Facebook on 30 Percent Platform Fees: ‘Hold Our Beer’

Jon Swartz, reporting for MarketWatch:

Meta said in a blog post Monday it is allowing a handful of Horizon Worlds creators to sell virtual assets that could eventually include NFTs. Virtual-reality platform Horizon Worlds is considered an integral piece of Meta’s unfolding metaverse. The company said it will take up to 47.5% on each transaction, which includes a “hardware platform fee” of 30% via its Meta Quest Store, as well as a 17.5% cut on Horizon Worlds.

“We think it’s a pretty competitive rate in the market. We believe in the other platforms being able to have their share,” Vivek Sharma, Meta’s vice president of Horizon, told The Verge. [...]

“Meta has repeatedly taken aim at Apple for charging developers a 30% commission for in-app purchases in the App Store — and have used small businesses and creators as a scapegoat at every turn,” Apple spokesman Fred Sainz said in an email to MarketWatch. “Now — Meta seeks to charge those same creators significantly more than any other platform. [Meta’s] announcement lays bare Meta’s hypocrisy. It goes to show that while they seek to use Apple’s platform for free, they happily take from the creators and small businesses that use their own.”

Did Zuckerberg lose a bet to Tim Cook or something? I can’t imagine a better gift to Apple and Google regarding their app store commission fees.

Here’s Zuckerberg all the way back in June 2021:

To help more creators make a living on our platforms, we’re going to keep paid online events, fan subscriptions, badges, and our upcoming independent news products free for creators until 2023. And when we do introduce a revenue share, it will be less than the 30% that Apple and others take.

Here’s Andrew “Boz” Bosworth this weekend, trying out the same lame argument Epic Games has used regarding why they’re purportedly upset about Apple and Google’s 30 percent fees for mobile games but not the 30 percent (or higher!) fees charged by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo for their dedicated game platforms:

Apple takes 30% of software and a significant margin on their devices. They’ve capitalized on their market power to favor their own business interests, which comes at great expense to developers.

Good luck with that argument.

★ Monday, 18 April 2022