We've been receiving a lot of questions about Ready Player Me and NFTs. This post will give you an overview of our thinking and clarity around our plans for the future.
First, let me make this very clear: Ready Player Me is for everyone. We will never be a priced-out, exclusive community only accessible to a few. Our goal is to build an avatar platform everyone can use across the metaverse. Creating an RPM avatar will remain free forever. NFT adoption will be a matter of choice – no partners or end-users will be pushed to adopt. For those that opt-out of the NFT path, we will offer other types of virtual goods and ways to make an awesome and unique avatar.
Why are we doing this?
How we believe NFTs can help the Ready Player Me community.
- We help developers monetize. A significant part of the revenue generated from NFTs will be distributed to the apps and games using Ready Player Me avatars — based on where the assets are used. Companies using RPM will get paid for allowing NFTs into their worlds. This helps our partners monetize and supports building a more open and connected metaverse. Supporting NFTs is an opt-in for developers; some games and apps will support them, and others that don't. We will also offer tools for developers to sell "traditional" in-game assets and skins in their experiences.
- We help creators of NFTs make their virtual assets usable in the metaverse. One of the biggest challenges for anyone creating avatar-related digital assets is making your assets usable in virtual worlds. RPM can give creators access to hundreds of virtual worlds through our interoperable avatars. More creators making a living building for RPM avatars means more diverse and high-quality digital assets for everyone.
- It could be a great way for us to monetize as a company. This ensures we can keep Ready Player Me free for developers forever. We believe avatars are a key piece of the metaverse, and every developer should have access to a great avatar system for free.
What are we going to do?
Ready Player Me Curated Drops: Our team will build drops internally, sometimes in collaboration with an artist or a brand. The goal with these drops is to build high-quality assets and experiment with new concepts. The RPM Punks drop is an example of that.
Ready Player Me Partner Drops: We'll partner up with creators to give their assets real utility in the metaverse. The value of an avatar asset you can't wear in the metaverse is limited. We'll take a revenue share from the economy on our avatars and share 50% of that with the games and apps using RPM in their products. We can deliver NFT assets to non-blockchain games without developers having to do any additional work. This allows us to introduce new developers to the benefits of Web3. An example of a partner drop is Head5 by deadmau5.
Ready Player Me Airdrops: Offering free drops to our early community. This helps us reward our early supporters.
Avatars are a canvas for digital assets. The assets themselves can be accessories, clothing items, skins, or complete avatars. We're excited to see what people come up with!
Ready Player Me is not a digital fashion brand. We're building infrastructure to give developers an awesome avatar system, end-users a portable avatar, and digital fashion brands a way to make their assets usable in the metaverse. We will work on some drops ourselves, but our primary goal is to support other companies and projects building on our platform.
We're not planning to build our own NFT marketplace. We're open to integrating any existing marketplaces with RPM.
How did we get here?
We started Ready Player Me with a few core hypotheses on where the world is going:
- People will spend an increasing amount of time in virtual worlds in the future, represented as an avatar. This means our avatar representations are critical and will become an even bigger part of our lives over time.
- The metaverse is not a single app. It's a network of thousands of virtual worlds. Creating a new avatar for each world doesn't make sense. A portable virtual avatar that travels across virtual worlds is needed.
- The avatar economy grows as avatars become an increasingly important part of our daily lives. Adding portability to digital assets will make them more valuable than in today's mostly closed game economies. Would you rather pay for a skin that works in 1 or 1000 games? This is a major opportunity for creators to take part and make a living serving the avatar market.
We initially imagined the creator-driven avatar economy would look similar to the traditional skins and virtual goods marketplaces in games like Roblox. When NFTs blew up last year, we got curious. We started actively taking part in the market ourselves personally to learn and understand how this could help us achieve our mission.
The promise of NFTs is ownership and interoperability. This aligns well with where we believe the (virtual) world should be going. It makes sense for the population of the metaverse to own parts of the world they inhabit. Be it through NFTs or other ways, we believe this is true.
NFTs are still very new, and without a doubt, there are many problems with how they are implemented today. The speculation, high gas fees, the environmental impact, scams, etc. This is unfortunate, but we believe most of those problems will be solved as the market and technology mature.
We also believe we can avoid most of those downsides with our own drops. This includes covering the CO2 impact of our drops and using more environmentally friendly blockchains.
Conclusion
Ready Player Me is for everyone. No partners and end-users will be pushed to adopt NFTs. It's an optional part of the Ready Player Me platform for those interested in taking part.
We believe digital ownership of assets is a vital part of building a more open and connected metaverse. There are many ways this can help us build a better community and a better product for everyone involved.
We're incredibly excited to be on this path of learning and building with all of you. It's been a wild ride and it's about to become even more so. Please join us, let's build together.