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?
Fax has been doing a great job of answering questions!
I’ve updated the top of the FAQ with some of the questions he has answered. I’ve omitted ones that were already answered.
I’m going to tackle a big one, though. Let’s dig deep a little…
Let’s tackle the source file questions and concerns!
And my apologies – this is going to be a long one. 
When we (or anyone, for that matter) is designing a product or feature, you generally operate with a certain target audience in mind. Even if you intend for something to be used by far more people than that initial audience in the future, picking an initial audience can help narrow development scope.
When you’re working with a limited number of resources, this can help you make difficult decisions: you’re working with a certain number of people and you have a certain timeframe and budget.
This means you’ve gotta make some hard choices!
In creating the Avatar Marketplace, we’ve opted to target users who weren’t currently being adequately served by our current content pipeline. Basically, out of the gate, we’re looking at folks that have never used the SDK – and likely have no interest in doing so. Yet, these folks also really want an avatar.
The current solutions that exist aren’t great: avatar worlds, search worlds, and the like are what current experienced users are used to… but they’re not a great experience for your average VRChat user.
If you’re an avid reader of the bi-weekly Developer Update, you’ll remember us saying that we’ve been bringing a lot of UX research into our planning. These choices are a reflection of that data and research!
Consequently, this also means that we’re thinking about the features that make the most sense for this particular cohort. If you lay out everything an Avatar Marketplace needs on the table and are allocating resources, does including a method of downloading source files really make sense for this particular initial target? Is it so important that it’s worth sacrificing development time for another feature? How will this move the needle and make this more successful for these particular users? You get the idea.
Much in the same vein, when we first announced the Creator Economy, we heard loud and clear from avatar creators that they wanted to be part of CE! They’re another big factor here – we wanted to build something that worked for them.
So when we were building out the Avatar Marketplace, we included them in the process. We took account of their needs, and what their biggest requests were. We also took into account some of their biggest gripes – piracy, having to provide a high-level of user support to folks just using Unity for the first time, and so on.
All of this data – from tons of UX research directed at both users and creators – helped us prioritize what would be included in this first, initial release of the Avatar Marketplace.
Just because this is what the Avatar Marketplace looks like now does not mean this is what it will look like in the future. Our philosophy is to constantly iterate and improve, and of course, this is part of that, too.
Trust me: we have a lot of plans for the Avatar Marketplace.
The Avatar Marketplace is a vital part of our ability to continue existing as a company – of course we want to make it useful to as many people as possible! But, as mentioned previously, you’ve gotta make hard choices out of the gate – else you’re going to end up in development hell.
We are extremely grateful that our community is vocal about the stuff they want – that’s a good thing! We encourage you to keep telling us your pain points and we welcome the sort of passionate discussion these sorts of things bring out.
Finally: serving one community doesn’t mean we are going to be ignoring another. We’re continuously adding tools to our SDK, for both avatar and world creators. We have no intention of stopping! We want to help people make really cool things – that’s core to our purpose.
At the same time though, some people just want to look cool, and we want to help those people, too.
Are there, or will there be any price floors or price caps for avatars?
And what about customisation? Will AM avatars be purely subject to the creator’s design, and never be able to have any custom content? There are people who make assets for base avatars (eg. accessories and clothing designed for Runa, Rusk, etc.), will there be any way to buy them and add them to your avatar, or are creators expected to upload an avatar with those accessories and just acknowledge the base avatar’s author? I mean, that obviously wouldn’t work without a payment splitting system.
But yeah, this system is horrendously mid for everyone involved imo. It’s really not that hard to find a “good” avatar, since avatar worlds are so easily accessible, and hell, you could probably spend like 10 minutes in Prismic’s and already find an avatar you like. It is not difficult to just worldhop avatar worlds and find an avatar that suits you, that’s literally the whole point of the avatars section in the worlds tab, not to mention the search function too. There’s even an avatar world in the VRCat Variety tab, and you see that every damn time you open the worlds tab.
You are essentially getting people to pay for public avatars. The whole point of buying an avatar is to get the files so that you or someone else can customise it and upload it for yourself. There is no control for the consumer, and the creators are only getting half the money they deserve from it. Creators might be encouraged to increase the price than what they would usually sell for, just to accomodate for the pay cuts, and that sucks for everyone. This is the state of your launch product. Please consider another approach.
“does including a method of downloading source files really make sense for this particular initial target? Is it so important that it’s worth sacrificing development time for another feature?” Yes. I think the community response around this decision is a pretty clear indicator that a huge portion of both sellers and buyers want this option. A feature as big as an official avatar marketplace should warrant the development time to make it actually viable at launch.
