4 Ways How Your Game Can Benefit From Custom Avatar Outfits

Ready Player Me Avatar Creator comes with thousands of diverse avatar customization options built-in. It features original content created by our in-house art team and outfits from brands like BMW, New Balance, and Pull&Bear. But as vast as our own content library can be, developers sometimes need avatar assets that better fit their app’s visual style and user preferences.

Last year, we released tools to empower developers to create custom content. Starting with the release of Asset Manager, we made it possible to upload custom avatar outfits to your apps and games. Later, Asset Designer and AI texture made creating avatar wearables as simple as selecting an outfit piece, picking a style, and pressing Generate.

Support for custom content was, by far, the most requested feature by developers using Ready Player Me. Hundreds of our partners have already utilized Asset Manager and the rest of the custom content toolset to bring unique avatar outfits to their apps or games.

Let’s explore why you should start creating custom avatar content for your app or game and how our partners have utilized new custom content tools to engage their users better.

How can your game benefit from custom content?

It doesn't matter if you're building a corporate meeting tool or a shooter game — custom avatar content can significantly impact user engagement, acquisition, retention, and revenue. Here are a few ways that you may improve your app by providing unique avatar customization options to your users.

Acquire new users and reward existing ones with custom content

Growing a user base from scratch can be challenging, but custom content can help. For example, you could create a referral system. When an existing user successfully invites their friend to your app, they both could unlock special avatar outfits. This could encourage other players to do the same to unlock the rewards.

You can apply the same idea to a ranking or achievements system, having players unlock new customization options as they progress in your game. Ready Player Me already lets you unlock assets through API calls, which makes setting up a rewards system a breeze.

Increase user immersion with outfits that fit your app experience

Custom avatar content should be on top of your priority list if you aim for your app or game to have a specific theme or style. Whether you're building a medieval social platform or a sci-fi virtual meeting app, bespoke avatar wearables will help your users immerse themselves in the theme of your world.

Building a virtual content catalog is a must for brands trying to establish a presence in virtual worlds. Companies like Tommy Hilfiger, Adidas, and BMW have already achieved that, opening an entirely new channel for customer engagement and exploring new commercial opportunities.

Monetize with premium avatar skins

Custom avatar content can also be the next revenue stream for your app or game. Many users are willing to pay for premium customization options that will make them stand out from the others. They are often also more likely to purchase content familiar to them, such as merchandise that features their favorite music band or sports team.

Premium Skins Catalog lets you sell branded avatar wearables from global brands directly in your app. Currently, we work with Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, The Voice, Angry Birds, McLaren Racing, and Manchester City — with more partners to come soon. You can request early access here.

Improve user engagement and retention with inclusive content

No one knows your users better than you do. Creating your own asset collection based on your users' feedback and preferences is an opportunity to create a more accessible and inclusive environment. It's your chance to show involvement in your community and understand its needs and social interactions. Building content around that can result in your users being more involved as well as higher engagement and retention rates.

How Ready Player Me partners use custom content in their apps

Since we introduced custom content tools, hundreds of developers integrating Ready Player Me have used them to enrich their avatar outfits libraries.

Metaverser: creating exclusive outfits for clan members

Metaverser is a virtual world platform allowing players to explore, create, and interact in a vast, immersive 3D environment. During their Battle of Clans: Zombie Challenge, they set out to design dedicated outfits for each participating clan. The initiative motivated new players to join or create a new clan to get an exclusive avatar outfit.

“The fact that members of each clan can have their own dedicated outfits is very appealing to them. It has become a significant motivation for new players not yet clan members to inquire how to acquire the outfit.”

Metaverser used AI texture in Asset Designer to create the initial outfit design. Then, they downloaded the AI-generated textures and added a unique clan logo in graphic design software. Once ready, they uploaded the asset back to Asset Designer. The whole process took just a few minutes for each clan and didn’t require any 3D design tools.

Custom avatar outfits allowed Metaverser to make their in-game event more engaging and incentivized players to join or form new clans.

