Really Boz? You want to start this publicly?
You make exceptions for YouTube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and others to sell/rent movies. You explicitly disallow
@BigscreenVR, while allowing "special partners" that Meta has secretly allowed.
Studios like Paramount, Sony, etc. set the price (ex. $3.99) and the royalty fee, typically between 60-80% of the retail price. This is a low margin business, leaving 0-20-40% for the distributor to pay massive bandwidth/ops costs and hopefully make a tiny profit. This is the movie distribution business.
Every film distributor – YouTube, Amazon, even
@BigscreenVR – follows the exact same price and similar % royalty fees.
YouTube, Amazon do not pay any IAP % cut to Meta and are allowed to do off-platform transactions (ex. credit card or saved payment methods).
@BigscreenVR is not allowed to do that, and was threatened by Meta's legal team (including verbal abuse from Meta employees, but let's ignore that) that if we didn't use IAP and give 30% to Meta, we would be sued/shut down.
Meta's unfriendly developer policies prevent us from experimenting. It's impossible to do any sort of ecommerce, digital goods, crypto etc. experiment in VR. Impossible because Meta won't allow it and the only way to get permission is through "pitch decks."
This is gatekeeping innovation and if I had any power at Meta, I'd ask Meta to unleash creativity and empower developers to create whatever they want without such arcane restrictions.
So go ahead and tell me how you treated us fairly like everybody else?