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 of 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, 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 Inc's 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 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, socialize 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.
Analysts such as Constellation Research in the US estimate the economy of the next generation of internet services will be worth $21 trillion by 2030.
Solution providers including Ireland-based Accenture are taking the metaverse very seriously.
During a keynote address at the company's Technology Vision event last month, its CTO Paul Daugherty highlighted what the metaverse is, the trends surrounding it, and the impact it will have.
“It is the time to stake your claim in the metaverse,” he said. “The exponential pace of technology change is going to continue, and the applicability to every part of what you do is going to continue.”
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