Tag: Ready Player Me

UPDATED JAN. 20th, 2026 WITH EXTRA COMMENTARY: Metaverse Bombshell: NETFLIX Acquires Ready Player Me—What Does This Mean for Metaverse Platforms Using Ready Player Me Avatars?

I somehow missed a major piece of news that dropped last Friday, which will definitely impact a lot of existing metaverse platforms (including big names like VRChat). On Dec. 19th, 2025, Sarah Perez wrote, in an article on the tech news website TechCrunch:

After shifting its gaming strategy to focus more on games played on the TV, Netflix announced it’s acquiring Ready Player Me, an avatar-creation platform based in Estonia. The streamer said Friday it plans to use the startup’s development tools and infrastructure to build avatars that will allow Netflix subscribers to carry their personas and fandom across different games.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Ready Player Me had raised $72 million in venture backing from investors, including a16z, Endeavor, Konvoy Ventures, Plural, and various angels, including the co-founders of companies like Roblox, Twitch, and King Games.

Netflix told TechCrunch the startup’s team of around 20 people will be joining the company. Of the four founders Rainer Selvet, Haver Järveoja, Kaspar Tiri, and Timmu Tõke, only CTO Rainer Selvet is moving to Netflix. It doesn’t have an estimate of how long it will be until avatars launch. Nor does it detail which games or types of games will be first to get avatars.

Following the acquisition, Ready Player Me will be winding down its services on January 31, 2026, including its online avatar creation tool, PlayerZero.

Scott Hayden, in an article written for The Road to VR website, adds:

“Our vision has always been to enable avatars and identities to travel across many games and virtual worlds,” Ready Player Me CEO Timmu Tõke said. “We’ve been on an independent path to make that vision a reality for a long time. I’m now very excited for the Ready Player Me team to join Netflix to scale our tech and expertise to a global audience and contribute to the exciting vision Netflix has for gaming.”

Avatar creation using Ready Player Me in the metaverse platform Spatial

Additionally, Ready Player Me announced its taking avatar creation services offline starting January 31st, 2026.

And, indeed, when I head over to the Ready Player Me website, the banner across the top of my screen declares:

Thank you for the chance to build together with you. Our services will become unavailable starting January 31, 2026. Please reach out to devs@readyplayer.me for any questions.

I pity the poor person on the receiving end of all those emails, because there are countless metaverse platforms which have relied on Ready Player Me as their avatar creation component, rather than try to build their own avatar design system in-house. All of these platforms now have a little over a month to come up with a replacement for the services provided up until now by Ready Player Me, which is shutting down on January 31st, 2026!

Ready Player Me’s avatar creation tools, which have been used by many virtual worlds and social VR platforms, will be shutting down on January 30th, 2026.
Among the tools affected by the NETFLIX acquisition of Ready Player Me are the Avatar Creator SDK, and the newer PlayerZero SDK, which allowed for users to create and sell avatar modifications and updates.

Ready Player Me has been the go-to solution for both gaming and metaverse companies for outsourcing much of its avatar creation process. Among those companies is VRChat. Scott Hayden opines:

Netflix hasn’t intimated it’s getting into XR gaming yet, so it’s pretty safe to say the Ready Player Me acquisition and subsequent shutdown is more or less a blow to one specific group of people: namely, VRChat users.

VRChat beginners looking to make their own avatars over the years were almost always pointed to Ready Player Me, with the platform even allowing users to upload a personal photo and generate a cartoony persona that was easy to mix-and-match with a variety of parts.

And while they weren’t always the most original avatars out there, it’s difficult to argue with the platform’s ease of use, as the web-based tool basically got you a (mostly) unique avatar that was not only cross-platform, but also already rigged for VRChat.

I’m not too worried on the impact to VRChat; as Scott goes on to write in his article, there are alternatives, albeit ones requiring a bit more technical know-how on the part of the user. VRChat also has a thriving third-party avatar creation and sale ecosystem, including a very popular series of Virtual Market avatar shopping events). VRChat will be fine. But it’s the smaller metaverse platforms like Spatial.io, which wholly rely on Ready Player Me’s services, that are now going to have to scramble to find and implement a replacement in very little time.

