After an initial tease last month, VRChat just announced that its long-awaited in-platform avatar marketplace is live, and that the company has already received (and is now processing) 1000 applications from creators to bring their avies to it.
This is already a crazy number of avatar options to choose from, but company community leader Strasz notes that they're planning to add options to search by category and tag. Most VRC users will probably go window shopping for avatars in social experiences, since it's easy enough to inspect a cool-looking avie to find out what brand they're wearing.
I expect this roll-out will greatly increase VRChat the company's revenue, as avatars are key to expression among its estimated 10 million monthly active users. As noted recently, creators who've already joined the platform's creator economy in its early phase are already making way more money, even after the company takes a 50% revenue cut. As Charles Tupper, Community Manager at VRChat, put it:
I want to remind you that [the 50% cut] is the same as our creator economy system that we have out right now, and people that we bring into the creator economy from off-platform sources like Patreon and Ko-Fi, see anywhere from four to five times the revenue [emph. mine] through VRChat systems, even with the cut. So even with the cut, they are making more money by having a wider band of access. T
That's four to five times the revenue for thousands of creators -- and thousands of new micro-revenue stream for VRChat the company which likely add up to quite a lot!
Good move, for all those years VRChat was behind normal virtual worlds in that aspect with approach "Want something? Go buy it somewhere on the internet, it's your problem"; crude.
Hope they will continue to develop it further than just avatars - moderation and property rights are the issue and it seems, for now, it's done by live moderators on the case by case basis for each uploaded avatar. Obviously this won't scale to the drastically more numerous world items, but looking on VRChat updates for last year I have a growing feeling of a solid teamwork behind all that, they're growing better and better in problem solving.
VRChat stuff is quite often to appear on my youtube feed, with all technical flaws of full body tracking on the budget and face/eye tracking issues and focus on cartoonish anime girls/furries/creatures and all kinds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iPQtq_qzfE
https://youtu.be/VcG_hBYrBwI?list=FLjG0E7R4dKNJOlzwoiElAdQ&t=30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLVc5e7R584
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfJ9H0l-tKU (this one was done without face tracking - just using controllers to trigger facial movements in right moments)
Posted by: Lex4art | Wednesday, June 04, 2025 at 11:38 AM