What mechanisms are in place to prevent abuse? e.g. people uploading and selling avatars they do not own the rights to.
Counterpoint: Competition is a good thing. A VERY good thing. Preventing that is questionable at best and monopolistic at worst.
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im an avatar creator, and a long long time vrchat player, i stuck with you guys through all that EAC fiasco everyone got all ruffled over. ive grown along side your software since the only ‘base’ available was the nanachi. but this. i do not understand or see a good reason to do this. maybe yall have something crazy up your sleeve but this just seems like paywalling public avatars. if the buyer cant at all ever edit anything on the avatar and is subject to the creators edits, its just a public with a paywall. and i do not understand how thats beneficial to anyone but your wallets. expecially with the 50/50 cut its not helping creators either.
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I think this line of “much easier for users that simply want to buy a high-quality avatar” is flawed, in that you’re quantifying a subjective thing. To one user, what to them may be low-quality may be high-quality to others, or vice-versa. Additionally, many public avatars already likely meet that subjective ‘high-quality’ standard, so what do you (as in VRC) mean by this? What’s the difference between a really high quality public avatar, and a paid for one on the market place? As far as I can tell, with the way this system is currently, there is no difference other than one of them you have to pay for. Plus, it wouldn’t provide that same sense of ‘ownership’ that customizing your own avatar would have. You couldn’t definitely say it’s ‘you’ or ‘this is mine and mine alone’ because other people will have that same exact version of the avatar, they can just use toggles and blendshapes to change it, but that’s it. To think of an extreme example, let’s say someone sees you in that avatar, buys it on the spot, and sets the customization of that avatar to be exactly the same as yours. That’d feel a little weird, wouldn’t it? This is prevented with normal public avatars to a degree with being able to disable cloning, but what steps would be taken to prevent this in this system?
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So then your previous comment should be removed, no? It’s spreading misinformation and basically coming across as “I don’t think artists deserve compensation for the work they do, I just want everything free”.
Nowhere in this announcement did it say “Avatar Search Worlds being Removed”. Avatars can still be uploaded as Public and you will find those in your avatar search, free of charge…
You’re not the target user for this announcement. That’s okay.
Part of the reason you see many quality avatars in the avatar search is because creators are forced to make their uploads “Public” to be able to make them cloneable to clients. The Avatar search worlds scrape the avatar database and list everything, regardless of the desires of the creator and the buyer who likely would have preferred it not get shared around.
The only way around this right now is for a creator to upload it to that person’s account themselves or the buyer being willing to try and use the SDK to do it themselves. (And even then, sometimes buyers want to be able to share their avatar with some friends, but don’t want it spreading around, so the existing system doesn’t have a solution apart from personal uploads).
It also makes it more complicated for a creator to maintain an avatar for people.
This announcement is hopefully a stepping stone to solving that issue. Considering the announcement of this system means that the backend now has “approved users” for avatars, that can hopefully extend to a manual system of adding approved users for avatars not put on the marketplace… Hopefully they will talk about this.
I’d disagree about it spreading ‘misinformation.’ Gonna be honest, I hold the same points they have, except applied to the angle of looking at it as a way of providing paid avatars, rather than viewing it in a positive light. (This sentence is worded poorly and I don’t know how to word it better.) It just feels like “Why?” with the way the system is set up. As for your reply to my post, I’m not talking about Avatar Search worlds, that’s a completely different subject, please don’t put words in my mouth. I’m talking about just public avatars. There are creators who have public avatar worlds that house some absolutely (in my opinon) spectacular avatars. As far as the issue of designated sharing, yeah, that seems more like a lack of a specific feature that would be like, ‘clone only from avatar creator.’ So that way if someone who isn’t the avatar creator has the avatar on, you can’t clone it off them, no matter what.
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Yeah, I’ll admit fault. Considering all of the above, this system is pretty great. I’ll also admit that I am not the target audience for this service, since I now understand more well what the purpose of the system is. It’s just a better way for things to be done on the commission side. Though, in defense of the original post, while what I said was wrong, it came from the perspective of someone who has not and likely will not spend money on VRChat. I talked to a friend and they helped inform me better on the system. The bottom line? I messed up.
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I will call out your response, though. One, I never said I wanted everything free. That’s simply not something that came out of my mouth. And neither did I imply that they were going to remove Avatar Search worlds. I understand disagreeing with the points I made, but you don’t need to put words into my mouth to make a good point.