NETFLIX’s acquisition of Ready Player Me reminds me, at first glance, of when the fledgling metaverse platform Cloud Party (which I have written about on my blog before) was acquired by Yahoo! back in early 2014, over a decade ago. The entire small company (only 3-4 people) was “acquihired” by Yahoo!, and they shut down the Cloud party platform (with a truly memorable sendoff, as they shut down the servers, that made me emotional; this link is from a former Blogger.com blog I used to write about Cloud Party, which is still up!). The staff were absorbed into Yahoo! to work on Yahoo! projects, and God only knows what happened to them, or the projects they were hired to work on. (And, of course, Yahoo! is a shadow of its former self; does anybody still use it?)

It is very clear from this news that NETFLIX has big plans for its gaming service, and they “acquihired” the staff (and assets) of Ready Player Me, in order to use them for some future project. Their gain (for whatever project they are working on) is the loss of the hundreds of virtual worlds, games, and social VR/AR platforms which relied on Ready Player Me.

The fallout from all this is going to be fascinating to watch.

UPDATE Dec. 23rd, 2025: Another thing that came to mind after I posted this blogpost is this: metaverse-building companies who choose to outsource aspects of their services to other companies like Ready Player Me, have to be prepared for the possibility that that other company could be bought out, change the terms of their service, or even shut down. While it might be more time and money consuming to build something like an avatar system in-house, at least it’s under your control, and you don’t run the risk of having the rug pulled from under you.

Thank you to my metaverse friend Carlos Austin for the heads-up on this news.

UPDATE Jan. 20th, 2026: Today I came across an article on LinkedIn by Terry Proto for the group with the lengthy title, Reality Innovators Network for Spatial Computing, Metaverse, AI & XR – Virtual, Augmented Reality (whew, that’s a mouthful!):

8,000 developers. 6 weeks. One lesson. Netflix bought Ready Player Me, and January 31st is the deadline to replace avatar infrastructure for a lot of companies.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Altspace. 8th Wall. The pattern repeats.

The lesson? Interoperable ≠ open.

RPM worked everywhere. But it was still owned by one company. One acquisition later, and thousands of production systems are scrambling.

That’s the difference between building on convenience vs. building on ownership.

I just wrote a new article on why the spatial internet can’t be built on rented land. Have a look here: https://lnkd.in/etu3xpiF

(Note: I don’t know if you actually have to have a LinkedIn account to read this article.)

In the linked article from the above quote, Terry goes to give a very good summary of why relying on a third-party solution (even one that is interoperable), is still not as good as having open standards.

He writes:

Netflix acquired Ready Player Me on Dec 19 and 8,000 developers have until January 31st to rip out and replace their avatar infrastructure.

That’s six weeks.

Six weeks to rebuild identity systems that many teams integrated as foundational layers, not optional features. For some developers, RPM wasn’t just powering avatars. It was powering user accounts, social presence, cross-platform persistence, and the entire notion that their users could carry an identity across virtual worlds.

As Jose Antonio Tejedor Garcia of Virtway put it: “Trust built over years is breaking in weeks.”

As I write this, that six-week window has narrowed to (checks calendar) just twelve days. And, as Terry has stated, many of the 6,000 developers who used Ready Player Me, used it for a lot more than just avatar appearance. He goes on to add what I was trying to get at in my original blogpost, but does it much more concisely:

ack in June 2023, I wrote about “life after Altspace”, exploring which platforms could fill the void when Microsoft shut down one of the oldest social VR spaces. Altspace launched in 2015, got acquired by Microsoft in 2017 and closed in March 2023. The community scrambled to find new homes.

Sound familiar?

But back then, I was asking the wrong question. Finding alternative platforms doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It just kicks the can down the road until the next acquisition, the next pivot, the next “strategic realignment.”

The real question is: why do we keep building critical infrastructure on top of proprietary platforms?

I am not going to quote it all, but I do strongly recommend you read the entire article here (even if I very strongly disagree with any potential solution which requires blockchain, cryptocurrencies or NFTs, all of which by now are tainted beyond redemption by numerous scandals, scams, and rugpulls). And I will watch with keen interest as the deadline of January 31st, 2026 comes and goes.

