Product & Content Request Forum

The Product & Content Request Forum (also known as PACR) is a great forum where users can request specially made and often personalized items of the community - either to be submitted in the catalog by its creator, or sold in exchange for credits to the requester for their own use. It's a large money making opportunity for a lot of people within the community - especially if you are a big name developer looking to make a little cash on the side.

But at what point is enough enough? There are literally hundreds of these "file sale" threads plauging what was once the place to go to ask someone to make you a custom skin or a pair of shoes. At what point will IMVU put their foot down and give us a forum specifically for selling files? - or dare I say it... do away with file selling all together.

We saw it happen with account selling. It started off simply being frowned upon by the company and it soon lead to it being banned within the forums, causing many users to create their own off-site forums in which to sell and trade accounts with other users. Soon after, it was written in the Terms of Service that exchanging accounts was illegal. Heck now you can't even give the darn thing away!

How much longer will IMVU allow us to sell files? Time will tell I guess, but I see the end drawing very near. That's bad news for a developer like myself who makes more money these days selling files of odds, ends and whatever else to aspiring developers than I do selling products I submit to the catalog.

It's not just the hundreds of file sale threads that are the issue. As with anything great, someone has to ruin it. The trend as of late is to steal files or purchase and "edit" files only to turn around and sell them to unsuspecting customers. And we aren't just stealing from one another any more. Even big name developers have been recently discovered to be selling files made for other virtual worlds such as The Sims or Second Life. They are pulling freebie files from places like Renderosity and throwing them into nifty packages and pawning them off as their own work. Makes you wonder how much longer it'll be before we see those people with a nasty lawsuit on their hands. And it can and will happen. The websites stolen from won't care that these unsuspecting customers purchased the files from someone else. All they care about is that their work is being used illegally and they will have every right to slap a lawsuit on anyone they want.

Is PACR doomed? Is there time for us to pull our act together and save what was once an excellent business opportunity?