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.

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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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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.

  • Very cool to give creators a way to easily monetize their content. One problem though: VRChat has had a terrible problem with avatar stealers downloading and reposting paid avatars to third party websites for a long time. Have they fixed that yet?

    • Default Guest Avatar

      This is probably a major excuse for them creating the new marketplace and monetizing it. You can imagine there will be official and unofficial avatars and their eventual "compatibilty issues" to use put it politely. In other words, put your avatar onto the upgrade treadmill or it could die. Has your avatar had its yearly checkup? Its looking really sick!

  • ZarathustraDK

    While the notion seems ridiculous, somehow they've trying their hardest to make VRChat pay2win.

    I don't mind them selling a some flair items to support the devs, but this has gone all but full crypto-scheme with app-specific credits, subscriptions, marketplaces, tiered "membership" and purchaseable full-on peacock-look-at-me player-nameplates.

    There's a dire need for some open source decentralized model competition here, sadly those projects aren't getting much attention.

    • Ondrej

      Pay2win? In a social game? Win what? Creators deserve to be paid for their work and products they make. VRchat content is heavily monetized independently for almost a decade. And it started from demand of users seeking artists to create stuff for them, not by some top-down greed.
      The actual problem of this marketplace is that Steam will be taking 30% without even hosting these assets.

      Crypto-scheme? There is no crypto involved. Freemium apps and games offering features for money is decades old.

      Open-source doesn't solve much, because corporations successfully build moats around open code (look at Android). Commerce is necessary here. The cost of infrastructure, maintenance and development is in many millions even for small communities like VRC. People putting in the work deserve to be paid, including the VRC devs.

      What's needed is what Tim Sweeney was promoting (but mostly ignored) for years: open standards and open protocols, like how web 1.0 was created with HTML, HTTP and E-Mail that was later partially locked down by web 2.0 social media.

      tl;dr Let the programmers and artists trade with consumers, but don't build moats.

  • Sven Viking

    Really surprising to me that they didn’t do anything similar years ago.