Looking at this chart there’s not much wiggle room here: Payout | VRChat Creation
Reducing the platform cut risks if not guarantees VRChat being kicked off so that only leaves only their own cut to be reduced when its already the smallest of the 3 by a wide margin.
Hi, thanks for the quick answer.
Regarding the R18 content selling: on Steam platform it seems to be possible, on Meta and Google not. So when selling R18 flagged content, the payment methods could just be reduced to Steam-Wallet right ? That should work ?
Anyway, I would always push against such policies. As an European, its absolutely incomprehensible that companies like PayPal & Mastercard (?) treat trading with NSFW content like weaponized Plutonium on the black-market, while content (e.g. games) with extreme violence & gore are just fine. This madness has to end at some point …
That will likely still get them kicked off the other platforms, from endorsing R18 content (even if its not allowed on their specific platform) and/or for circumventing payment systems. Apple is particular is very quick to nuke anyone from orbit who gets close to breaking these rules and will gladly cut off that soon to be major revenue stream. Either way its a high risk gamble that would kill the platform if things went wrong.
I’m an American living in Europe and agree with you to an extent but as much as we’d all love to see VRChat take a stand, I don’t think it’s going to be the platform to lead the fight for that change, activism doesn’t pay the AWS bill.
The avatar you bought will be in the new purchased avatar tab. So, even if they are gone. It will stay in your account unless there is something sus about it. Though it could be possible it can be broken by future updates.
if a seller grants users who bought the avatar a NSFW avatar off-platform for download will they be punished or removed from selling ?
Okay most of my questions have been answered but I have to talk about the Elephant in the room:
How will this affect partners like Virtual Market, one of VRChat’s biggest events, and Ready Player Me/Tafi?
Will they (Vket) be getting referral commission for “MPA”, Marketplace Avatars, sold while in their event/worlds? Or if it has tags like “at Vket” in the description?
Will this come from “Vrchats and partners fee” for the sale or the creators fee?
(We have to pay to have a vket booth, having it come out of our cut sounds like double dipping, but taking it from the partners cut incentiveses more event participation)
Will MPAs, Marketplace avatars, at these events have an expidited approvals?
Will Vket and other partners have to end their Avatar Creator services?
I feel it’s very dishonest to not be upfront about this and instead just handwave people away with a link. You’ve been so forward will all other information, why not this?
So here, let’s do it this way, and I ask you to please correct me if any of this math is wrong, if it is, please provided the correct math, and if any additional math needs to be provided, please do so, and if I’m also wrong about any of my interpretations of what’s written, please correct that as well.
DISCLAIMER:
This is only considering what affects the seller, not the consumer. The person who purchases credits also gets a cut taken that goes to steam and what not, so that’s where some of these other percents listed on Payout | VRChat Creation are coming from, but for the seller, those numbers aren’t relevant, as it doesn’t impact their “earned credits,” nor does it impact the amount of credits the user who purchased those credits receives. They still get what they paid for.
The values here are also subject to change, and approximates.
My math may also be wrong according to what order things fees are applied and exchange rates are applied, so I’m making some assumptions here.
- Credit Exchange Rate. The current exchange rate for Payouts is $0.005 U.S. Dollars per Earned Credit.
- Seller Transaction Fees. Transaction Fees of approximately 15.3% will be applied to any sale of Seller Content. This percentage will be deducted from the total number of Credits comprising the purchase price of any Seller Content, rounded up to the nearest full Credit. These fees go to VRChat and the applicable CE Partners.
- Payout Transaction Fees. Transaction Fees may be assessed when you initiate a Payout. Such fees will be deducted from the amounts paid to you by VRChat or our CE Partner. Transaction Fees vary depending on payment method chosen and will be shown on the Platform and/or by our CE Partner facilitating Payouts.
Let’s do some math, assuming 1200 VRChat Credits as our avatar price.
15.3/100=0.153 (this is turning the 15.3% into a number we can use)
1200*0.153=183.6 (this is how we get the number to applying the 15.3% fee)
1200-183.6=1016.4 (round up to 1017) (this is applying the 15.3% fee)
1017*0.005=5.085 (this is the at-point-of-sale post-fee "exchange" into "earned credits", see below)
That final step in that bit of math there, that little *0.005, the credits are getting turned into “earned credits” which is (if I understand correctly) just terminology for VRC turning the credits into revenue and then noting down our share of the earned revenue that we can redeem once we’ve earned an arbitrary set amount, and “earned credits” would then not be able to spent anywhere else other than used as a payout (again, if I’m interpreting things correctly), since they aren’t actually even credits anymore.
Now, consider you have to have a minimum of 100 USD worth of “earned credits” to make a payout. Oh, let’s not forget, there can also be a payout transaction fee. So let’s say you manage to get 100$, 500$ or 1000$ of “earned credits” and decide to make a payout. This is assuming the halving due to the “exchange” rate has already occurred due to some particular wording in the creator economy TOS, seen here.
- Revenue Share. The term “exchange” as used in the Terms and these CE Rules with regards to Credits means a transaction in which a Seller forfeits VRChat Credits in order to receive a revenue share from VRChat in U.S. Dollars calculated based on the number of VRChat Credits forfeited and the then-in-effect exchange rate. VRChat does not directly exchange or convert Credits to U.S. Dollars. “Payouts” in U.S. Dollars represent a share of the revenue that VRChat has earned through the VRC Creator Economy based on a Seller’s contributions, which are quantified through the Seller’s Earned Credits.
Now, math time. We’re using the approximate number for the payout transaction fee provided on this page, Payout | VRChat Creation.
