Custom Shirts Marketplace: The First Step of a Grand Plan
The Economy Team at Rec Room just rolled out the marketplace features of one of our most ambitious projects - Custom Shirts!
Our team’s goal is to make Rec Room a place where our creators can be rewarded (and paid!) for the amazing things they make. Our grand ambition is to build a marketplace where our players make everything they can buy and wear. We believe there is a HUGE market opportunity if we get it right.
Since June of this year, RR+ members have been using the Clothing Customizer tool (found in their backpack) to create their own graphic tees to wear on their Rec Room avatars. Whatever markers, paintbrushes, or gizmos they can use to draw on a whiteboard or art canvas, they can now use to draw their own designs on the front and back of a t-shirt.
When we launched this feature, we were excited (and honestly a little nervous) to see what our players would create. We’ve really enjoyed seeing all of the different designs everyone has been making and wearing.
Like this cute custom shirt from Gen #9930 on Discord!
As we thought about this marketplace, we realized there are some hard problems to figure out. Here are the 4 biggest questions that we faced:
The Avatar Ink Question: How do we reduce ink costs for items players wear, to open up more possibilities for creators? Ink is how we measure the cost to render items, gizmos, costumes, etc in Rec Room. It’s important that the game looks good and runs smoothly across all rooms and on all of our devices, including all of our supported Android and iOS phones.
The Authoring Question: How do we make it easy enough for creators to author the things players wear? And make sure that we don’t lose the charm of what makes Rec Room look like Rec Room.
The Moderation Question: If we let our players make the things our players can wear ANYWHERE, how big of a bee hive are we unleashing on our moderators? There’s a big difference between managing rooms that players choose to go to, and moderating what people can wear in the Rec Center .
The Economy Question: How do we find the balance between enough of a free marketplace so our creators can experiment and enough regulation to avoid exploitation or a race to the bottom? It’s taken us a lot of experimentation to figure out how to best position and price what we sell in the Store (and we’re still figuring it out for ourselves).
But here’s the thing about how we go after hard problems at Rec Room: instead of spending many months trying to design (and guess) what might be the solution, we build something we can ship fast, so we can learn from our players what the solution should be.
This is why coming out with Custom Shirts felt like the perfect way to test our hypotheses for our grander ambition.
Let’s break it down question by question on why Custom Shirts felt like the right next step.
What Custom Shirts helps us learn about the Avatar Ink Question
Costumes were the first step towards building a way for our players to create what they wear
We’ve been testing creator made outfits ever since we released the Costume prop in rooms. It allowed us to get feedback from creators on what works (attaching shapes to the body parts of a mannequin works better than expected!) and what doesn’t work (costumes are way too expensive and hard to use for a lot of our players).
In order to make costumes wearable everywhere, we have a lot of work to do to manage their ink cost. So we asked ourselves, do we really need to go after this big technical problem to learn all the things we want to learn?
We love drawing on shirts in games like Animal Crossing: New Horizon, and that gave us an idea. What if we simplify the problem by starting with customizing the texturing on pre-defined clothing, like drawing on a graphic tee!
This decision to use textures had a few great benefits.
To make this work on our servers, all we needed to do is store a single 1 megapixel image for the front and back of each custom shirt.
Since each custom shirt uses the same base material and geometry, we have fewer concerns about the look of Rec Room changing too much if the Rec Center is filled with custom shirts.
To make this work in the game, we needed to solve how to display textures in an optimized way so we could have up to 40 different custom shirts in a single room.
This is a much easier problem than getting costumes to work across the game, but there were still some challenges of having this work across the 9 different platforms we support.
For example, we needed to ensure that wearing custom shirts didn’t cause performance issues on mobile devices. To show a custom shirt on an avatar, we need to compress the image on that shirt - a way for us to reduce the file size of that image. However, what happens if 40 people enter a room, all wearing custom shirts that we need to compress? Would the game crash?
We needed to answer this question before adding a way to make custom shirts. So, before we made the clothing customizer - or any kind of creation process - we needed a prototype!
