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Avatar designer emerges as lucrative career option in China as age of the metaverse dawns

(People's Daily Online) 18:13, June 24, 2022

A man surnamed Chen in Shenzhen, south China’s Guangdong Province, has a lucrative sideline job working as an avatar designer for a social media platform to create personalized avatars for its users.

A designer creates an avatar on her computer. (Photo/Science and Technology Daily)

The unit price of the virtual avatars designed by Chen varies from 30 yuan (about $4.47) to 80 yuan on Soul, a popular Chinese metaverse social networking app. “Some users need customized avatars, and such customized avatars are priced from 200 yuan to as much as 2,000 yuan,” Chen said, adding that the money he has earned from creating the avatars even outpaced the salary earned from his regular full-time job.

More and more social platforms and games allow users to create their own avatars with elements that include different choices of faces, hairstyles and clothes as provided, but many users will seek out a unique and personalized avatar to better express themselves. Under such circumstances, the profession of avatar designer was born.

A customized avatar can be personalized based on the requirements of an individual user, including selecting from among over 100 kinds of hairstyles, different hair colors, headwear, and the finer details of the avatar’s face, including its nose, eyes and eyebrows. Chen pointed out that having a good imagination and a sense of creativity are necessary to create an avatar.

Chen began to create avatars for users on Soul three years ago. With his painting skills, the young man was able to create highly-detailed avatars and gradually attracted an increasing number of users on the platform who asked him to create personalized avatars for them with an offer of paying for the service.

Soul so far has signed contracts with more than 80 avatar designers, including Chen. It’s reported that top avatar designers on the platform can earn nearly 40,000 or 50,000 yuan per month.

Many stores on an online Chinese shopping platform sell customized avatar products, with the unit price ranging from 5 yuan to 500 yuan. Some popular stores have seen more than 1,000 people place orders in all for their avatars.

“Creating personalized virtual avatars for users can provide them with a more immersive experience. Therefore, many users are willing to pay for a finely-made avatar,” said Wang Yang, art director of Faceunity Technology, a metaverse builder based in Hangzhou, capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province. The company began to invest in virtual avatar technology in 2016.

Wang added that avatars represent the virtual identity of people entering the metaverse, and customized avatars therefore enjoy a great market potential.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Du Mingming)

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