Wagner James Au / New World Notes

After an initial tease last month, VRChat just announced that its long-awaited in-platform avatar marketplace is live, and that the company has already received (and is now processing) 1000 applications from creators to bring their avies to it.

This is already a crazy number of avatar options to choose from, but company community leader Strasz notes that they're planning to add options to search by category and tag. Most VRC users will probably go window shopping for avatars in social experiences, since it's easy enough to inspect a cool-looking avie to find out what brand they're wearing.

I expect this roll-out will greatly increase VRChat the company's revenue, as avatars are key to expression among its estimated 10 million monthly active users. As noted recently, creators who've already joined the platform's creator economy in its early phase are already making way more money, even after the company takes a 50% revenue cut. As Charles Tupper, Community Manager at VRChat, put it:

I want to remind you that [the 50% cut] is the same as our creator economy system that we have out right now, and people that we bring into the creator economy from off-platform sources like Patreon and Ko-Fi, see anywhere from four to five times the revenue [emph. mine] through VRChat systems, even with the cut. So even with the cut, they are making more money by having a wider band of access. T 

That's four to five times the revenue for thousands of creators — and thousands of new micro-revenue stream for VRChat the company which likely add up to quite a lot!