Our first instinct was to grab an image, put it on a shirt, compress it, and see what happened. Because we didn’t have any drawn custom shirts yet, we decided to just use the player’s profile picture. Behold, the very first “custom shirt”
Truly horrifying
We repeated this process 40 times and did some profiling on it. Luckily, we found that the image compression didn’t cause any major problems. This gave us a good signal that once we added hand-drawn shirts into the game, we wouldn’t see any major changes in room performance.
What Custom Shirts helps us learn about the Authoring Question
Examples of some beautiful 2D art our players make using the existing drawing tools
We had confidence that a lot of different kinds of creators can make great 2D drawings on the art canvases that have been in Rec Room for years.
By making a graphic tee be a new kind of canvas, it made it super easy for a wide range of creators to get started. When we launched Custom Shirts, we were seeing compelling new avatar content almost immediately. In the first 41 hours, more than 71,000 shirts were published! At the peak there were more than 3,700 shirts created PER HOUR across approximately 1,000 unique RR+ players ! In the 4 months since the feature has been released, over 400k custom shirts have been published.
Since Custom Shirts was released in June of this year, over 400k custom shirts have been published.
If we launched a feature where customization required using a Makerpen to draw 3D shapes on a costume mannequin, there’s no way we would have attracted this magnitude of creation. Having more creators use the feature means we can learn more about what they want.
We want to get to a place where players can eventually use 3D shapes to create the things they wear, but since our end game is to create a rich ecosystem with a large variety of creators, it feels right that our first customization feature had a lower bar to entry.
The problem is that this lower bar to entry is what leads us to the next problem. Because it’s easier for creators to customize what they wear into the Rec Center, it’s also easier for bad actors to violate the Code of Conduct in a public room.
The Code of Conduct that all players agree to when they sign up
Why Custom Shirts helps us learn about the The Moderation Question
“We had a betting pool among the team on how many minutes it would take until an inappropriate shirt was published. For the curious, it was 8 minutes.”
From the first design doc, we knew that once we made it easy to draw anything on an avatar’s shirt, it would be a matter of minutes after releasing the feature that the first inappropriate shirt was published. We had a betting pool among the team on how many minutes it would be. For the curious, it was 8 minutes.
What we didn’t want is to overwhelm our moderation team with so many inappropriate shirts that we lose our community’s trust in our ability to maintain our Code of Conduct.
We weren’t sure the extent of how many bad actors would emerge, or what tools we would need to manage them. But we knew that avoiding the problem wasn’t an option if we wanted to go after the grander ambition.
We did a few things to manage the risk:
Only creators with a RR+ subscription could publish and wear shirts. We thought the players who are more bought in to Rec Room (literally) would be less likely to create content that violates the CoC. And for everyone who became an RR+ subscriber just so they could make an inappropriate shirt, thanks for helping pay our moderation team!
We wrote enough tooling so our moderation team could easily address issues as they are reported, our in-game moderators could have insta-ban hammers, and anyone who had a bad reputation or a custom shirt under moderation review would be disallowed from publishing any more shirts.
For our first release, we made it so our players could publish shirts that only they could wear. So if an inappropriate shirt appeared on our platform, it couldn’t easily spread to other players.
Of the 400k custom shirts created so far only around 1.7% shirts have been reported and moderated. That’s still higher than we would like (that’s about 6,800 shirts!), but within reason that our world class moderation team has been able to manage it. It’s also helped inform how to improve our tooling including helping us write a feature to automate moderation using the training data from the last four months.
Now that we’ve built up our moderating muscle for Custom Shirts, it’s given us confidence that we can take our next step. It’s time to build a creator-driven avatar economy!
Why Custom Shirts helps us learn about The Economy Problem
Shortly after we released the ability to make custom shirts in the dorm room, something really interesting happened.
^MorbMachine, a room that used the clothing customizer to print Morbius shirt designs using circuits and gizmos, started topping the charts. It became one of our most popular rooms within a day. This was a surprise to us for a couple of reasons:
We hadn’t intended for the clothing customizer to be usable outside of the dorm room, and
People were VERY excited about this room and the custom shirts it created.
^MorbMachine, along with other shirt-printing rooms, quickly became a hit on the platform. We proudly wore our Morbius shirts in-game. Every day was Morbin Time! But more than anything, this room helped us realize that we really needed a way for players to share their shirts with each other.