Edit: I don’t mean to imply that you did this maliciously, I want to clarify! I believe that you have good intentions with your input.
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I did not put words in your mouth, I specifically said it “comes across as”, as in, the feeling it gives off.
And for avatar worlds, while you didn’t say that explicitly, it sounded like you had the assumption this was replacing that entirely, that’s why I mentioned it.
All good though. We talk to clarify, it’s not a bad thing!
This is a good discussion! Not sure where in my mind the disconnect was between “comes across as” and “this is exactly what you believe” is, but I probably should focus on that. And to clarify my thoughts on avatar search worlds, I didn’t mean to imply that they were going away, but I now see that you could have gathered that I think that. I’m sorry for that confusion.
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And while I still have a few concerns over how the system operates, I’m mostly content with it existing.
So what Am I getting paid in vrc credits or actual money for my avatar? Or is VRC taking a cut of my revenue and hard work and dedication for my time? Or what is the percentage cut 50/50?
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If I may ask, in what way do you see it as a better way for things to be done on the commission side? And is that in a future version of the system or the current version of the system?
Wouldn’t just paying the creator directly be ‘fair pay’ as you put it? Rather than the cuts this system is going to take from what creators would be making? As far as doing things without a mess, this system isn’t quite at the point yet of being able to provide a middle ground between using public avatars and doing unity work, and that’s the achilles heel of it. It occupies the same space as using public avatars, instead. I say this from the point of view of customization, or rather, the complete and utter lack there-of compared to unity work. Can you call a public avatar truly you? Can you call any of these paid avatars through this system truly you? In my opinion, with the system in in it’s current state, no, you can get close, but the answer won’t be a yes. Of course, there are others who will beg to differ. Also, I felt Corbi’s points were pretty good points.
For one, it’s better for the seller since they’re guaranteed payment from the buyer. Sometimes, things happen, and sometimes that means that avatar creators end up putting in work and not getting paid. It also puts the transaction under VRChat’s jurisdiction, which, depending on how you see it, is either good or bad. Once the wrinkles are ironed out, I could see this system fitting into VRChat well. It just has to work on those issues.
I put the word “fairly” to compare 1 (free public) and 3 (this Marketplace), not comparing 2 (buy asset or commission) and 3.
If you prefer 2, just continue that. Nothing stops you. Again, this system isn’t for you, at least as initial target audience.
In my opinion, it would be nice to post a feature request to support file downloading after launch. But saying it is worthless before starting is not constructive. We have to start.
(Imaging VRChat’s business, I think this is a reasonable choice. If this marketplace were to supply source files, it would be in competition with existing stores (Gumroad, BOOTH, etc.) in the form of commerce. It is clear that our current situation would not be possible without the supply from those stores. VRChat and stores seem to have a good relationship right now.
There is no advantage for VRChat to dare to compete with them and weaken them. Also, keeping the current external store situation is good for us, the users.)
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It’s not me to convince. But I mostly agree on that.
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At the moment, we review each seller and each avatar individually. This should help avoid unauthorized content and increase the quality of avatars on the marketplace!
The open beta will be available soon - I hope you’ll enjoy what’s on offer!
That’s a great idea! Users can try any user can try on any avatar on the marketplace without buying it - but we’re not launching with free avatars.
Is the “Try On” feature something you’d be interested in? Do you think it could work as a tech demo for users?
Users pay you in VRChat Credits, and you can pay out your earnings to your PayPal account. You can find more details in our documentation contains more details about payouts! For example, here’s an approximation of how the Creator Economy’s revenue is shared:
We released the Creator Economy in 2023, and it’s been working really well for world creators! Most users don’t want to close VRChat and open a website to support creators - top creators earn 4x more in the Creator Economy than they did on Patreon. We hope we can help avatar creators find similar levels of success!
Yes, please submit feature requests!
When we launched the Creator Economy, we focused on worlds, not avatars. But we kept working on the Creator Economy, so we’re happy to finally allow avatar creators to participate, too.
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So how long until you start restricting private uploads?
Since you guys are starting to act against the community in the name of money, how many years will it take until people can’t upload their own creations and have to buy corpo approved avatars in order to play?
How much time until vrchat takes 90% of the revenue from said creations?
How long until people start getting DMCA notices for their gumroad stores?
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