Meta will charge creators up to 47.5% in fees to sell virtual goods in its metaverse, much higher than the costs Apple charges on its App Store.

For 30% cut goes to Meta via the Oculus platform for every item sold in Horizon Worlds, and 25% of the remaining amount goes to the Meta App Store. That’s more than Apple’s oft-criticized 30% App Store fee, much larger than what NFT traders are accustomed to. For example, in the NFT space, marketplace OpenSea takes a 2.5% cut of each transaction, and creators typically take between 2.5% and 7.5%.

To clarify, the items Meta is selling aren’t nonfungible tokens. Instead, They’re more similar to the skins and animations you could currently buy in games like Fortnite. But the metaverse Meta is building is competing with crypto-native metaverses like Sandbox and Decentraland, where in-world items are owned as NFTs.

Apple has been chastised by Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg for charging developers a 30% fee for in-app purchases made through the App Store. In November, Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook that Meta was making improvements to help metaverse programmers avoid Apple’s App Store tax.

He said: “As we build for the metaverse, we’re focused on unlocking opportunities for creators to make money from their work. Unfortunately, the 30% fees that Apple takes on transactions make it harder to do that, so we’re updating our subscription product so now creators can earn more.”

Following by Insider, A Meta spokesperson confirmed that the math was correct.”If a creator sells an item for $1.00, then the Meta Quest Store fee would be $0.30, and the Horizon Platform fee would be $0.17 (25% of the remainder), leaving $0.53 for the Creator before any applicable taxes,” the spokesperson said.

They continued: “Over time, we plan to bring Horizon Worlds to more platforms, so the platform fee won’t always be going to Meta. As Horizon Worlds rolls out to more platforms like mobile, we expect those platforms to charge their fee. The Horizon Worlds fee, which is 25 percent of the remainder, would be applied after any relevant hardware platform fee has been applied.”

Vivek Sharma, Meta’s VP of Horizon, told 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.”

Meta announced in October last year it was rebranding from Facebook to shift its focus from social media to so-called “metaverse” technology — a future vision of the internet that is accessed through immersive technologies such as VR.

The company said Monday that only a “handful” of creators would be trialing the virtual sales feature for now. A Meta spokesperson declined to give exact numbers when asked by Insider. Meta’s Monday blog said in-world sales would be available to users in the US and Canada aged over 18.

Source: Business Insider