This is a good point, and while I don’t have an answer for you now, we definitely have it on our radar as an issue to solve. It has been discussed a lot.
We run VRChat, not the internet. We do not have the power to take down a given website, even if there is definitely motivation and reason.
I can’t comment on any actions (legal or otherwise) we’ve taken regarding this subject. I also don’t want to derail this thread too much so forgive me if I ignore further questions/discussion on this topic.
Can’t answer these questions right now – not because I don’t want to, but instead because they are things that dip into legal stuff. You’ll learn the answers to these once we release the Creator Terms later on.
I’m sorry but I fail to see anything good coming out of this. Things like this always and I mean ALWAYS get misused and it’s gonna make vrchat worse for it. I’m not exited at all
I’m super excited to see the release of the Creator Economy, especially for avatars. Purchasing an avatar to use in VRChat has always been a super lengthy process that’s really intimidating for new users. Not needing to follow written instructions or watch a Youtube guide for installing & setting up Unity, importing packages, and potentially deal with a slew of errors is gonna open up the world of higher quality avatars to so many people. I hope the VRChat team can stay transparent and keep us creators up to date on how the avatar market will work so we can have plenty of time to adapt to it. Thanks for the update!
Literally just had this thought but I would love to see VR chat offer embeds for things like groups or worlds or profiles. It would be cool to have like, an instance invite that you could put in a tumblr or reddit post or something and have it actually show how many members are currently in that instance and other instance details. It would be great for groups that do events and stuff too
While an interesting idea, they’d have to add in special check systems to say if an instance is still running and to close the link. On top of that, they’d have to form contracts and some even require payment to use such API systems. I’d say it’d be a far shot if they’d even implement such an idea.
I mean the API is already free to use. I just don’t think anyone has done something third party like this. And I think it returns of an instance is no longer available. The biggest overhead here really would be just serving a little embed which can grab that data from the API
Thanks for the response. I get that it gets into the legal side of things, so I won’t ask more about it. I just hope y’all consider the children (and how they lie/break rules).
A separate question. Will the recipient of the money have the option to reject a payment/donation?
I ask that because I’m also a little concerned about para-social interactions where someone feels entitled to a creator’s time/attention because they sent them $. Or that the creator feels that they must spend time with this person because they just sent a significant tip. (I’m just imagining the Tweets now: “uggh, I just gave ____ $100, they took my money and blocked me… ___ is a scammer”)
I know, no specifics were announced and I’m being That Guy, asking about specifics.
(I’m also imagining a system where if I see a cool performance on the stage of the black cat, that I can easily send that random person a couple bucks for the fun performance, similar to the ease of handing off a IRL dollar bill; where the hardest part was getting your hands on that dollar bill)
That’s a good one. Someone tried to pull this stunt on me and I’m like “Dude. You’ve been very annoying to myself and my community. You’ve broke a few rules in my Twitch server as well. I had to remove you”. They clammed up but I doubt the loud ones won’t for sure.
I like the idea for worlds, cutting out the middleman of patreon for VIP features makes a lot of sense (outside of potential p2w/cashgrab games being infinitely more possible).
But avatars I am very iffy on.
I know that not much information has been released yet on the avatar side, but I hope we don’t just see a similar system applied to them. It would cut out like, a ton, of creators. People who make props, tools, shaders (biased on this one lol), etc, and don’t want their work resold as part of an avatar, but instead simply want to sell personal licenses to end users.
How is this better than Patreon + group roles? Especially since Patreon also allows generating rewards outside VRC? And how are you going to convince existing creators to tell their community to go through the effort of switching from Patreon to this, when it objectively has less features? Even assigning Patreon rewards in worlds can be automated already using string loader.
the Creator economy would allow vrchat to actually get a cut of the money instead of it going to patreon allowing vrchat to actually become financially profitable
You have excellent points, and @simsora13 brings up one answer. Another is the reduction in friction for the buyer, which greatly increases the probability that a user will choose to support you.
There’s many more reasons why, and we’ll add more as time goes on. Those are some of the foundational advantages, though.
Will Udon detecting players function as a generalized whitelist, with roles people didn’t pay for? Can it work for things like Owner, Moderators, Admins, Event Hosts, and other roles not connected to creator economy?
As somebody who is already subscribed to multiple Patreons, I don’t see how the process could become more frictionless. But I do believe it is in everyone’s best interest then to add more features to Creator Economy, as it currently offers no real advantage over existing systems.
Also, are there going to be measures in place to prevent abuse? Like, I can see people making “pay to win” game worlds, especially with VRC coming to Android, where that style of game development is almost expected.
I am not sure if this can be answered outright without consultation with the rest of the team, but I do believe it is in everyones best interest (plus laws in certain areas) if at least any sort of gambling mechanics that used real world currency were banned fully.
While I understand the whole adage of “It will be fir community to decide, vote by not playing, etc etc”, if that worked, the mobile gaming scene would not be the disaster it is now.
I am sure there already some internal discussions about this, but I believe a set of rules of what is, and is not allowed must be established as we approach a full launch
I’ll note that opening up a browser is a huge point of friction, especially when you consider that a large fraction of our users aren’t using VRChat on PC.
Thanks for communicating your plans with monetization early on!
Honestly, I’m am quite nervous about how VRChat will feel content- and community-wise, if In-App-Purchases actually become accessible through Udon.
I understand the need for monetization features and I do support monetary interactions that don’t risk changing VRChats content-landscape at its core.
For example selling avatars or being able to donate to creators is great! What I’m most concerned about, is that it might become the norm to lock most of the content behind a paywall or focus the world-building entirely on getting players to pay real money. It could mean a large shift from content being created out of passion to content that is designed entirely to generate profit.
While bearing a risk, I can see the opportunities in subscription-based or single-permanent-purchase-only models for world creators. But making repeated microtransactions available on the other hand, I would consider outright harmful for the platform.
Whatever model you will go with, please display the used monetization features for each world as prominently as possible in the world browser, so players know what they’re getting into.
a heck of a lot more tedious to try to sign up for a World’s patreon if you’re a quest user as you can’t pull up a browser inside the headset without closing vrchat
I would love to see this go further (or perhaps this is in the cards, due to the nature of what you are explaining?) especially where content like avatars are concerned. I have been wanting creators to be given a way to pass/allow access to individual content (uploaded avatars being a big one) to only certain people.
This would help reduce easy theft of content/people passing it around which has always been a huge issue with avatar creation. The need need to hand over entire packages of our work due to the need for buyers to upload themselves has always been a big reason casual content theft is so easy. Many creators try and navigate around this, by only allowing people to commission unique work off them, if they can login and upload to the commissioners account directly. Which of course is a huge security breach and against the rules. But I understand why they do it. This is the main reason why I have not personally been creating avatars to sell as much as I did on old SecondLife. Keeping your base working files protected is pretty much non existent due to the nature of uploading.
Integrating Creator economy, and a way for clients to support or pay their creators directly. Coupled with creators having the ability to upload the commissioned content to their own account and lock it for use to only the individual clients, or group of supporters themselves would be huge. This also opens a whole Patreon like experience, such as monthly items sent to supporters via groups and so on which it sounds like you are kind of eluding to.
