It would definitely be a helpful separation of metrics yeah, though not as massive as it could be, since VRChat uses “Forward” rendering, which the basic approach to means rendering the mesh shading pass again for each light affecting it. If they upgraded to Unity’s URP, that would help a lot, but it would also break a lot of the community’s shaders…
A common way to improve it is using a “Light Loop”, by first collecting all potentially interacting lights and looping through them in a single pass (which URP does), but just implementing this would break existing shaders too… But they could maybe create their own shader conversion process to adapt that. I could definitely see it being worth it if upgrading to URP isn’t in the cards for them.
Apple is perfectly fine with it, so long as the version of the app on their store restricts access to the 18+ content. VRChat is already on IOS, and people can access NSFW content right now technically, but VRC will eventually likely have to implement a NSFW content access check by platform the user is on regardless. This isn’t all the complicated in itself.
As many others have said, this Market isn’t aimed at people looking for commission work of a personalized avatar or wanting to bother with customizing it themselves. That’s what existing stores and creator pages are for. This store is currently meant to serve a casual part of the audience who is open to buying semi-exclusive avatars instead of just the public ones so many others are using, but can’t be bothered enough to be buying from an external store or paying much more to commission a personal model. It servers a middle-ground.
If it’s not for you, it’s not for you, but we can’t act like we know better than the company that has the analytics on all this.
Supporting customization in the way you’re referring is not an easy task… It would require a whole bunch of extra tools to be created in the VRC SDK for Unity that forced those avatar creators to setup their character in specific ways, with animators that take those accessories/customizations into account if the base has existing customization options, and then especially for customization that swaps entire parts of the model like clothing does… the mesh on the modeling side may have to be segmented to support that as well for performance, and even then you’re very limited on what you can do. It’s manual work that people who upload variants of avatars do.
VRC also uses a very outdated Unity renderer that only supports basic instancing, so each of those accessories is going to become a separate full “Draw Call” in VRC’s current renderer. This would make an already bad performance situation potentially much worse, especially on Quest/Mobile platforms. Another problem being on URP would be a huge benefit for, due to its “SRP Batcher” being able to reduce the cost of rendering multiple materials greatly, as long as they use the same shader (textures can even be different).
People uploading customized bases are often merging these accessories/clothes into the base mesh so that it becomes one model, merging relevant textures and adjusting UVs. At least ideally. People who don’t do this are creating Poor or Very Poor avatars.
Because VRC wasn’t built from the ground-up with a customization system in-mind, unlike a game like Second Life, it’s not going to be an easy task to support that kind of system. But I do agree that it would be great if they could move towards allowing the upload of an avatar that is marked as “allowing accessories to be made” that can be uploaded and linked to it. But I think they need to make the hard decision of upgrading their renderer first and getting someone working on a system that could attempt to port existing shaders to it (it’s possible, but it would be a lot of time and effort).