Meta Plans to Launch its Horizon Worlds Platform to the Web

Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth announced in a tweet on Thursday that the company plans to extend its Horizon Worlds social metaverse platform to the web. The platform’s availability on the web would be a significant step forward for the platform, which is now exclusively available on the company’s Quest VR headsets.

Meta VP of Horizon Vivek Sharma told a source this week that the company is working on delivering Horizon to mobile phones later this year and is in “early negotiations” about bringing it to game consoles. Horizon’s web release date is still unknown, and when we asked about it, Meta spokesperson Iska Saric claimed there were “no timing details to share at this time.”

Meta Plans to Launch its Horizon Worlds Platform to the Web

Horizon’s newly-announced fee structure for creators has been criticized, and Boz’s tweet was included in a discussion defending it. On Tuesday, the company told that for Horizon purchases, it would take a 25% cut of the percentage remaining after any platform fees.

As Boz pointed out, this means that Meta would only use 25% for the Horizon web app. However, for platforms with a 30% fee, such as Meta’s own Quest Store, it would take 25% of 70%. That implies Meta will take a whopping 47.5 percent of any transaction made in Horizon on a Quest VR device.

In this regard, Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz said,

Meta has repeatedly taken aim at Apple for charging developers a 30% commission for in-app purchases in the App Store — and has used small businesses and creators as a scapegoat at every turn. 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.

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