My Predictions for Social VR, Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse for 2022

Have you joined the RyanSchultz.com Discord yet? You’re invited to be a part of the first ever cross-worlds discussion group, with over 600 people participating from every social VR platform and virtual world! We discuss, debate and argue about the ever-evolving metaverse and all the companies building it. You’re welcome to come join us! More details here.

I was going to write up another entry in my ongoing Pandemic Diary series today, but then I read Wagner James Au’s predictions for 2022, and I suddenly realized I had neglected to write up my own blogpost, with my predictions for the next twelve months! So let me polish my crystal ball and see what comes up… 😉

Among Wagner’s predictions is this one, which I agree with 100%—make that 1,000%!

There will be a major scandal or controversy around one of the blockchain/NFT-oriented Metaverse platforms.

With NFTs beset by scams and NFT/blockchain-oriented metaverse platforms seeing low user numbers but extremely high investment and speculation, this is only a matter of time.  

It’s only January 12th, 2022, but I have already written about a number of questionable NFT projects which at best are crazy schemes, and at worst are outright scams! MetaWorld springs to mind as the perfect example of the latter (ALLEGEDLY, I hasten to add, although IN MY OPINION, I don’t believe there is any actual MetaWorld platform, aside from a prototype which was created years ago by someone who has since left the company to work for Somnium Space).

By the way, I have been reliably informed that, after an absence caused by the publication of this damning recent piece of investigative journalism by Engadget, Dedric Reid is once again active on Clubhouse, shilling MetaWorld in his own rooms and in other rooms about the metaverse on the still-popular social audio platform. He’s also relisted his (ALLEGEDLY, IN MY OPINION) worthless virtual land NFTs on OpenSea, after NiftyKit took the original listings on his website down when the original artist he stole the images from to illustrate his NFTs lodged a copyright complaint.

Despite all the negative press from the Engadget exposé and my series of blogposts about MetaWorld, Dedric continues undeterred. Someone joked to me via Discord DMs that Dedric Reid is the Elizabeth Holmes of the metaverse, and I laughed out loud because it’s such an apt, concise description! Harsh, savage, but accurate.

But on to other topics; I am tired of talking about Dedric Reid and MetaWorld (and frankly, whoever falls for his ALLEGED scam at this point is simply not doing their proper due diligence, IN MY OPINION). There’s a lot of actual progress being made by many legitimate metaverse companies building social VR/AR platforms and virtual worlds!

First, Facebook—sorry, Meta! I predict that Meta is going to have a very bumpy year ahead. The company was roundly criticized by the virtual reality community when they announced that. starting in October 2020, all Oculus VR hardware users had to set up accounts on the toxic Facebook social network. While Mark Zuckerberg, in his now-infamous Connect 2021 keynote, said that the company was looking at removing this requirement, I’ll believe it when I actually see it happen. Words are hollow, Mark; what matters are actions.

I predict that Facebook (sorry, Meta) is going to have a rough year

Meta is facing such a never-ending litany of complaints, scandals, and even legal actions that this is, once again, a very easy prediction to make for 2022.

Next prediction: there’s going to be a lot of activity this year in the fuzzy overlap area between games and virtual worlds, what I like to call the “metaverse-adjacent” space. Both games (e.g. Fortnite, Minecraft) and game platforms (e.g. Roblox, Core) will continue to add new features in an effort to become more like social VR/AR apps and virtual worlds. And, given their immense popularity, especially among children, tweens, and teens, many people will get their first taste of the metaverse via these games and game platforms, in much the same way as an entire generation got their start in the metaverse via Second Life.

Speaking of Second Life, in my predictions for 2021, I wrote the following:

And, indeed, 2021 was the first year in which VRChat began to consistently surpass Second Life in user concurrency figures (Rec Room did too, I believe). VRChat has been breaking new user concurrency records, leading up to and including New Year’s Eve 2021, as Johnny Rodriguez tweeted:

Last night, 88,700 people put on a VR headset and decided to join the VRChat New Years event to countdown [to] the new year. For reference, this is Husker’s Memorial Stadium [at the University of Nebraska], which fits around 86,000 people when completely full. VR is here to stay.

