In an attempt to expand people’s interest, Meta will now allow creators to sell digital assets in the metaverse.
Meta teamed up with a select number of creators to begin creating and monetizing products they make on Horizon Worlds, Facebook’s free virtual reality video game and its primary focus for building the company’s vision of the metaverse.
“The ability to sell virtual items and access to things inside the worlds is a new part of [the] e-commerce equation overall,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Monday. “We’re rolling this out with just a handful of creators, and we’ll see how it goes. But I imagine that over time we’ll get to roll it out more and more.”
Meta has not said how many creators are in the program or who is included in it.
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The preselected creators could use the new commerce system to sell accessories for an avatar in a fashion-themed world or access to a different part of the world they created, according to a Meta blog post.
However, these items will have limited accessibility. Any items purchased will only work in the worlds where they originated, which will allow creators to accessorize and create products exclusively for their user base.
“What the creators can do as part of building their world, they can attach behaviors that trigger monetization, which means that we actually don’t know all the things they can do to monetize,” Vivek Sharma, Meta’s vice president of Horizon Worlds, told CNET. “That’s exciting, but also, at the same time, we want to do this in a way that will scale eventually to cross worlds into shared spaces and beyond.”
Meta is also taking a 25% cut of all in-world items sold and a 30% platform fee for any sales made on the Meta Quest. Any creator who attempts to sell in-game products on Horizon Worlds will have to give Meta a 47.5% cut of all purchases, a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider.
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Meta’s decision to invest in Horizon Worlds creators is reminiscent of efforts in 2021 by Big Tech companies to begin investing more in creators and influencers after seeing a surge of interest due to the pandemic. Zuckerberg announced in July 2021 that Facebook, before the company was re-branded to Meta, planned to invest more than $1 billion into creators on its various platforms by the end of 2022.
A spokesperson from Meta did not respond to requests for comment from the Washington Examiner.
