VRChat Is Planning for a Virtual Economy, Currency, and a Marketplace for User Generated Content

VRChat just posted a tweet to let people know they’re hiring:

So, I moseyed over to take a look at their job listings. Among other things, they don’t mind if you are a remote worker:

The VRChat team all work remotely. We are distributed around the United States, Canada and Europe. We have semi-flexible working hours with some core hours in the Pacific (UTC -7/-8) time zone. It really doesn’t matter where you work from, as long as you have a great internet connection and the ability to connect to the VRChat platform. We’ve also recently launched on the Oculus Quest, which is a really handy travel-ready version of VRChat.

They are looking for a wide variety of people—Unity engineer, security engineer, customer support—but what really got my attention was a posting for a Virtual Economy Manager:

We’re looking for someone to lead the development of VRChat’s virtual economy, currency and marketplace. VRChat is a “live” platform that’s constantly updated and evolving, so you’ll see your work have an immediate impact to our massive global community of users.

At VRChat, we’ve got ideas about how we’d like to move forward with our economy, but we’re looking for someone with experience to help guide and lead the effort. As our Virtual Economy Manager, you’ll be responsible for the oversight, development, release and management of VRChat’s virtual economy, currency and marketplace. If you’re interested in creating a whole new virtual economy and help the community make a living in the VRChat universe, then this role could be right up your alley.

Among the responsibilities of the position are the following:

– Work with design and production to plan, document, design, implement and manage a virtual currency economy with user generated content
– Work with design and production to plan, document, fully design, implement and manage a marketplace for virtual goods
– Work with various teams to implement, QA and release various monetization models
– Engage with the community team and community feedback to iterate on VRChat’s economy and marketplace
– Review and design monetization-based analytics
– Provide new feature recommendations that improve monetization and retention

As you may already know, there is a booming economy already happening around VRChat, but it is all happening entirely outside the platform itself. In April 2018, I interviewed Ghoster, who runs the popular and successful VRC Traders Discord, where many people are already earning hundreds, even thousands, of dollars by designing and creating custom user avatars for other VRChat users. Here’s an invitation to join their Discord if you’re interested.

VRChat faces a somewhat tricky transition from an anything-goes, intellectual-property-flouting wild, wild west to an more orderly, legal in-world economy. Among many other things, they will have to learn how to deal with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices issued against content creators. Not to mention compliance with new U.S. financial regulations to prevent money laundering, such as the new Tilia rules in Second Life.

It will be very interesting to watch as this all plays out, and learn how in-world commerce will be built into the platform. (Let’s hope they don’t decide to jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon!)

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