If anything like Gumroad, two options.
Tools like VRCFury, Modular Avatar or Vixen are very different from the tools cited in our guideline update and are not against the rules.
Im curious how this would effect commission based content. Will there be an option for private listings on the store? So one could pay for an avatar that way to access to their content without the need of sending files and any trouble shooting accompanied by it. Wouldn’t something like that eliminate the hassle for people without computers? And any security risks at present time. It may be against TOS and guidelines, I still hear word of many people uploading avatars for others on their account. I think that seems like a valid question and point, correct me if I’m wrong.
I have a few more technical questions about how this will work for both buyers and creators.
Will the avatars in the marketplace will be “Locked in” IE: The creator has to set the avatar and never modify it after it’s in the marketplace, or will they be able to make modifications to the avatar for updated features or fixes?
If updates are allowed, Will these updates be moderated manually as well, requiring a waiting period prior to the avatar being updated for everyone?
Will users be refunded if an avatar is deleted, banned, the creator decides they do not want to sell the avatar anymore, or the creator is banned for some reason?
I would also hope there is a refund option if the creator updates/modifies the avatar, in case they remove a specific thing that the user bought the avatar for.
Thank you for all the questions! We’ve been working on the marketplace for a while, so we hope you’ll enjoy trying it out soon :)
I see a lot of questions in this thread - I’ll answer as many as I can, but please keep in mind that it’ll take us some time to get to all of them.
Our avatar content guidelines currently don’t permit NSFW content on the marketplace. After we have launched the marketplace, please feel free to submit a feature request on Canny!
Does people have access to the files for the avatar if in the future they want to modify or add assets on unity/blender/etc ?
When you buy an avatar on the marketplace, you get access to in in VRChat immediately - no other steps (or the Unity editor) are involved.
If not I don’t really see this being a improvement over public avatars that creators most of the time already make available for you to test in their storefronts.
If you’re familiar with avatar creation, I agree! Working on avatars in Unity is a worthwhile skill to learn.
However, most VRChat users don’t use Unity - and many of them don’t even have a PC! The marketplace will make it easier for users to find high-quality avatars, and to support avatar creators.
Yes! Sellers can list avatars for free after we invite them to our avatar seller pilot program.
Sort of! You can select other users who are using a marketplace avatar. You can try it on locally to see if you enjoy it, or visit the listing to buy it.
Yes! You can improve your avatar and make fixes, though you shouldn’t drastically change to avatar and meet the expectation of existing buyers. (Don’t turn a dolphin avatar into a squid.)
Also, we review updates of marketplace avatars before publishing them!
Yes! Several sellers will list multiple variants of the same avatar. This improves performance while still giving you a lot of options.
Not yet, but we’d love to do it in the future! It’s a popular feature request.
Sellers can unpublish avatars from the marketplace to prevent new users from buying them, but they can’t “take away” avatars you have already bought.
Half of the questions aren’t actually answered here.
Still doesn’t address that there is NO option for providing source files (if a creator wants to), and the official FAQ uses scare language in what seems like an attempt to intimidate creators into not providing source files.
It seems like one of the main focuses here is to limit the activity of the creator community, since it isn’t providing VRChat a profit, and to decrease visibility and weaken the existence of source provided avatars.
I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point the SDK became paid and/or required a license agreement with VRChat, locking creators out of the ecosystem
Will there be a process for creators to update an already published model? For things such as bugfixing or adding requested features.
If there is an update pipeline, I’d be afraid of a user updating their avatar in a way that “Takes away” content.
You absolutely need to maintain the ability for power users to download source files from the first party source (VRChat themselves in this case). Remix culture is a core part of VRChat creativity, especially around avatars, and requiring creators to handle hosting and serving source files themselves will effectively remove that part of the ecosystem from the view of nearly all users. There’s no reason that source files and immediate access cannot coexist alongside each other, with users heavily encouraged to use the immediate access.
This is the main thing I was concerned about with the Marketplace release, and it sucks to see it come true. VRCs greatest triumph is the cultivation of a grassroots creative culture through the smooth transition of “user/consumer” to “creator”. You have the opportunity to make that even smoother by serving source files to authenticated users yourselves, and are wasting it. I want to believe that this isn’t out of a desire to destroy the grassroots culture in favor of a more moneymaking consumer culture, and is simply a design oversight. At the very least, allow creators to upload their source files and choose whether to make those available to purchasers, if the worry is piracy and redistribution.
As they stated in the video (To the best of my understanding)
Creators will be able to offer the files to those who purchase through the avatar marketplace, by letting those users prove their purchase and receive the files externally to VRChat. The avatar marketplace is not really meant for avatar modifications but instead only final products that are non customizable. If you make avatar modifications to avatars you buy, then you likely will not use the avatar marketplace to buy avatars.
