VRChat announced it’s officially opened its own Avatar Marketplace, allowing users a centralized way to buy and sell avatars from within the social VR platform.
Users have been able to visit VRChat worlds and directly buy and sell avatars for a while, however the company has now rolled out a centralized marketplace to make it easier to find and purchase avatars.
Users can browse avatars via the ‘Avatars’ tab, letting you try on avatars before spending VRChat Credits, the app’s premium currency. VRChat Credits can also be used to purchase virtual items, exclusive roles, group instances, unlockable features, and paid subscriptions to user-generated worlds.
“The store will launch with an initial installment of high-quality avatars. We expect this number to grow rapidly as creators move their wares to the Marketplace,” says VRChat Senior Community Manager ‘Strasz’ in a news update.
VRChat also now lets users see an avatar’s performance ranking before buying, as well as know when another user has obtained their avatar through the Marketplace.
Notably, the studio says its Avatar Marketplace isn’t replacing the ability to upload your own avatar via Unity, or the ability for users to sell their avatars on other platforms, such as popular third-party marketplaces like Booth or Gumroad.
In addition to the usual cohort of user-generated avatars, the Avatar Marketplace is also now hosting branded avatars, such as ‘Quill’ from Polyarc’s VR adventure series Moss, ‘Achilles’ from platform-fighting game Combo Devils, and Lens Chan from Gugenka.
VRChat’s Avatar Marketplace will be limited to select sellers at first, the studio says, with perspective sellers requiring to go through the same onboarding process as Creator Economy sellers, which includes a number of requirements to allow you to earn VRChat Credits and convert them into USD. After that, sellers submit their avatar to the Marketplace for manual review.
“We intend to release the foundations of the Avatar Marketplace system shortly. After launch, we’ve already planned some immediate improvements — think tag search and filtering, along with other ways to make browsing through the avatars on the Marketplace a lot easier,” Strasz says. “We also intend to simplify the buyer’s journey, smoothing out the purchasing process. We’ll also be continuously onboarding new sellers into the system, increasing the number of avatars actually in the Marketplace.”
Founded in 2014, VRChat brings together VR and non-VR users in user-generated worlds across PC, PC VR headsets, Meta Quest, Pico headsets, and Android mobile devices. At the time of this writing, the platform now boasts over 40,000 concurrent users across its Steam client alone, according to SteamCharts.
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