Have you ever created an avatar and felt underwhelmed with the customization possibilities? Perhaps a video game only offered a handful of skin tones, hair types, or facial features, none of which captured your unique style or look. Online giants like Facebook and Apple have pushed out their own versions: Facebook Avatar and Memoji. Both are somewhat bland, though, and lack the expressiveness, the attitude, that will attract users. That’s why other platforms are working with alternatives. Giphy is the latest company to partner with Genies, who recently updated their distinctive digital avatars from a 2D to a glorious 3D style. The time has never been better to give your virtual persona a makeover.
Can You Upgrade Your Avatar’s Appearance?
Giphy’s virtual avatar creators possess the market-tested feature of microtransactional customization options. While basic ways to customize your avatar, such as expression, skin and eye color, will be freely available, digital goods such as branded clothing may be offered for a small fee. Genies CEO Akash Nigam intends to use his app and its relationship with partners to create new marketplaces: virtual fitting rooms where users can design their own avatars and outfit them with digital goods. Goods, of course, that are sold at a modest price which Genies and its partners take a substantial cut of.
“Our big bet is on the digital goods economy. If it works well, we’d want it to be 99.9% [of our revenues],” Nigam says.
This is not necessarily hyperbole. Epic Games’ blockbuster game-cum-hangout area Fortnite is free-to-play but in 2018 and 2019 generated over $1 billion of revenue from in-game purchases of cosmetic upgrades — ‘skins’ — on mobile platforms alone. Home computers and games consoles are also substantial sources of revenue for the developer.
How to Properly Upgrade My Avatar
Genies has a new 3D avatar SDK (software development kit) available to partners seeking to upgrade their apps. Users can enjoy a branded avatar experience with thousands of digital clothing and accessory options. The SDK may be put to different uses depending on the partner and platform in question. Genies’ statement on SDKs follows: “Over time, these SDK partnerships will create a digital identity ecosystem where consumers can transport their avatar from platform to platform.” This ecosystem may be the precursor to the ‘Metaverse’, the virtual space that many tech enthusiasts believe is the next phase of the Internet’s evolution, and which has been discussed before by Nigam.
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