In a move to further propel the metaverse forward, Ready Player Me (RPM) is partnering with five brands—The Voice via Virtual Brand Group, Warner Music Group, Bravado, Rovio’s Angry Birds and McLaren Racing—for the launch of its new premium skins collection, a way to monetize the distribution of fashion items, which the company has been distributing on a basic level for free.

To which you might be wondering, “Why should I care?”

Because you care about the future of the Internet.

By building on its existing infrastructure of basic avatars, RPM’s foray into a premium marketplace—in partnership with five leading brands in the metaverse—signals a huge bet on the future of virtual fashion and how companies are viewing the value of avatars themselves.

“Ready Player Me is an avatar creation system that’s interoperable across 10,000 or more different games,” Virtual Brand Group chief executive officer Justin Hochberg said to me in a recent conversation. “The huge value to that is the same value we experience in the real world: You buy things to be able to use them wherever you want to use them.”

RPM’s move is thus inching us one step closer to normalized interoperability across different metaverse platforms, especially since there are many metaverse platforms that are not yet interoperable.

According to Hochberg, RPM’s model is built more in the vein of open source blockchain—buy it once, use it everywhere—which is different from Fortnite and Roblox where objects can only be used in game. With RPM, players are not limited to using skins only on specific platforms—costing players more money— but instead can use them freely across platforms.

“Gen Z and Alpha consumers are moving past being digital natives on 2D social media to ‘spatial natives’—playing, making relationships and buying 3D items in 3D worlds,” Hochberg said. “Designing a line of hyper-stylized The Voice merchandise that includes street wear, accessories and over-the-top high-performance fashion for Ready Player Me is how VBG creates new ways for them to uniquely express themselves because every Voice matters.”

Ready Player Me reaches over 50 million daily consumers, making it one of the largest metaverse platforms and now one of the largest brand retail sales channels. In addition to new monetization tools, developers can quickly start selling branded skins to their player base to encourage avatar personalization and grow revenue as a result.

“Interoperability is the key,” Hochberg said. “You get to create an avatar and use the same one wherever you are. I might have an avatar I want to use in a shooter game and an avatar I want to use in a dance game, but I still create it once, and I can use it wherever I want. To me, that mimics the way we all exist in the real world.”

He continued, “When you buy a pair of Nikes, you own the right to wear those Nikes wherever you want. If I told you you could only wear Nikes in Nike supported stadiums or at Nike supported events, how would you feel?”

Restricted, mostly. 

In this way, Ready Player Me is paving the way for a new era of digital fashion accessibility—where freedom of expression of your skins are less bound to the world in which you make your purchases and more available to the virtual worlds you choose to exist in.