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?
Does the SL Community Care Enough to Clamor for Well-Optimized Mesh?
Pictured: Slink Redux body bundle, a rare example of popular SL mesh avatar content that's also well-optimized
Last Friday I wrote about the new Black Dragon viewer update which checks whether a mesh avatar is well-optimized or not. Reader "Down With Underboob" (LOL) tried it out in SL over the weekend, to see how much mesh content was poorly optimized, and came away shocked:
I'd say it's the responsibility of the many SL bloggers and YouTubers to report on the complexity/triangle counts of the content they feature, warning them that high poly items will likely cause lag. Failing to do so would be like a real life fashion reporter failing to mention the clothing items they're recommending are made of toxic materials.
As to her request for optimized mesh to try out, Slink is among the few mesh body creators well-known for optimization.
But is there a market for good optimization in general? Reader "Seph" thinks not so:
Continue reading "Does the SL Community Care Enough to Clamor for Well-Optimized Mesh?" »
Posted on Monday, November 23, 2020 at 03:58 PM in Comment of the Week, Economics of SL, SL Mesh | Permalink | Comments (11)
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