The Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor is now publicly available in early access, with asset importing and TypeScript support to build “high-fidelity worlds” with “complex game logic”.
Horizon Worlds is Meta’s “metaverse” platform. Most worlds on it today are made inside VR, using the Touch controllers to manipulate primitive 3D shapes and rig up interactions using a spatial visual scripting system. While this allows anyone with just a Quest to build virtual worlds, the results have been widely and harshly criticized for their simplistic cartoonish appearance.
Since summer 2023, Meta has been providing desktop tools to select game studios, including an internal studio it spun up called Ouro Interactive, to build higher fidelity worlds using traditional 3D asset creation pipelines and textual scripting. These worlds, including Super Rumble and Citadel, now make up some of the top visited and rated destinations on the platform. Last year, Meta started rolling out these advanced desktop creation tools to select Horizon Worlds individual creators in a closed beta.
Now, the Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor is available, in early access, to anyone aged 13 and above in any of the 23 countries where Horizon Worlds is available.
In the US, exclusively for now, the Desktop Editor public beta release also includes generative AI tools. To start, you can generate sound effects, ambient audio, and TypeScript, and Meta plans to roll out new generative AI features later this year, including 3D model and texture generation.
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Meta preview of upcoming Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor model, texture, and animation AI generation.
Meta’s (Limited-Scope) Unity Competitor
According to creators who have been testing the closed beta version, the Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor has an interface resembling a simplified version of game engines like Unity, reminiscent of Apple’s Reality Composer Pro, the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), or the Roblox Creator Hub.
The tool, which currently only runs on Windows, offers the ability to import 3D assets, images, and sound files, place them in a 3D landscape, and implement game logic functionality using TypeScript, an offshoot of JavaScript popular with web developers.
The software also supports creating in-world user interfaces (UIs) for use in VR, web, and mobile, and for creating, animating, and setting up the behavior of simple non-player characters (NPCs).
Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor interface.
As with other similar desktop game creation tools, it supports near-instant testing of your world with one click. You can also send a link to your phone, or open a link in your PC’s web browser, to test it as it will be seen by non-VR players.
With the Desktop Editor, and the company’s continued focus on the Horizon Worlds platform, Meta seems to want to entice individual VR developers (or as it would now say, MR developers) to build their experiences for Horizon Worlds, and use its tools rather than Unity.
That may be appropriate for some developers, especially those with limited experience with full-fledged game engines. For other more traditional game developers though it will be a hard sell, given it would mean being locked into one XR platform, and giving Meta a higher percentage of their earnings. Meta takes 47.5% of transactions within Horizon Worlds, compared to 30% for apps on the store.
Henry Stockdale
To make this a more appealing option, Meta is enabling Horizon Worlds’ in-world monetization features, which let world creators charge for items and experiences, in 18 new countries from Monday: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan, in addition to the currently supported US, UK, and Canada.
Further, Meta is launching a $50 million Meta Horizon Creator Fund to pay creators of “fun and engaging” worlds. Here’s the company’s description of how the money will be distributed:
“Each month, we’ll pay out bonuses from the Creator Fund to the makers of fun and engaging mobile and MR worlds. Bonuses will be tied to worlds’ contributions to the overall ecosystem across time spent, retention, and in-world purchases, so there are a variety of different ways for creators to maximize their earnings.”
