GDC 2025: Insights for Creating, Monetizing and Growing on Meta Horizon Worlds

GDC is well underway and we’ve been delighted to meet with countless developers and creators in person to share and discuss all the exciting developments happening in the Horizon OS ecosystem—including entirely new ways to create and earn revenue on Meta Horizon Worlds.

Last month, we expanded access to the Meta Horizon Creator Program and launched a $50 million creator fund to support creators with monetization opportunities like earning monthly bonuses and winning contests like our $1 million mobile competition. We also launched early access for the Meta Horizon Worlds desktop editor so everyone can start efficiently building high-quality, complex worlds on their PC.

Horizon Worlds offers a unique development path to build quickly, broaden your reach across mobile, mixed reality and web, and get rewarded for your imagination. We’re also doubling down on our investment in mobile worlds by working on mobile-specific optimization features coming soon.

After diving into new possibilities with Horizon Worlds at GDC, we’re excited to share some of the highlights so you can start creating, monetizing and growing on Horizon Worlds.

With Horizon Worlds available across web, mixed reality and mobile, you can reach an even larger audience than ever before, shipping once and getting access to the platform at scale—but that’s not all. We’re also integrating Horizon Worlds access into our family of apps so you can reach roughly 3.3 billion active users. This means that users can explore and enter your world from nearly anywhere via Facebook, with Instagram support coming soon.

The desktop editor is your gateway to unleashing your creativity with the world. Available to creators 13+ everywhere, it features a suite of features that support rapid development and enable you to create nearly all aspects of your world without a physical headset and even preview your worlds with mobile controls.

Here’s how you can leverage it to build out your unique vision:

The desktop editor supports custom model import functionality that allows you to import FBX files made with tools like Blender, Maya and Adobe. You can leverage these assets to give your world a truly unique look and feel that stand out among an increasing number of worlds available to users.

The desktop editor supports TypeScript to help you intuitively script interactive elements in your world using familiar integrated development environments (IDEs) like VS Code. Leveraging TypeScript and robust Horizon APIs enables more complex game logic and mechanics to make it more engaging and rich for users. You can leverage TypeScript for relatively simple tasks such as creating new items, or for more complex use cases like integrating interactive NPCs like skeletons, zombies, animals, and more.

US-based creators can leverage the desktop editor’s suite of generative AI features which help decrease development time, fill technical gaps or even create an entire world from scratch. Our generative AI tools will help you and your team scale world creation by helping increase output, simplify editing, and building even more engaging worlds to attract wider audiences. As of today, the editor supports AI to generate TypeScript, skyboxes, and sound effects and ambient audio.

In the coming months we’ll be launching more generative AI features that can help your worlds feel more unique and engaging by generating 3D meshes, textures, and even leveraging our latest Llama models to power NPCs.

Stay tuned for full GDC sessions on covering the desktop editor coming soon. We’ll also be sharing a panel session where you can learn from builders on how they leverage the power of AI to create unique apps and experiences. To get started with the desktop editor, visit the documentation.

As we mentioned above, we recently launched a $50 million creator fund to ensure that you’re rewarded for joining us on our journey in making Horizon Worlds more fun, engaging and fulfilling.

We’re excited to share that all $50 million will be paid out this year, primarily through our bonus program in addition to contests throughout the year. Currently, we are funding bonuses across four areas:

While bonuses are an effective means of earning through Horizon Worlds, you can also earn revenue through the consumer-driven economy of IWPs. Meta Horizon Creator Program members can start unlocking uncapped earning potential by selling digital items, tokens, levels, powerups, and more. These purchases fall into two categories:

While these purchase concepts aren’t new, they can guide your monetization strategy. For example, if your world is an action-packed shooter, consumables such as weapon power-ups, speed boosts or extra lives may make more sense, at least initially while your user base grows. Once you’ve established a strong user base, you could sell battle passes that reward progression and include durable items like rare weapons or vehicles.

