Virtual Reality moneymaking

Reading lots of Snow Crash has been fueling my mind for the future of VR lately. I’m picturing a world full of goods that only exist in a metaverse…a world only in VR. The scary thing is that we already have proof of a monetization model for virtual goods, spearheaded by virtual economies in video games.

In Team Fortress 2, Valve created a marketplace where players can buy, sell, and trade in-game items. I have an entire blog post on this, but the core concept works really well. Players are willing to pay lots of money for in-game cosmetic items and it’s generating a ton of revenue for the companies.

Soon, I think we’ll see a similar trend in VR. Imagine headsets that can render items of clothing onto other people. This could work well in real life with AR too. Colors, trends, and fashions could be changed on the fly at the press of a button. It’s on-demand fashion at its best. The best part about this is that it costs the companies nothing to make this stuff. No textile manufacturing, no go-to-market strategies, no display mannequins, and absolutely no overheard. Just some 3D modeling, rigging, and animation.

I can see it happening already. A sea of humans waddling slowly in TimesSquare, wearing bland workout clothes and headsets on their face, where all the “fashion” is inside the headset. People pay to buy virtual clothing items that can be swapped on-the-fly for different events. Third-party vendors churn out virtual clothes by the thousands on the app store.

Monetizing items in VR and AR is frighteningly easy. I’m actually concerned about the state that society would go into if this were to become a reality. Judging by the pace of things, it’s going to happen sooner than we think. All of this has proven to work to a scarily profitable level in video gaming, and if VR is the next level of full immersion on this scale, we either need to start considering the psychosocial implications of this or start emptying out our wallets by the hundreds.