My Life Running a Tower Unite Art Gallery, by Mangcho
Tower Unite is a social MMO in which you design and furnish virtual condos. It plays like a cross between VRChat and Animal Crossing--you win minigames for in-game cash, use the cash to buy furniture and condo styles, and invite others to visit your creations. Some of these creations are remarkable setpieces, where the default condo structure has been transformed into a haunted castle, a fleet of sailing ships, a junkyard filled with rusting supertankers, or a hellish highway. A feature lending itself to this creativity is the canvas object. You can buy a shape, such as a rectangle or pyramid, and set its texture to display an image from the internet. From a decorating standpoint, the possibilities are vast, ranging from the vulgar to the tasteful, from the sacred to the profane.
In my time with TU, I saw not only a game, but opportunities for making money. Where people gather, there's a market, and if you can give them something they want, they'll buy it. After experimenting with different ventures and failing to make anything on them, I settled on running an art gallery, and learned a few things about business in a very short time. Let me share them with you.
We'll look at my bigger failures first. When I started looking at TU as a job, entertainment immediately came to mind. Stand-up, comedy skits and podcasts seemed like good fits, but after building a few sets and hosting a few open mics, I realized the game's design held back the potential. Aside from having to wrestle with the interface, a big factor was the camera. Your character serves as the camera's focal point at all times, making good composition next to impossible. And viewers don't like watching everything from just one angle. Designing the set around these limitations didn't help much, either, and that's when I realized the key to everything:
If someone else can provide the same kind of thing you do, for less time, cost, or hassle, people will buy it from THEM.
Even at my best, the amusement I gave was weakened by the platform. An audio file of a podcast would give the same level of engagement as a TU talk, with fewer awkward silences as visitors stumbled into the set, wandered around looking for a place to sit, and pressed a button to activate their microphone. Likewise, it's hard to tell if your standup jokes are landing when people's mics are on push-to-talk. These "interface hurdles" took guests, and myself, out of the experience and forced us to rack focus back to the subject matter.
After several months, I scrapped the live entertainment and started doing research. My first question was, what kind of condos get the most attention? And my second was: what similar thing are those condos failing to provide? After looking into it, I came back with answers to both questions: Number 1: Porn condos; Number 2: Art that isn't porn.
The project started taking shape in my mind. Using the "Highrise" condo template, I painted and furnished the place into a gallery, to show off what people were making around the game and other places. There wouldn't be porn, but works I considered unique and made with integrity. Viewing benches were positioned, canvases hung and linked to the artwork, and I made plaques for the artists' names and websites in MSPaint. All the images were hosted on a private Discord server and linked to TU from there. I was even visiting other condos of artistic merit, taking snapshots, and hanging them in their own room, a different condo owner featured every two weeks or so. I even had a "Twitter Comedy" garden outside, with screenshots of tweets and memes lining the brick paths. Entire floors, staircases and balconies were added. In the basement, I was designing palatial apartments from scratch for friends, as mini "tribute" versions of their own condos. I even filled in the pool for more room. With enough buzz and new exhibits, I figured it was only a matter of time before I could monetize my Discord server and get dollars for hanging. Unknown artists would get exposure and commissions, and Mangcho's ArtZone would be a permanent fixture.
By now, it should be clear I'm not giving exclusive trade secrets away, because my business model was flawed in all sorts of ways. I'm writing this as a lesson to digital entrepreneurs, not to list my achievements. These lessons aren't just for TU, they're good for anyone in sales. Let's delve into what I thought would happen, and what actually did.
Expectation: This is a business model that's been around since the salons of Paris. It's ironclad.
Reality: If that were true, the salons would still be bustling marketplaces, filled with wealthy prospects and masterful artisans, jockeying for the best price. Sadly, galleries today aren't like this at all. They invariably take government grants, and most fine art is private viewing only. The galleries that are marketplaces are not interested in seeing millenials dabble. Your target market is 98% kids who bought a social MMO for $15. If they were interested in paying money they'd have gotten a job by now. Times change, and so do business models. There are no governments handing out grants to TU servers, and the wealthy have a video game called My Exciting Life to play.
Expectation: Having lots of free things to enchant people with means they're more likely to buy your service.
Reality: It means they gobble up the freebies and leave once they're full. If you're a fun enough host and make an impact on some of them, they might donate to your tip jar (Patreon, SubscribeStar etc.), but that's paying you for making a fun hangout, not for hosting their work. Why would artists pay to decorate your condo with their work, only for you to get tips from visitors? You should be paying them for making your condo cooler!