Virtex Stadium: letting fans show their support

Virtex Stadium lets you experience live gameplay and virtual events like never before by allowing you to place yourself in the middle of the action. The addition of custom content to Ready Player Me has enabled Virtex to increase user engagement in their esports community:

“During virtual events, fans can dress their avatars in outfits representing their idols and teams, allowing them to feel as immersed in the virtual space as they would at an in-person event.”

Besides creating Virtex-branded outfits, the company has worked with esports teams and their partner brands to create virtual merchandise, generating hype and exposure during virtual events.

Virtex’s primary focus is to create custom full-body avatar outfits, hence why the company has been using Asset Manager and uploading outfits made in 3D design software.

“Our content creation pipeline involves using Marvelous Designer and Blender for crafting outfits. Once the designs are complete, we integrate them using the Asset Manager, and they are then brought to life in our app using Unreal Engine.”

Banter by SideQuest: rewarding users with Hero Characters

Banter is a physics-based social VR app from the VR content platform SideQuest. The platform offers a virtual hangout space for the SideQuest community and beyond and lets content creators express their creativity by creating new playable experiences.

Avatars’ appearance is crucial for SideQuest in enhancing the user experience of Banter. The company has found recently-added Hero Characters to be particularly important in this area:

“Hero Characters [...] allowed us to unleash creativity and offer a wide range of unique avatar designs, making the game more engaging and visually appealing. [...] The introduction of custom avatar outfits had a positive impact on user engagement and the overall experience on our platform. It enabled us to design themed outfits and avatars that align well with Banter's environment.”

With the help of the Avatar API assets endpoints, SideQuest have used custom content as a way to reward Banter players during in-game events:

“[...] the outfit management feature allowed us to offer exclusive avatar items as rewards for competition winners, which has been very effective in encouraging participation and enhancing the sense of achievement among users.”

Thanks to the Asset Manager and the Blender validation tool, SideQuest have easily integrated custom content creation into their pipeline:

“Content creation with Asset Manager was initially a learning curve, but it became more manageable with the help of a Blender Add-on that streamlined the naming process.”

How to create custom content for your app or game

Now you know how custom avatar outfits can improve your app or game. Let’s dive into how you can create some custom assets yourself! And don’t worry — you don’t need to be a 3D designer or even know how to use Photoshop.

Use Asset Manager to bring custom content to your app

You will find everything you need to create custom content in Asset Manager. You will need a Ready Player Me Studio account to access it. Asset Manager is divided into two sections:

• Add & Manage – add new assets, change their details, and assign them your apps;
• Configure – toggle assets' visibility, change their order in the Avatar Creator, and set default full-body outfits.

If you're looking for the most creative freedom and are comfortable with 3D design tools, you can create an outfit from scratch using tools like Blender. For your custom asset to work with Ready Player Me avatars, it needs to meet our technical specifications and work well in your app. The latest requirements, guidelines, and step-by-step instructions are in our custom content docs.

Asset Manager now also supports Hero Characters — completely custom avatars, from head to toe.

Use Asset Designer to upload or generate custom outfit textures

As great as creating completely custom avatar content can be, it still requires some extra time and knowledge of 3D design tools. That's why we have created Asset Designer, which lets you create custom textures for various outfit pieces (shirts, pants, shoes) in as little as 10 seconds. You have two options:

• Custom texture – design your own pattern based on a template in PSD-compatible graphic design software like Photoshop;
• AI texture – generate patterns in a specific style or based on a text prompt using geometry-aware generative AI (learn how it works here).

You can even combine the two options by creating the initial design using AI texture. Then edit the texture file in graphic design software and upload it back to Asset Design as a custom texture.

You can learn more about creating avatar outfit pieces using Asset Manager in our docs.

Get started with Ready Player Me

Ready Player Me offers a complete avatar system for your app or game. From our easy-to-integrate Avatar Creator to custom content creation tools that we covered above. Get started for free here.