Top Second Life Creator is Importing His Avatars into VRChat -- And Successfully Selling Them for 10x the SL Price

What you’re looking at above may be the first sign of a larger trend: This furry avatar for VRChat is now selling on Gumroad for $40. That’s not surprising, given VRChat’s fast-growing userbase. 

What is perhaps surprising is that the very same avatar is selling in Second Life for a tenth of the price. That’s because “Krample”, who has been an SL creator for years (listed in the SL Marketplace as Orange Nova Avatars), is now finding far more success selling his avatar content to the VRChat market.

“I've been making content in Second Life for the past decade or so,” Krample told me last month, “but it's increasingly brutal to be working in an engine that's just so... old. Especially ever since I got a day job working in Unreal, because then I get to have a daily reminder about how much better things could be!”

He declines to discuss his specific day job for the record, but suffice it to say that if you've watched the Super Bowl recently, you've probably seen the visual effects he helped create. 

“So I've just started to port my avatars over to VRChat, as it's a much more modern engine,” he continued. “It helps a lot that people in VRC seem to be willing to pay far more reasonable amounts for the same product, the VRC version of the same avatar costs about ten times as much. Which may sound obscene, but I am just following market rates.”

As evidence of that, he shows me a recent screengrab of other VRChat avatars on Gumroad (below) priced roughly the same.

OK, but how are his VRChat sales doing?

“As of right now, just that single beta in VRC is outperforming my entire SL store, which is a pretty wide array of rather popular products... I don't want to say numbers, but right now, I'm making about 20% more off of VRC, with one product, as opposed to dozens in SL."

When we spoke last month, he was selling several copies or more of his VRChat avatar per day “and climbing.”

“Wow,” I told him, after some quick math, “that sounds like over $1000 USD gross.”

“Yeah, it's about 1500 USD off of a single avatar over the span of... 27 days. Which I'd consider slow for a new release, but again, new platform, so it will take time to build up a customer base and spread the word.”

So is he giving up on Second Life entirely?

“I really don't want to say that I am,” Krample tells me, “but there's another thing that hasn't been talked about.... Making complex content for SL is really, really, really difficult and time-consuming. It takes months upon months to put together an avatar from scratch. There's a vast array of realtime engine features that are missing from SL, and it is sorely felt.”

I doubt he's the only top creator to notice that. More on this -- and what Linden Lab might do to address that -- in a future post.

Comments

[seph]

He's right.

The main difficulty in creating content in Second Life isn't that it's embraced external tools and workflows, but that it hasn't embraced them enough. Those tools and workflows constantly gear towards ease, and the more they do, the more Second Life is a chore to create in and other platforms look desirable.

[Adeon Writer]

One of many. It’s hard to say if this is just part of the “VR Tax” though. People who play VRChat tend to be those who can afford expensive VR gear, and this attitude drives up the average market price of anything else surrounding it.

Or perhaps the ability to actually step into and become an avatar as your actual body in a immersive technology is what increases the perceived value so much?

Either way, Second Life’s marketplace feels the same as Apple’s App Store: you can’t charge what your product is actually worth, because nobody else does, and everyone has decided $3.00 is overpriced.

[Wili Clip]

I am talking from my economist and marketer perspective...

May I suggest to the Orange Nova Avatars creator to lower his price on gumroad a bit. Well don't lower it but maybe sell at discount for some time and see if that increases your sales for VRChat buyers.

I've studied microeconomics so I know it will. Because as you lower the price more people can afford to buy it and they buy it + when releasing a new product you want that as many as possible people have your avatar because then other people see them and buy it too.

Track it for some period of time ;)

I've seen the Shark avatar in Second Life fishing in my Fish Hunt game
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Orange-Nova-Slugger-Shark-V20/8268189

Congrats on being one of the best avatars creator and all the respect to you.

I hope you will stay in Second Life at least with 1 leg. I run a community of several 10s of thousands people and I am trying hard to create some positive pressure that would lead towards some changes in Second Life and re-start the growth.

After all if Second Life wants to keep you as a content creator and all the others content creators that make SL great then Second Life has to have growth in number of users so that you can get more sales. I am very growth oriented myself.

I am a content creator in Second Life as well (but more from progammers & manager side). In 10 years of managing a product in Second Life I've acquired skills in management 1st hand. The morality in SL is low and as Second Life has been acquired by long term assets company there is now belief that LL is no longer going to have major investment for SL innovations.

But in the end of the day the only thing that matters are numbers. And Second Life needs growth in numbers.

I am looking for different ways to help SL get to growth again. I've set it as my challenge + training ground as I am these days studying to become a manager.

We have also set up SL Business Consortium group in Second Life and we're recruiting all the biggest virtual businesses from Second Life are starting to organize meetings for brainstorming, ideas and collaboration to find ways how we could help Second Life to gets to its growth again.

SL virtual businesses - power users as (all content creators and larger businesses in SL) we are. We are not going to go down without a fight. With us Second Life has a fighting chance.

Second Life is 1st virtual world that was entirely built by its user base. The core company LL's goal should have always been to focus on providing the tools, updating them and making it easier for content creators to create content.

There is so much that can still be done with Second Life.

Don't despair JOIN US & lets find a way to make SL grow and get updated! \ O.. O /

[FlameSoulis]

To everyone saying that VRChat is somehow more expensive because of needing better hardware... you do know it runs in Desktop mode, right? It may have VR in the name, but it's optional, and the requirements for it are about on par with Second Life's. I can confirm a Dell laptop from 2013 can run it about as much as it can SL, so cut it out with the "VR Tax" chanting because... there isn't anyway.

To people saying the prices should be lowered, let me explain something that clearly the SL people forgot: You are selling the actual art resources. This includes the models, textures, and templates in most cases, which are required for upload. Second Life content usually involves things being where you get a digital copy of a resource only usable on the platform, and as such the prices are lowered to reflect that.

[SLFurry]

super miss leading topic lol. for this be true, KZK OR DsD would have to done this... AND DsD has... why this guy...didnt do that well in SL compare to other stores/makers... also like to see Flame fighting for VR xd. SL>NeosVR>VRchat