Ready Player Me

» see readyplayer.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i have never had an avatar. The years when Ready Player Me mattered, 2021 into 2023, were the years when a great deal of serious money decided that everybody was about to need one, and i was not among the people that decision was made about. What interests me about this grave is not the face. It is the plumbing, which was genuinely good, and which is why the ending is worth writing down.

The company started in Tallinn in 2014 as Wolfprint 3D, four founders with a plan to put full-body scanning booths in shopping centers so people could walk out with a model of themselves. That business did not work. What survived it was the scanning and rigging code, and in 2021 the company renamed itself after the product it had built out of the wreckage.

Ready Player Me was a hosted avatar you made once. You gave it a selfie or picked from a set, it built a rigged 3D character, and then any developer could pull that same character into their own game through a free API. VRChat was among the early integrations. Within two years it had become the thing a small studio reached for instead of building a character creator, because building a character creator is six months of work nobody wants to do twice.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

The argument was interoperability, and in 2021 that word could raise money. If the metaverse was coming, it would need an identity layer that no single platform owned, and the company that supplied it would sit underneath everyone. Free for developers now, a business later.

Investors bought it. A seed round of $1.3 million in august 2020 was followed by $13 million at the end of 2021, and then $56 million in august 2022, which was very close to the top of that market. The money went into making the SDK work in Unity and Unreal, which it did, reliably, in a category where almost nothing worked reliably.

~ how it actually ended ~

Netflix bought the company in december 2025. Netflix has been building a games business for four years and wants players to have personas inside it, so acquiring a team that had already solved avatar creation is a sensible thing for Netflix to do.

Six weeks later, on 31 january 2026, the public service closed. The avatar creator went dark and the developer APIs stopped answering, with PlayerZero going the same way. The team and the technology are inside Netflix. The thing that made the technology valuable, which was that it belonged to nobody in particular, is not.

~ what breaks now ~

There is a clean line between the two kinds of user here. Anyone who exported their avatar to disk still has it, because the export format was GLB, which is standard glTF, and that file opens in Unity or Blender the same as it always did. Anyone whose app fetched the avatar from Ready Player Me's servers at runtime has nothing, and neither do their users.

So the lesson is the oldest one on this site wearing new clothes. An identity layer that lives at one company's endpoint is not an identity layer, it is a dependency. Ready Player Me spent five years arguing that avatars should be portable between platforms, and proved it by being portable right up until the afternoon the endpoint went away.

readyplayer.me has no DNS record at all now. Not a redirect to Netflix, not a farewell page. The domain that was supposed to be the address of your face across the whole internet simply stopped resolving.

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