What you’re looking at above may be the first sign of a larger trend: This furry avatar for VRChat is now selling on Gumroad for $40. That’s not surprising, given VRChat’s fast-growing userbase.
What is perhaps surprising is that the very same avatar is selling in Second Life for a tenth of the price. That’s because “Krample”, who has been an SL creator for years (listed in the SL Marketplace as Orange Nova Avatars), is now finding far more success selling his avatar content to the VRChat market.
“I've been making content in Second Life for the past decade or so,” Krample told me last month, “but it's increasingly brutal to be working in an engine that's just so… old. Especially ever since I got a day job working in Unreal, because then I get to have a daily reminder about how much better things could be!”
He declines to discuss his specific day job for the record, but suffice it to say that if you've watched the Super Bowl recently, you've probably seen the visual effects he helped create.
“So I've just started to port my avatars over to VRChat, as it's a much more modern engine,” he continued. “It helps a lot that people in VRC seem to be willing to pay far more reasonable amounts for the same product, the VRC version of the same avatar costs about ten times as much. Which may sound obscene, but I am just following market rates.”
As evidence of that, he shows me a recent screengrab of other VRChat avatars on Gumroad (below) priced roughly the same.
OK, but how are his VRChat sales doing?
“As of right now, just that single beta in VRC is outperforming my entire SL store, which is a pretty wide array of rather popular products… I don't want to say numbers, but right now, I'm making about 20% more off of VRC, with one product, as opposed to dozens in SL."
When we spoke last month, he was selling several copies or more of his VRChat avatar per day “and climbing.”
“Wow,” I told him, after some quick math, “that sounds like over $1000 USD gross.”
“Yeah, it's about 1500 USD off of a single avatar over the span of… 27 days. Which I'd consider slow for a new release, but again, new platform, so it will take time to build up a customer base and spread the word.”
So is he giving up on Second Life entirely?
“I really don't want to say that I am,” Krample tells me, “but there's another thing that hasn't been talked about…. Making complex content for SL is really, really, really difficult and time-consuming. It takes months upon months to put together an avatar from scratch. There's a vast array of realtime engine features that are missing from SL, and it is sorely felt.”
I doubt he's the only top creator to notice that. More on this — and what Linden Lab might do to address that — in a future post.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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