Meta's Horizon Worlds $50M Creator Fund Yet Another Deep Misunderstanding of How Metaverse Platforms Work

I promised myself I'd stop picking on Meta after last month's "Make Horizon Worlds succeed or get fired" debacle*, but this latest announcement is too painful to keep quiet about:

Meta has made some strides on content by attracting more and more creators to build for the platform and creating some of its own first-party games inside of Horizon Worlds.

Now the company is making another big bet to incentivize creators to build on Horizon Worlds; today it announced a $50 million ‘Creator Fund’ that will pay out to creators of worlds that drive high visits and retention.

If you're an indie developer or studio who needs the work, you should definitely consider applying, but this fund is basically Meta's open admission that Horizon World as a metaverse platform is fundamentally not fun.

Historically, successful metaverse platforms like Rec Room, VRChat, etc. are rich with amazing content created by the user communities themselves which they create for free because they enjoy the very process of creating and enjoying them together as an end in itself.

Paying third parties to create this content not only does not make the underlying platform any more fun, but it will inevitably lead to content that's not optimized for highly social, casual play, where metaverse platforms thrive. I just blogged one such example from VRChat, a community-created volleyball game, again made for free by the users themselves.

All of this is why one of my golden rules for metaverse development is the creation process should be fun and rewarding in itself, and that the platform should not be monetized immediately. You want a large and highly active community on there before thinking about that. Which Horizon Worlds is decidedly not.

Or as Richard Bartle explains it: 

[T]he psychological phenomenon known as the overjustification effect means that if people are doing something for an intrinsic reward and you start giving them extrinsic rewards for it, they lose their intrinsic motivation. Imagine if you were reading a book and were paid for every page you read: after a while, you'd be reading pages because you wanted paying, not because of the content.

 

It's the same with games. If people are playing your game for fun and you start giving them money for playing, they won't find the game so much fun. If fun is what they seek, they'll play another game.

 

So I wouldn't count of this fund saving Horizon Worlds. Though I do hope some out of work game devs benefit from it at least. 

* Oh wait, sorry, that was earlier this month.

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Comments

[Skarredghost]

Well, I think this announcement has also a big problem: it does not directly fund content. If Meta accepted pitches for cool Horizon Worlds, it would have attracted various professional studios that could take the money to commit to make wonderful worlds. But instead, it is just rewarding existing worlds based on the outcome, and no professional will work for free just to MAYBE get some money.