As most of the Content Creating community knows, on June 8th, an issue rose about the use of dynamic content on product pages - things like coding from YouTube.com, Slide.com and other various 3rd party websites. In order to address the problem, IMVU decided upon taking the ability to use such coding from non-Pro developers on June 11th.

The use of dynamic content is officially back for both Pro and non-Pro alike as per the post by Senior Community Manager, Jamidiaz in the official IMVU blog post Product Detail Page Update. It's great news, but for the Pro developers who have continued to use their fancy codes the last couple of weeks, a new challenges has risen.

As seen in the next image, courtesy of the Official IMVU Blog, you can see that all coding is now restricted to IMVU's original description box. Personally, I'm shocked that it took this long for IMVU to take the ability to decorate our product pages away from us.


My standpoint is that I have been creating on IMVU long before users like DeMo, Ange, Lollirot and myself started the product decorating trend. I made my mark on IMVU without the use of fancy coding and I believe that it is possible to make a name for yourself here without the e-glitter. However, some developers are still upset over the loss of their hard work, special product page graphics and marketing aspects - enough so that many are calling it quits.

My word of advice - Don't just quit. I started developing because I enjoyed doing it. That should be your main concern. If nothing else, view this change as a leveling of the playing field. Sell your talent and your products - not your fancy product pages.

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?