Meta has confirmed that it plans to charge a 47.5% cut on sales of digital assets on its virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds, despite having previously blasted Apple for taking a 30% App Store cut from its own creators.
Meta – the conglomerate formerly known as Facebook – announced on Monday that it was allowing a handful of Horizon Worlds creators to sell virtual assets within the worlds they build, which could one day include NFTs. The announcement did not make any mention of fees.
However, CNBC has since cited a Meta spokesperson as saying that Meta will take an overall cut of as much as 47.5% on each transaction. This will include a 30% “hardware platform fee” for sales made through the Meta Quest store, in which apps and games are offered for the company’s VR headsets. Additional to this, Horizon Worlds is set to charge a 17.5% fee.
Those combined fees charged by Meta on the sales of virtual assets add up to significantly more than Apple takes as a cut from app sales in its App Store. And the move is especially controversial in light of criticisms previously levelled at Apple by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives over that policy. Zuckerberg even said in November that his company would try to help metaverse creators avoid Apple’s App Store fee.
News of the monster Meta cut did not go down well with some commenters in the NFT community.
If Meta wants 47.5% of NFT sales they gotta talk to the IRS because I don’t even have that after taxes 😭
— ThreadGuy.eth 👑 (@notthreadguy) April 13, 2022
Just because you changed your name to Meta doesn’t mean you understand the value of Web3.
47.5% Creator Fees👀
I hate you Facebook.
— TradingFemale.nft (@TradingFemale) April 13, 2022
However, Meta’s Vice President of Horizon – Vivek Sharma – defended the fees, saying to The Verge: “We think it’s a pretty competitive rate in the market. We believe in the other platforms being able to have their share.”