1.5/100=0.015 (this is turning the 1.5% into a number we can use)
100*0.015=1.5 (this is how we get the number to apply the 1.5%)
100-1.5=98.5 (this is applying the 1.5%)
500*0.015=7.5
500-7.5=492.5
1000*0.015=15
1000-15=985
So the transaction fees for payout to Tilia or Paypal (I’m don’t know which, and this is an approximate) aren’t too bad, but it’s still another cut.
Let’s say you sell an avatar at 2400 VRC Credits, or 20 dollars to the user. Let’s sell this avatar enough times to reach minimum payout amount.
Assuming some things from earlier.
2400*0.153=367.2 (see my first set of math for knowing what's happening here)
2400-367.2=2032.8 (round up to 2033)
2033*0.005=10.165
100/10.165=9.83 (this is determining how many avatars we have to sell to meet payout req)
10.165*10=101.65 (we sell 10 avatars at minimum since we can't sell 9.83 avatars)
Now, let’s make the payout exchange rate the same as the currency purchase exchange rate, which is 0.00833333333333333333 (just a very long decimal, not infinite) rather than 0.005. We’ll do this both with and without the fee from VRC.
Let’s also calculate the purchase exchange rate. (rounding up to whole numbers for sanity purposes, otherwise technically the exchange rate is NOT static across the different prices, which gets… icky.)
5/600=0.00833 (shortening these for sanity because long decimals)
10/1200=0.00833
20/2400=0.00833
50/6000=0.00833
100/12000=0.00833
600*0.00833=4.99 (shortening these for sanity as well, and if more 3s were added to the 0.00833 number, it'd actually turn these into whole numbers!)
1200*0.00833=9.99
2400*0.00833=19.99
6000*0.00833=49.99
1200*0.00833=99.99
So we’ve verified that exchange rate so
2032.8*0.008333...=16.93 (this is with the fee)
2400*0.008333...=19.99 (this is without)
therefore to meet minimum payout
100/16.93=5.9
16.93*6=101.58 (this is how many avatars we have to sell at minimum to reach payout.)
19.99*6=119.94
As a side note, I don’t know why they chose such a horribly long decimal.
Now, there’s some interesting terminology about payouts.
- Payout Requests. Payout Requests can take up to 30 calendar days to process. We may impose a limit on both the amount and frequency of your Payouts based on the age of your account, your history as a Seller, and your compliance with the Terms. Initiating a Payout Request does not guarantee that you will be able to exchange your Earned Credits for U.S. Dollars. VRChat alone has the authority and discretion to determine if your request will be honored. In addition, our CE Partner may establish requirements that you must meet to their satisfaction before being able to receive a Payout. Upon submitting a Payout Request, the requested amount for Payout will be deducted from your Account, pending approval and processing of such Payout. In the event your Payout Request is denied, or the Payout is otherwise unable to be completed, the deducted Credit balance will be restored to your Account. We may not be able to remit payments to certain countries, entities, or individuals because of legal or other considerations.
I wonder if they’re safeguarding themselves from this system being used for money-laundering with the whole “age of your account” “history as a seller” thing. If so, I mean, good? There’s definitely that potential for abuse. I just have to wonder who keeps the “discretion” in check from being abused as well?
Scratch that, it just took forever to appear apparently.
I hope from the deepest of my heart, VRChat plan for the avatar marketplace won’t fail and im not over worried on what i think are miss-opportunity to make money from active avatar costumer that already spent in the thousand in avatar costumization.
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).
Hi I had a concern over the language used on avatar listings?
Calling these purchases permanent is misleading? An avatar purchase is a sub-license under the VRchat terms of service right? (9.2.d). VRChat can absolutely not guarantee a license that VRChat has complete control over as a permanent purchase. A license is only good as long as VRChat is live for and in the case that you need to remove a product from the store for breach of TOS OR if you delete a users VRChat account you are already going back on this claim.
Avatar purchases are licenses, not a tangible product, it should be clear to someone using VRChat to purchase an avatar that VRChat can remove the purchase for any reason deemed necessary.
later in the terms of service (9.2.h.v) literally states these sub licenses are not guaranteed,
please correct me if I am looking at the wrong section of the TOS regarding avatar sales.
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!
I’ve been mulling over this system and my general conclusion is in its current form it’s very likely it won’t hit the target market like how things worked out for world creators so it’s not worth me attempting to sign up.
If the Marketplace is filled with products that are available elsewhere then chances are they will have a licence that allows them to be available in VRC as a public, unlike with worlds and Patreon that puts them on the same level of access as the marketplace and at that point it’s a matter of if your target audience thinks the store and prices are more convenient then just using a search world or, if those end up banned, outright searching for the avatar world by world.
There’s a real possibility that even if there is an item exclusive to the store the target audience won’t buy it simply because they wrongly assume they haven’t found it for free yet.
The products on the store collectively need to have value above what’s available for free. Yes one way would be providing source files for peace of mind even if the target audience is never going to use them (like how the console market provides physical copies of digital games) but any other method to provide value could also make a difference.
If I were to give a suggestion that everyone and myself will hate me for it would be to make some system exclusive to marketplace avatars, something like a universal accessory attachment point system so then we can sell avatars and have another store to sell hats.
In my opinion it’s not a horrible idea. As a minimum viable product like they said it is, it’s fine. As long as they don’t restrict the old way of doing things we should be fine but there is one concern I have.
My concern is that the sharing of avatars will significantly slow down.
I belive the company should strive on keeping that community sharing element somehow. Especially for a platform like VR Chat that thrives on people sharing stuff around
Oh also a option for free avatars would be really nice :33
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