One way to fix this is to give some of the tips back to artists. But how do you divide the tips? Should every artist get the same amount, or the most skilled? How do you define "most skilled"? What if you're hosting your own work to fill in gaps, does that entitle you to a cut? You can see how complex it gets. Setting a metric for how much traffic an artist gives you is next to impossible, unless you have tip jars for each artist. And you don't, so you can't.
Expectation: I need to generate enthusiasm before I charge money.
Reality: A Tower Unite condo has a visitor cap, and you need strong bandwidth and PC specs to keep your condo from crashing due to heavy load. Given this, "generating enthusiasm" costs money, and it needs to come from somewhere. What's worse, if you're not charging for hosting and then suddenly you are, people will get disappointed. If you got tough on selling your space at the beginning, it would set the tone and nobody would have room to complain later.
Expectation: I don't need to charge admission to see the art, only to host it.
Reality: The client isn't going to pay you for hosting if they're not getting great exposure. If you're getting 30 visitors a day and your gallery hosts art from 100 unique artists, the likelihood of just 1 visitor contacting 1 artist for a commission is extremely low. Now consider all the art sites out there who can net the artist hundreds of views a day, provided they have the skill. How many commission requests will they get from that batch? Probably a lot more than you can provide.
Another dilemma: You need to manually open your condo and be present there for people to join it. There is no passive income solution. And if you're not online all the time, cabitzing and schmoozing and adding new installations, people will get bored, your artists won't get the exposure they want, and they'll stop paying you.
Expectation: The interactive/social element of my business is what makes it better than my competitors.
Reality: Except, of course, the business of viewing art is just as passive in a 3D virtual space as it is on a website. If anything, the social aspect is a distraction rather than an enhancement, as people will focus on each other, and treat the canvases around them as window dressing for your cool, virtual party.
Expectation: I'm giving the people who don't want to look at porn an alternative.
Reality: And that's good and noble. We need more people doing that. Unfortunately, making money from this idea (outside of a tip jar) isn't on the table. On TU, the porn alternatives people want are either 1) watching videos together, 2) listening to music together, 3) playing games, or 4) talking about things. If you can accomplish these in a virtual art gallery that pays homage to artists, and collect tips from people who value what you do, congrats, you've got a coffee fund. Make something really wild out of your condo and you might even have a secondary income.
Funny story: After running the gallery for a week, people would join it hoping to find porn. Apparently many porn servers turn the porn into a scavenger hunt--the host makes the canvas or TV displaying it tiny, and hides it somewhere in the condo. When a guest finds it, the host resizes the canvas or TV and everyone views it together. When I told these visitors I didn't have any porn, they immediately left, usually after making a nasty little parting shot. I decided to have a little fun with them (they were dealing with Mangcho, after all) and play a game of my own. I put two beach balls in the condo basement, under some stairs. When a kid logged on, zoomed through the gallery and asked me if I had any porn, I told them about the "balls room" in the basement. They'd rush down there and ask where the porn was. I'd play a game of hot and cold with them ("getting warmer...getting colder") until they found the beach balls. When they found them, I'd say, "You found it! You found the balls!" And throw them at the kid. Moral of story: make sure they don't have a microphone first. Hearing a 13 year-old social outcast screech about porn isn't a great way to spend an afternoon.
Expectation: If enough people are in a place, at least one of them will buy from you.
Reality: People are fickle creatures when it comes to art. You could find art that speaks to you deeply, hang it on the wall, and tell 500 people about it. That 500 people may even stop by. Will even one of them love it? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe they'll think it looks good but never contact the artist, which is the point of hosting it in the first place. Remember, it's not the visitors buying space, but the artists. A big number of guests is no guarantee of sales, especially when the artists may never even set foot in your gallery.
If this all sounds like I'm dissuading you from running a Tower Unite gallery yourself, it's because I am. Much like how 3D "menu rooms" in video games died out in the 1990s, the mechanics aren't quite there to run a 3D website, even if the fundamentals are in place. When an art site can handle the same demands as a virtual gallery with less hassle, you're better off turning your cushy virtual pad into a wacked-out art installation than renting out canvases. There's a lot of potential to make money through TU, but the developers don't seem too interested in making it any easier. So long as people keep experimenting with what's possible, and improve on what's there, who knows--maybe VR standup really will be the next big thing.