Turning back to Second Life, the coronavirus pandemic caused a temporary surge in usage (and the current Omicron wave might well prompt people to dust off their avatars and give it another try, too). I still estimate that SL has somewhere between 500,000 and 900,000 active users per month (that is, people who sign in at least once in the past thirty days). I really wish that Linden Lab would regularly release statistics like this, but if they are declining (slowly or quickly), I can also understand why the company would be reluctant to do so.

It doesn’t help matters that Second Life’s userbase skews significantly older than most other social VR platforms, virtual worlds, and metaverse-adjacent apps like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. SL users are (literally) dying off! However, Second Life still remains popular enough (and a reliable cash cow) to keep merrily coasting along for many years. And with the deep pockets and good connections of the Waterfield investment group (of which Second Life is now a part), the future looks bright.

I wish I could say the same about Sansar, which from my (admittedly limited) perspective, seems to be circling the drain. I wrote the following post in the official Second Life community forums late last year:

I was part of Sansar since I was invited into the closed beta in 2016/2017, and I was there for the whole crazy ride. Sansar is now on life support (the company that bought it from Linden Lab, called Wookey, furloughed all of its staff recently, and I believe that they could shut down at any moment without warning). Being there from beginning to end, I still marvel at how Linden Lab thought they could build a new virtual world/social VR platform and just put it out there, and expect it to sell itself in this competitive marketplace for metaverse platforms. “Build it and they will come” might have worked for SL in 2003 but it sure ain’t gonna work nowadays. You have to PROMOTE yourself to get noticed.

Also, Linden Lab could have done a lot of things to try and entice SL users to a) visit Sansar and b) make them want to stay, build worlds, create content, and form a new community. Instead, what happened is that Second Life folks (rightly or wrongly) saw Sansar as something which distracted LL from its work on SL, and as a result most SL folks hated Sansar and refused to have anything to do with it, hastening its downfall in my opinion. It also didn’t help that Linden Lab made a bet that many people would be owning high-end VR headsets tethered to high-end PCs with good graphics cards, and instead the Oculus Quest wireless headset took off.

I still shake my head and wonder “what if?”. Say a prayer for Sansar, it needs it. 

Right now, Sansar’s best hope for survival in 2022 is for another company who wants to enter the metaverse marketplace to buy the platform from Wookey, much the same as Microsoft stepped in at the eleventh hour to snap up AltspaceVR.

Another prediction: we are going to see an increase in the number of companies providing services to metaverse platforms. Wagner James Au mentions the Linden Lab subsidiary Tilia, which provides financial services, in his blogpost which I linked to up top; I predict that they will land a few more clients this year. Another example of a company doing well in this niche is Ready Player Me, the avatar system currently in use in VRChat and over 1,000 other apps and games on VR, mobile, desktop, and web. Expect this nascent business-to-business sector to explode this year!

Well, that’s it for me, for now. I might update this blogpost with other predictions for 2022 as they come to me.

And I ask you, my faithful readers: what predictions are you making for the next twelve months? Feel free to leave a comment, or use the feedback form on my blog if you’d prefer to contact me directly. You’re also welcome to join the RyanSchultz.com Discord server, a cross-worlds community where over 600 people, with experience in various metaverse platforms, welcome you! Just click the button on the left-side panel of my blog as shown (image right). If you are connecting via a smartphone or tablet instead of your computer desktop, just click the three-bars menu button in the upper-right hand corner, then scroll down until you see the Discord widget displayed.

The New Ready Player Me Hub: The Ability to Import Your Avatar to Any Supported Platform!

An example of the avatars you can create using the new Ready Player Me Hub (source)

Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me, the customizable avatar system I have written about before here, here, and here, has issued a brand new update! In the email I received yesterday:

The Ready Player Me Hub lets you create one or multiple avatars and use them in all apps that support Ready Player Me. With one click, you can import your existing avatar or create a new one and add it to apps like VRChat, LIV, and Somnium Space.

