As a fresh user that's trying to join the party late I don't feel like I have "the right to vote" but I'd like to share some thoughts as a "soon to be a creator" user:
- Creating a marketplace *this late* in which The Platform takes a 20% cut (before VAT), with an additional 30% going to Steam (why are they even included?!), leaving creators with only 50% before taxes feels disingenuous. This isn't a reasonable participation fee that fosters creation; it's a hefty tax on creators' work
- Nobody wants to block your revenue streams, but this marketplace simply monetizes what creators were already doing for years, both for the community and themselves. Rather than innovating with new type of content or new additional features, you're inserting yourselves as gatekeepers and taxing a thriving ecosystem. The 'fancy avatar browser' functionality should have been a basic feature years ago, not a justification for taking half of creators' earnings now.
- You mentioned "this is just a first step", and you did not emphasize the autonomy of the people who actually create the content beyond your platform. Looking from the outside, it raises concerns you're planning on prohobiting people from creating(and selling) avatars outside of your marketplace or at least making it more difficult as it is today.
- I understand that striking deals with major corporations isn't easy, and payment processing has complexities. However, with your consistent footfall of approximately 50,000 daily users through Steam alone for the last two years (just checked), volume shouldn't be an issue if you genuinely wanted better terms for creators.
- The legal terms reveal creators are clearly not the center of this marketplace: 30,000 minimum credits (~$150) to get any payout, long wait times for payouts, mandatory two-week intervals between payouts, required VRChat Plus subscription(pay us before we pay you?), and complete discretion by VRChat to deny payments or change exchange rates at any time at their discretion. On top of that everything is wrapped in a non-currency token the platform controls and suddenly this looks less like supporting creators and more like *extracting maximum value* from them while *offering minimal services* in return.
- If the marketplace was a *new sub-platform that would create a NEW type of content* it would be different situation but as it stands everyone in the comments shares the fears of monopolisation or simply a parasitic rather than symbiotic relationship with estabilished creators and revenue stream going to VRChat. This is a very risky move because if there's a community likely to abandon a platform over creator rights issues, it's this one and I say that with barely explored world or two! Please think this through!
- You're assuming that marketplace avatars are going to ease out choosing the avatar and will work great as-is but all of the community's voices(and surrounding comments) suggests clearly that even the best avatars will need some form of personalisation in order to make them truly *yours* - which a closed system does not allow for nor it's stated as a plan and we all know you're not about to release a full-feature in-game avatar editor as this is very time consuming and expensive (before we even get to related bugs).