These are news that will shake the fledgling virtual worlds scene:
Ryan Schultz wrote the following post Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:45:30 +0100 Metaverse Bombshell: NETFLIX Acquires Ready Player Me—What Does This Mean for Metaverse Platforms Using Ready Player Me Avatars?
https://ryanschultz.com/2025/12/22/metaverse-bombshell-netflix-acquires-ready-player-me-what-does-this-mean-for-metaverse-platforms-using-ready-player-me-avatars/ Now, there are lots of virtual worlds and virtual world systems where Ready Player Me avatars can be used. In VRChat, it's one of the most popular options, but still one out of many. In Vircadia and Overte, it's useful because these two have no built-in support for avatar creation whatsoever, because they still have more important things to take care of than avatar creation.
But then there are hundreds of small platforms like Spatial.io that have integrated Ready Player Me as their avatar-building system. As their only avatar-building system, because the extra effort of implementing an alternative wasn't worth the time and effort for the small team or the one sole developer behind it.
[spoiler=Content warning for the image: car]
The next player to integrate Ready Player Me will be Netflix for its gaming and social VR side. However, what Netflix is going to do is swallow Ready Player Me out entirely. It will be integrated into Netflix. The whole staff will be transferred to Netflix, for now anyway. And on January 31st, 2026, PlayerZero, the cross-platform avatar-making platform launched only a year ago, will be shut down.
This means that Netflix will not only integrate Ready Player Me. It will take Ready Player Me away from hundreds of smaller platforms at the same time, leaving them with no working source for avatars whatsoever and probably no avatars at all.
Seriously, this happens when you place all your bets on one single third party.
[spoiler=Content warning: eye contact, crying, anger]
Explanation:
The images are based on the following meme templates in this order:
Ready Player Me (
https://readyplayer.me/;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_Me) is known for various tools for creating fairly high-quality 3-D avatars for various uses. Their name is a play on Ernest Cline's 2011 novel about a 3-D virtual world and, more famously, Steven Spielberg's 2018 film adaptation.
Ready Player Me uses a large number of built-in assets plus artificial intelligence to build avatars. It can be integrated into other platforms, it has a dedicated avatar creator for the popular 3-D virtual world platform VRChat, and it can be used to export avatars for various standards.
Among developers of small virtual worlds and virtual world systems, it is popular because it can fairly easily be integrated into their systems, giving them quick and easy access to very versatile avatars on par with characters in modern-day video games. This saves them from developing their own avatar system, including rigging, configuration and outfitting, and from designing their own avatar components or waiting for their user community to supply these.
Such virtual worlds are actually fairly numerous. The COVID-19 pandemic with its social distancing provided fertile grounds for virtual worlds which would allow for interactions without real-life social restrictions. And Mark Zuckerberg's 2021 announcement to start his own virtual world kicked off a metaverse hype. Countless virtual reality and virtual world projects were launched in its wake.
Bigger players could afford to develop their own avatar engine and avatar-building system and usually also design their own avatar components. Small start-ups, on the other hand, lack the development capacities for that, as do non-profits and free and open-source projects. Some, like the decentralised virtual world systems Vircadia and Overte, require their users to generate their avatars in external tools, convert them to something that Vircadia and Overte understand and upload them on sufficiently fast servers.
Others made use of the solutions offered by Ready Player Me to integrate it directly into their worlds. This immediately gave them an avatar-building system along with all assets to build avatars from as Ready Player Me generates them on the fly.
There are other avatar providers like Ready Player Me, but Ready Player Me is the biggest and most well-known one by far. In fact, oftentimes, Ready Player Me must have been the only one of its kind known to virtual world developers. Even if not, they deemed integrating at least one more such provider an unnecessary effort. After all, Ready Player Me did what it was supposed to do.
One year ago, in December, 2024, Ready Player Me launched PlayerZero which can be integrated into virtual worlds and the like, too. The killer feature of PlayerZero is that users can create an avatar and use the self-same avatar in all virtual worlds that have PlayerZero implemented without ever having to remake it. In fact, generating the same avatar twice over is next to impossible, seeing as Ready Player Me has always been AI-powered.
With the takeover of Ready Player Me by Netflix, the latter will fully incorporate not only its staff, but also its technology and assets and make them available exclusively to Netflix products.
On January 31st, PlayerZero will be shut down which will immediately rob hundreds of virtual worlds of their entire avatar engine. Not only will users no longer be able to create new avatars, but even existing avatars will vanish along with the entire avatar engine, essentially breaking these virtual worlds altogether.
These worlds will have to choose: Either they find and integrate another avatar engine. This would take quite some time during which the whole world will remain essentially defunct, and then everyone will have to build new avatars. Or they develop their own avatar engine and either design their own avatar assets or also provide a way for their user community to make, upload and share avatar assets. This would take much more time, and it would require people talented enough to make avatar assets. Well, or they give up and shut down, and be it because they cannot survive for a prolonged period of time during which nobody can access them because nobody has an avatar anymore.
As hinted at in the fourth image, Second Life and worlds based on OpenSimulator, both from the 2000s, have a much more resilient avatar system. It doesn't even use assets built into the world engine. Instead, avatars are built in-world from content that first has to be acquired into the inventory. With only very few exceptions, this content is made and offered by users.
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