The idea that the initial target audience should exclusively be people that use free public avatars is out of touch. To put it bluntly, I don’t think those players are jumping at the chance to pay for access to avatars that are less feature rich than the unoptimised, free models they already have favourited.
Will the market become more widely available in the future? Will anyone be able to sell on it (within reason)? Could you open up a separate, less moderated market for those verified 18+? Just wondering because most of my avatars are classed as very poor and NSFW so I wouldn’t be able to sell them in their current state.
I’m going to reiterate what some people have said here again and I apologize for it now, but after being on VRChat for a couple of years, I finally feel strongly enough about something to post my thoughts. Those being:
I’m sorry, but I have a difficult time believing some of this. Are you saying that a large portion (ther are even hints that it’s most) of active VRChat users (not ones that login once in a blue moon or used if for a week or two, then hardly ever again) are ones that never see someone wearing an avatar that they like enough to ask where they could get something like it, no one within earshot of those questions ever brings up the avatar search world option, and they never notice an avatar search world in their suggested list that is shown pretty frequently, or they never thought “hm, I should check that out and see what they have”? If all of that is true, are they even looking for an avatar or are they the kind of person that probably doesn’t care what they look like in VRChat? If all of that is really true on a platform that advertises its social aspects (chat is part of the name after all) then I could think of better ways than this to solve that “problem”. And that maybe there are bigger ones…
I know that not everyone has access to a pc to run unity or the knowhow or desire to learn alternative. I totally get that. And a way to search for avatars directly within VRChat without hopping worlds is a good idea. But did it really require a paywall to be able to use anything you find? I think a nice “could have been” option would be to do what avatar search worlds do and search for public avatars directly from within VRChat. But I understand not everyone would want their avatars that visible and there have been enough issues with questionable content in those worlds that I get why they wanted another option.
You state you don’t want to keep features in perpetual development, and I understand that, but then how do you justify things like Soba? It’s still behind closed doors. Why not release that too while you keep working on it? (For context I am not a world creator and have never used Udon so I don’t have a personal interest in Soba. I’m just using it as an example.) I also understand that there have been some staff cutbacks, and you are now required to vet every avatar and avatar update on this marketplace. Burnout anyone?
So what are my solutions?
I have 2. One easy and one more difficult.
The difficult one is what people have been asking for. Some way to offer source files at purchase. It can be optional and maybe even a toggle to change the price if included. While I know that may sound like the easy solution to some people. I know that the technical part of that isn’t anywhere near as easy as it sounds. But despite what you have said, I think it should be a launch feature for something like this.
The easy one is to allow avatars on the marketplace to be free if the creator desires. I get VRChat is a company and needs to make money, and offering creators another source of income is a good thing, but the fact that there is zero free option, when there is already a way to do what this new system offers, just slightly (and I want to emphasize that word) more convenient, just screams greed pointed directly at people that just can’t be bothered to ask for or investigate alternatives of their own. Or possibly some can’t afford a decent enough PC for Unity, but now there’s a new way to spend what little they may have. It just smells wrong all over.
Will you be able to upload PC only avatars to the marketplace or do all marketplace avatars also need to be optimized for quest?
For those who are considering being a seller, I recommend reading the Creator Economy doc. The dev has already updated it for the Avatar Marketplace.
A lot of words to dodge the main concern, sure, source files would not be needed by the vast majority of users, especially for those that the in-game marketplace is targeting.
However, there are people who DO want source files, there are also creators who wouldn’t want to keep source files away from users, and at the very least inform them of the option to acquire them elsewhere, yet the guidelines directly forbid that, despite your prior statement that you “would not be getting in the way”.
Again, if you acknowledge that your platform is targeting a specific audience but you KNOW that there are people who want more and to whom the current system is insufficient, why deny us those few conversions? Why forbid us from informing users that some features may have been cut from the avatar, be it for restrictions or performance ranking reasons, and informing them that they could get source files? Yes, you might lose some money with those conversions, but most of those off-platform sales are ones you wouldn’t have made anyway with those users, some users may also be inapplicable to those options (standalone without a PC to use source files), and in your own words, a lot of people prefer the integrated process, and those are the same people who are your target audience, and they wouldn’t be going anywhere, even if you dropped these anti-competitive rules.
So this sounds like a great idea, but what about people who purchase assets on platforms like gumroad and make custom textures and edits of those assets, what systems are going to be in place to ensure that creators of the assets are properly credited for their work? and what kind of protection will there be to prevent reselling assets? as a majority of creators that sell wares on platforms like gumroad specifically state not to resell assets. I don’t think I’ve seen a single avatar on VRChat that doesn’t use some sort of purchased asset on a custom avatar be it the model itself or a simple shirt or piece of jewelry.
