of Zuck’s metaverse. Everyone thinks money will be flowing like water once you have a place there. It’s so ridiculous to be spending your life in some virtual world, especially any place that’s involved with Facebook.
Reading across multiple sources the 47% appears accurate. However it is a total of 2 separate fees. 30% for using the MetaQuest store (formerly Oculus) and 25% on the remainder (in this case out of 70% which works out to about 17%) for Horizon Worlds. The former cost is the platform, so depending on the platform (e.g. Playstation, mobile, xBox, Switch, etc.) store you eventually use, the cost could vary. Assuming though that the platform fee for some reason is 0%. Meta still stands to receive a 25% cut. Seems rather unreasonable IMO and hopefully they’ll reconsider that part to boost participation in Horizon Worlds. I applaud the idea of allowing other platforms access but that 25% may just cause the entire project to fizzle.