You are missreading here i think. What was targeted was what happend with third.com a platform to ease users to install vrchat avatars “simpler” without unity. This is what being mentionned on the “scripts that upload content”.
VRCFury and MA are helper scripts to build the avatar, not upload it.
VRCFury and Vixen are not banned! As far as I know, these tools use the VRChat SDK to upload avatars. They do not upload content on the user’s behalf.
We added a new section to the avatar details page called “Acknowledgements” that allows you to credit other creators. Of course, avatar sellers still need to respect the licensing terms of whatever assets they use. In your example, the seller may need to make a licensing agreement with the original asset creator.
There’s no revenue splitting yet, but we’d love to add that feature! Avatar creation is a collaborative effort, and we’d love to make it easier.
Yes, avatars on the marketplace should respect our guidelines for public avatars.
Sellers can see a transaction history of all purchases, including the names of buyers. (Current Creator Economy sellers already have access to this functionality - it’s not new.)
Fortunately, we review avatars before they get published on the marketplace! Broken avatars are unlikely to get published. So avatars shouldn’t break - but if they do, we should be able to fix it.
We probably won’t catch every issue, so if you find one, please let us know!
No, but that’s a great idea!
When sellers publish an avatar product, it becomes available for purchase on the avatar marketplace for all users.
Avatar creators can continue releasing updates! Improvements, bug fixes, etc.
However, avatar creators can’t completely change an avatar. That would be unfair to existing buyers who expect something different!
Yep! Avatar updates don’t go out immediately - sellers need to wait a bit.
Thank you for asking questions! I hope we can answer all of them, but it’ll take some time. 
I wish I could give you access to the marketplace right now! That would answer some questions. Soon™️
re: source files
This was a design decision based on interviews and discussions with avatar creators! The Avatar Marketplace is designed to target a different audience, one who has no or little interest in using creator tools to have/find/use/etc. an avatar.
You can still use other marketplaces to access or download source files – and if that is you, or your market, we aren’t getting in the way there.
We aren’t about to start locking creators out or by paywalling the SDK! If anything, this is designed to do the opposite: open up entirely new audiences for creators to reach, bringing more creators in to VRChat.
I don’t see myself using this feature if I won’t have acess to the source files and won’t be able to customise the avatar. I think most people especially furries buy avatars to customise them, add their own textures, clothing etc. This also isn’t great for people who make avatar add ons or textures but don’t make full avis as people who buy from the marketplace won’t be able to use their products. I can see this system working but for now no access to sourcefiles is a major thing holding it back.
If you don’t provide source files yourselves, you are effectively destroying that part of the community. Nobody will put in the work to host and build a file distribution platform themselves. You are profiting off the work of a grassroots community that was here before the marketplace, at the very least, give back by enabling the existing remix culture to continue.
You’re also still missing core features like texture remixing that require that remix culture to exist. This smells so badly of an out of touch design process, so I hope the loud feedback from users here counts for something. It seems that your cohort of creators was missing perspective.
Protecting creators and punishing people who try to abuse this system and uploading things that don’t belong to them seems like it would require quite a lot from both VRC and the creators.
Would creators be required to file a DMCA? How does anyone prove that something is theirs and wholly theirs? How does one go about reporting the unlawlful use of assets?
Oh, I misunderstood your question when I answered it the first time! Sorry about that.
No, avatar sellers cannot choose a price of 0 Credits when listing an avatar.
(However, sellers do not need to pay anything to publish avatars on the marketplace.)
This seems like a strange set of decisions. I was really hopeful for a good, on-platform way to buy and sell avatars, accessories, etc, but this is pretty far from what I had in mind.
I don’t see many people in the target demographic (people who have no desire or ability to use Unity) engaging with this when there are thousands upon thousands of avatars available for free in avatar/search worlds.
Meanwhile, features I would consider core to this system are lacking, with Fax saying that Creators can upload multiple versions of an avatar for versions with different accessories or performance ranks. I would much rather see a system where users can purchase accessories, textures, etc that are specifically made for the avatar they had purchased. Given the lack of ability to customize, again, what does this offer to the target demographic that the avatar search worlds doesn’t?
Also, if source files are not available to purchasers at all through this system (something I feel is a mistake, we have to log into VRC in the SDK to do anything anyway, could we not have a package manager that gives us access to the purchases on our account?), VRC needs to provide an API that can be used to automate checking purchases. Other storefronts already have this, usually with a Discord bot that checks a license key to provide access to channels and files.
Right now, as it is laid out in the video, this feels like it’s going to disappoint both the target demographic and the power users, as neither will be able to customize their purchases beyond what comes built-in, with no avenue to do so. It feels like you’re presenting “public avatars, but now you pay for them” and not much more.
IMO an API for purchases is still placing way too much burden on creators and users, just allow download directly using a toggle on the creator side.