Meta testing tools to let people sell virtual goods in Horizon Worlds

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to allow people to buy and sell virtual goods and services, with real money, in the metavers

The tech billionaire said Monday that his company is testing new tools that will allow creators to make money with things that make them only exist in the virtual world. Zuckerberg believes the initiative will stimulate creativity and enable people with digital minds to make a living in the augmented reality and connected 3D virtual environments that make up the metavers.

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“The metavers, by nature not being limited by physical space, will bring a new level of creativity and open up new opportunities for the next generation of creators and businesses to pursue their passions and create livelihoods,” Zuckerberg said in a recorded video. virtual reality and blog entry on Monday. “Creators and entrepreneurs will have more freedom to find a business model that works for them.”

At the moment, only a handful of users will be able to sell what they have created. But Zuckerberg hopes to make similar opportunities available to all creators.

What’s for sale?

So what can you buy at Meta’s Horizon Worlds, the virtual video game that users access through the company Oculus headphones? Zuckerberg said users will be able to buy products such as plug-in fashion accessories, while users will be able to spend money to access a new or restricted part of a particular virtual world built in Horizon Worlds. Meta will also pay selected creators if they build very popular worlds that are visited frequently.

“For now, in this limited test, creators will be rewarded for building worlds that attract most of their time, but over time we can evolve these goals, for example, to encourage creators to adopt new tools or functions that we implement “, Meta. he said in a statement.

Lots of trade it is already occurring in other corners of the metavers. For example, rapper Snoop Dogg owns virtual land in The SandBox, the virtual world version of Microsoft Windows. His purchase caused a fan to shell out $ 450,000 to buy a virtual plot next to him, according to a report by Decrypt, a crypto news site.

Zuckerberg wants users to be able to make transactions similar to Horizon Worlds, though he notes that the company will have to experiment before doing well.

“Clearly, the ability to sell virtual goods and be able to take them with you from one world to another will be an important part of that. But first there has to be things that people want to buy to get that economy going.” , he said. “And I think the things that end up working on these digital products end up being a little different than you’d expect from the physical world. So it requires a lot of experimentation and creativity.”