Is it possible to request a refund in the event that an avatar breaks for any reason and neither its creator nor VRChat can restore it to a usable condition?
I think it would clear things up a lot if you explained in no uncertain terms that the marketplace can or will target advanced users in the future, and offer them the source files as their own copy to edit, and more importantly, own.
So this seems to be a good move to prevent the huge leaking database that has been popularized and is a huge concern for any avi creator who sells avatars. But I have a couple of glaring concerns.
A lot of the current complaints that you guys are facing seem to come from the customer facing side of things even in these comments and they don’t seem to understand the bigger picture of how the piracy of avatars is bigger than the avatar market itself.
How do you plan on filtering this feedback because the number of non relevant complaints or just lack of experience in the market seems to make everyone complain about issues that they don’t understand. Ive talked to a lot of people about the piracy sites they don’t even realize is stealing revenue and stealing content from creators and they didn’t even know.
We need a huge transparency on the reality of how much of a profit margin you guys plan to take, and how much steam is going to take. There is a lot of rumors that creators lose a 50% share of earnings which for someone who makes avatars from scratch is crazy. So what is the split of profits? The benefits of no file sharing is obvious.
The way I see this going down, creators are going to drive the prices of avi’s down overall because of the lack of file sharing so the revenue that vrchat, steam, and meta take are going to be extremely important.
If your going to involve independent creators to make and sell avatars, why not just make the currency more transparent instead of charging obscure costs for example $50 for 6000 vrcbucks instead of just 50 or 5000 vrcbucks. I get its all ways to get players to spend more money but the inconvenience to creators seems like the tradeoffs are not worth it and the territory seems to be entering a roblox creator state where if your not a large company there is no value as an independent creator to make anything and the profits that creators gain is so miniscule its not worth pursuing cause 50% cuts are extremely discouraging.
Considering a large majority of players are quest players the market itself will do really well. There will be a lack of “Customization” but honestly most customers dont really know how to customize things outside of basic material sliders so it feels more like a loud minority making a complaint over lack of bigger picture which is to kill the leaker market.
Is quest support going to be mandatory for the avi market? I cant imagine most purchasers are not going to be quest players.
Will there be any anti-ripper precautions taken? Such as something similar to Kanna Protecc to automatically install when someone uploads a paid avatar? This is personally the biggest fear I think of when uploading my own fully custom base.
PC-only avatars are allowed! Users can also see which platforms an avatar supports.
We want to incentivize creators to support all platforms, but it’s not a requirement.
Yep, the price floor is fairly low (currently 1200 Credits, ~10 USD). Sellers are currently satisfied with that number - we might revisit it in the future.
Also, worth mentioning: When you buy an avatar for 1200 Credits (or any other price), your purchase might include multiple variants of the same avatar, i.e. different outfits or styles.
We’re adding a new acknowledgements feature to the avatar details page! It allows avatar creators to add credits and licenses to their avatars.
Please contact our support team at help.vrchat.com if you an an issue with an avatar! We’ll do our best to ensure that the issue is fixed. If that’s not possible, we’ll do our best to give you your Credits back instead.
You can find information about fees and payouts in our documentation: Payout | VRChat Creation.
The Creator Economy has been in VRChat since late 2023 - and world creators who switched from Patreon to the Creator Economy usually increase their earnings significantly. (4-5x)
You’re correct that VRChat’s revenue share is lower. However, it’s much easier for users to support creators directly in VRChat, so it’s beneficial to users and creators alike.
With the avatar marketplace, it’s more difficult to draw a 1:1 comparison to existing avatar stores. Getting avatars instantly is different from getting access to source files! But I’m hopeful that users will enjoy easier access to avatars.
I don’t understand that mindset. NSFW avatars are like one of the biggest markets. At least in my circles (rave scene), everybody wants an NSFW version of their avatar at some point (or lets say 90% of the players). Its absolutely natural that humans want to express their sexuality, also in virtual space. Why keep neglecting that fact ?
Other platforms gate their NSFW content behind a “Are you over 18 ?” dialogue (Reddit, Twitter, etc…) and that’s fine. And considering that VRC even has an age verification system that could be used for content gating, that decision seems even more backward and prude.
Means, for selling the NSFW version of an avatar, we have to go back to the usual selling platforms, which opens up again the piracy problem.
(also SPS versions of avatars would be very poor by default - so I guess, selling those on the market place will never happen)
That’s also true for games on Steam, and still they get criticized a lot for being greedy with their 30% cut. I think there is no justification at all for a 50% cut and it will just backfire with the creators & whole community. It will drive away many creators and they just stick with the old way, even IF they could earn more on the VRC Marketplace - just because they feel it’s unfair, and I am totally on their side.