Proudly showing off a community made custom shirt from the ^MorbMachine room
Unfortunately, we found a bug that was causing a 10% increase in crashes. In order to fix this, we needed to stop initializing the customizer upon entering most rooms, meaning it could no longer be spawned outside of a dorm.
But this would break ^MorbMachine. None of us wanted to do that. We decided the best compromise would be allowing any rooms currently using the feature to continue using it, as long as they didn’t update the room. In the future, we may let creators turn on customizer spawning on a per-room basis, because we really don’t want these types of rooms to go away forever.
The viral success of ^MorbMachine and other custom shirt printing rooms has taught us a lot about the community. Rec Room players will always find a way to DIY. When custom shirts came out, we didn’t provide a marketplace to the community - the community did it themselves. That’s so cool!
We also learned a valuable lesson here: this feature is the start of a new type of Rec Room economy, so it’s important that we got the official marketplace right from the beginning.
Building a new economy is all about trust. If a creator utilizes their talent and spends their time to make a really cool item to sell, can they trust that they’ll be properly rewarded? If a player buys a custom shirt from the marketplace, can they trust they’re paying a fair amount? If a creator makes something that a lot of players want but it might have copyright material, can our creators and players trust that the situation will be handled appropriately?
We’ve worked hard to figure out pricing for the beautiful and engaging items our art team adds to the game. It’s been a challenge finding the right balance of setting an amount that players feel comfortable with, while also considering the business needs of the Rec Room team.
Launching the Custom Shirts marketplace is the first step towards handing off what we’ve learned to our creators.
In this next phase, these 3 potential pitfalls are keeping us up at night:
Creators might underprice their work which devalues their contribution to the platform. It also hurts other creators. Players will come to expect lower prices for high quality work, and it’s so hard to raise prices once those expectations are set.
If we allow everyone to start selling shirts, custom shirts might flood the market such that high quality work will get lost in the noise, and the sheer volume of supply will suppress value across the market.
We have a suspicion that many creators will make popular custom shirts with copyrighted material. The overhead of policing this kind of behavior could be unmanageable. Just like with moderation, if it goes unchecked, it will undercut the trust of an open marketplace.
To manage these pitfalls, we’re starting the market with a curated list of featured custom shirts. Creators can submit their shirts to be featured through the Ink Inc Discord (recroom.com/inkinc) in the #featured-custom-shirts channel.
We’re setting the minimum price of these featured shirts to 1,000 tokens and the maximum price to 10,000 tokens.
1,000 tokens is more expensive than the cheaper shirts we currently sell in the game store, but it is generally less expensive than the 5-star shirts with unique geometry and tie-ins to seasonal events & themes. We want creators to share in the success we've had selling avatar items, and a competitive price is a big part of helping make that happen.
This feels like the right amount to value the many hours our creators put into their work, and also keeps token prices within reason.
Our partnerships with creators and programs like Ink Inc have helped us understand better pricing for player made content - with Dorm Skins being the best example. We are continuing to listen to creator feedback and look at sales data to figure out how to make pricing work best for everyone.
By launching with a staff picked list, we will be able to manage how the marketplace starts off so we can grow trust among our creators and players. Just like with the moderation problem, we hope to learn what is working and what isn’t. Then we’ll gain the confidence to take it the next step - opening up the marketplace so players can buy directly from each other’s portfolios.
What’s Next?
Custom Shirts is the first step of a big plan to hand over content creation to our players. Over the next few months, we will learn a lot more about how to solve the 4 problems we talked about above. We’re also expecting to find new problems we haven’t even considered. How it all goes will inform what we ship next so we can keep learning and keep trust strong.
These are big problems that don’t have straightforward solutions. We can’t easily apply the same real world economy playbooks to a social gaming platform like Rec Room. We’re writing a new playbook as we pioneer trusted transactions in a player created game. It’s a daunting problem, but being on a frontier like this, defining what the marketplaces of the future will look like, is the reason why we joined the Econ Team.
Interested in joining us? We are hiring!
Econ Team Senior Software Engineer
Or take a look at other opportunities at Rec Room.