Responding to my post on VRChat's emerging new creator economy featuring the video above), longtime reader Martin K. has some provocative thoughts on the sociology of virtual worlds:
One interesting thought that jumped at me in the context of monetization was this:
When your world is Quest-compatible, more kids get in; it's just a fact - an uncomfortable fact, because it's also people who don't have as much money - who can't afford a PC - who get a Quest.
All this is probably true, but one might jump to the conclusion that Quest-users spend less money on microtransactions (on average) because they are younger (on average), and that's probably not true for microtransactions targeting children: as Roblox and many other free-to-play games have shown, children might be quite willing to spend a few dollars regularly on (exploitive) microtransactions. (And that inclination is in addition to the larger number of Quest-users compared to PC-VR users.)
Of course, the offerings have to target children; your typical, over-sexualized Second Life skins probably won't sell well to children.
Which reminds me of the idea that The Big Sort is not only happening in real life but also in virtual worlds with creator economies: specific metaverse-apps with creator economies attract specific audiences.
Martin's referring to the highly influential sociology book arguing that people across the United States have been "sorting" themselves by culture and worldview, to the point where even differing neighborhoods in the same city can hold widely contrary values and opinions.
Martin argues that different kinds of commerce can have the same sorting effect on virtual worlds:
The way this usually works is that a majority of paying consumers determines what the majority of creators offer commercially - other consumers and creators are pushed out of the market.) Roblox and Second Life have had a creator economy long enough to find their specific audiences; VRChat might still be in the process of gravitating towards its future (paying) audience.
And that might be a painful process for the consumers and creators who will be pushed out of the monetized future of VRChat. (As far as I can tell, Rec Room is further ahead in that process and has already lost many engaged creators since they introduced their creator economy.)
That sounds right to me. I've mentioned this before in other contexts, but the arrival of high-end mesh pretty rapidly "sorted" the Second Life economy (and then the broader culture of the virtual world) to be centered on highly-realistic, very beautiful human avatars -- the Malibu-ization of the world.
VRChat, by contrast, focuses its monetization on specific worlds and individual world creators, which will probably exert its own cultural shifts. One common complaint I hear (echoing Martin's point) is hardcore VRChat users with high-end VR rigs wanting to avoid Quest users -- seen as very low-end, "cheap", casual players on the immature side -- to the point where they'll frequent worlds that don't work well (or at all) on Quest headsets.
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