We look forward to offering a variety of competitions for creators to win cash prizes throughout the year, and we’re excited to kick things off with the ‘Mobile Genre Showdown,’ our $1 million mobile world competition.

Open now through May 8, 2025, this competition is open to all Meta Horizon Creator Program Members and will reward 30 creators, including $100,000 for the top five winners. You can learn more about the competition details, prizes and how to enter here.

With more ways to build and earn, now is the time to capitalize on the creator fund and unlock scalable monetization on mobile. To get started, join the Meta Horizon Creator Program and visit the monetization documentation.

Horizon Worlds provides creators with a suite of analytics in the Creator Portal that provide key metrics around player engagement like retention, visits and timespent. We also have built-in libraries and asset bundles that allow you to customize in-world metrics that are specific to your game (such as which areas visitors are spending time in and which weapons players are picking up most often). More analytics tools are landing every month with key capabilities like platform benchmarking, 3D heatmaps, and A/B experimentation for world cover photos launching shortly.

While creating, you can leverage the desktop editor’s advanced analytics tools to track performance and identify areas for improvement. These tools provide detailed data on how your world’s scripts, physics and audio impact hardware CPU and GPU.

The three main areas where analytics come in handy are iteration, growth and monitoring. Different metrics will become more important depending on where you are in your development cycle.

When your world launches, looking at retention can provide a good indication on long term engagement and success. If you notice that retention across most users drops off consistently after a certain duration, it may be beneficial to iterate on your core game loop to make it more compelling.

With so many worlds to explore, users may world-hop until they find something that piques their interest. That’s why “Sustained Visit Rate” can come in handy. This metric measures what percentage of users stay in your world for longer than five minutes and can provide a reliable baseline to determine if your world has a strong hook.

During the iteration phase, it’s also important to benchmark monetization effectiveness via funnel conversion rate and monetization per user. Working backwards from your monetization targets can help determine how much each user needs to spend to meet your goals.

Even with early feedback and testing, it can be difficult to determine what mechanics or types of gameplay users will gravitate towards. That’s why the iteration phase is key for gathering insights on user behavior and making rapid adjustments to develop a more compelling and effective experience. Identifying repeated activities that users take or items they repeatedly spend on can provide a blueprint for future iterations that lean into the strongest aspects of your world.

The growth phase is categorized by increasing the number of users in your marketing funnel. During this period it’s important to look at “growth accounting” metrics, which indicate how many users are new, retained, churned or resurrected.

Visit-through rate also plays a vital role during the growth phase, revealing how effective your world is at getting users to click and enter it. If your visit-through rate is lower than expected, it may mean that your creative assets could be stronger, or your description needs to be finetuned to better convey your world’s appeal.

While monitoring is last on this list, we recommend monitoring during each phase of your world’s lifecycle. Several performance metrics are included in the Creator Portal World Insights page such as crash rate and FPS so you can monitor how your world is performing with users. Soon, we’ll be launching a feature that provides automated alerts in the event that one of your key metrics experiences a drop off. Consistent monitoring enables you to proactively mitigate bugs, identify emerging opportunities and determine if your strategy is effective.

In-content analytics are specific to your world and provide you with mechanisms to drive other engagement and retention metrics. In-content analytics are available for all creators with our analytics tooling and include categories of genre-specific metrics such as area analytics, heat maps, progression analytics, shooter analytics and more. The more granular you can get with your metrics, the better equipped you’ll be to make strategically beneficial changes and determine what parts of your content resonate with users.

Be sure to keep an eye out for our Horizon Worlds analytics session from GDC coming soon on-demand to dive deeper into setting goals and how to determine good candidates for metrics to operationalize on, including using J-statistic to determine participation rates between retained and churned users.

With more platforms to publish to, easier and faster ways to build and more ways to earn, there’s never been a better time to start creating for Horizon Worlds. To unlock all of the opportunities at your disposal, join the Meta Horizon Creator Program today. We can’t wait to see how you captivate and engage audiences with your worlds!

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