According to the official blogpost announcing the update (which I recommend you read in full):

Ever since we launched Ready Player Me back in May last year, our goal was to create a cross-game avatar platform for the metaverse – one that gives you a consistent digital identity everywhere you and your avatar go. Think of it as a passport that gives you access to thousands of virtual worlds. Today, we are making the metaverse passport real with the launch of the Ready Player Me Hub…

When you sign in to the Ready Player Me Hub, you can see all your avatars and connect them to your favorite applications in one click. To import your avatar into a partner app that uses Ready Player Me, all you need to do is sign in with your account.

VentureBeat reports:

Wolf3D’s platform allows users to travel between video games, virtual reality experiences, and other apps using a single virtual identity, said cofounder Timmu Tõke in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We’re trying to build a cross-game service to enable a lot of virtual worlds to exist,” Tõke said. “We see more people spending more and more time in virtual worlds. The metaverse is kind of happening around us. But most of it isn’t happening in one world or one app. It’s a network of many different worlds that people visit for work and play and collaboration. And doesn’t really make sense for the end user to create a new avatar identity for each of those experiences. It makes sense to have one portable entity that travels with you across many different games and apps and experiences.”

In fact, 300 games, apps, and social VR/virtual worlds now support the Ready Player Me avatar system, including the following platforms (all links below redirect you to blogposts I have previously written about each platform, which might be somewhat out-of-date, as I am covering so many different platforms on this blog!):

You can peruse the complete list of Ready Player Me partners here.

If you are interested in trying out the Ready Player Me Hub to create an avatar (either from a selfie or from scratch), you can access it here. You have a choice of making either a full-body avatar or a head-and-shoulders avatar:

The Ready Player Me Hub starting screen

When your avatar is ready, simply click Next in the top right corner of the website. You will be redirected to the new Hub interface. To save your avatar, click Claim now and sign in with your email address. You will get a one-time login code that you need to type in the Hub. You can use the Hub to connect your avatars to available apps in the Discover Apps tab. To import your avatar into a new app, all you need to do is click Connect avatar (some applications may require a few extra steps).

We are getting ever closer to the dream of having a consistent avatar which you can use in multiple social VR platforms! Be sure to give the Ready Player Me Hub a try.

UPDATED! VRChat Launches Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me Avatar Creation System: Create a Humanoid Avatar from A Selfie in Just Minutes!

Launching officially today, Wednesday, February 24th, 2021, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time, Wolf3D‘s Ready Player Me avatar maker now supports importing avatars into the popular VRChat platform!

VRChat integration was always among the most requested features from the users of Ready Player Me. The avatar creator allows for generating a 3D avatar based on a single selfie. Users can select from 200 customization options, including outfits, hairstyles, and tattoos. Wolf3D set as a goal to bring the same set of personalization and customization options to their VRChat avatar creator.

Starting today, the VRChat community can create personal 3D avatars based on a selfie and use them in VRChat on both PC and Oculus Quest versions of the game. Ready Player Me avatars are compatible with AV3, allowing players to use the platform’s new expressions system.

For many, creating an avatar in VRChat is both a daunting and very important task. We’re excited to work with Wolf3D to help make avatar creation easier and more accessible for everyone in the VRChat universe!

—Graham Gaylor, Co-Founder & CEO of VRChat

Like full-body Ready Player Me avatars, all users need to do is upload a selfie. The company’s machine learning algorithm (based on 20,000 high-resolution facial scans) will generate a 3D model based on the photo. It’s possible to skip this step and go directly to the avatar maker if the user doesn’t want to share their photo.

Here’s a brief video on how to create an avatar using Ready Player Me:

To get started, simply head over to https://readyplayer.me/vrchat. Have fun! For more details, please see the official press release from Wolf3D.

UPDATE March 1st, 2021: Timmu Tõke, the CEO of WOlf3D, reported in an email:

In the first 24 hours, the VRChat community has created over 20,000 Ready Player Me avatars, peaking at 30 avatars per second and almost melting our servers (for real). We were featured on Road to VR, UploadVR, VRFocus, and many more.

Congratulations to Timmu and his team on their successful launch!