Brief History of FaceRig
Facerig was born in 2014 as one of the very first software suites that enabled anyone with a webcam to digitally embody awesome avatars. A year later, we pioneered VTubing as we know it today by partnering with Live2D. We’ve loved seeing all the artwork and characters you’ve brought to life with FaceRig!
As much as we loved (and still love) FaceRig, we were facing a tough situation three years after launch, in 2017. We realized the future of FaceRig and its continual improvement just was not sustainable. The external team that developed FaceRig’s render and animation engine disbanded, making any further development on FaceRig a lot more challenging.
The world of avatars and VTubing has changed significantly since our 2014 Early Access launch. As larger companies began to enter the market, we saw innovation blossom but also censorship and control creep in.
To help overcome these challenges, in 2018, we secured capital from external like-minded investors and started building the new Animaze engine and technology from the ground up. Inspired by VR chat’s free base with optional subscription, we focused on a metaverse-centric, avatars-as-a-service paradigm, but built on an independent engine.
We were thrilled to launch Animaze on iOS in Autumn 2019 and PC in Autumn 2020. To the best of our knowledge, Animaze (and Facerig before it) is among the very few fully-featured avatar apps and tool suites out there powered by an indie engine. We consider our independence of great importance to guarantee freedom of speech for all avatar voices in the coming metaverse. In recent years we’ve seen big gaming companies silencing their e-sports champions as soon as they voiced opinions not aligning with the gaming company's best financial or political interests, underscoring the importance of an independent avatar solution. Of course, we’ve also seen similar controlling behavior from large social network companies.
Because building and testing an independent engine takes enormous focus and effort, and software support has a large cost, (particularly for custom avatar imports in a custom engine), we don’t have the resources to support the old FaceRig on its discontinued engine. As a result, we will stop selling new FaceRig licenses in 2022. Before that happens, though, we are holding one last goodbye sale for those of you who requested a final opportunity to own a bit of metaverse avatar history at a discount. At the end of this sale, FaceRig will no longer be available for purchase.
What’s going to happen to FaceRig ownership?
For those who already own FaceRig or get it during this sale: once purchased, you own it forever. FaceRig will stay in your Steam library and will likely remain just as usable as it is today. However, Holotech's entire development and support focus will be on Animaze. FaceRig will no longer be updated or patched.
What’s new with FaceRig’s spiritual successor, Animaze?
We designed Animaze to take your avatar communication to the next level. Holotech Studios team is continually working to improve Animaze. We’re releasing new features and content monthly. We also have folks monitoring the support[@]animaze[.]us inbox and ready to help on our Discord server ( https://animaze.tv/discord ) with any questions you may have on custom avatar creation, imports, app functionality or just avatars in general. You can play with Animaze on Steam for free. The free tier for casual use gives you access to our best face tracking library and all its advanced tracking settings, (even the iPhone based tracking is part of the free package) and a lot of free. ready-to-use, highly customizable avatars. If you would like to upgrade to a paid tier, the first term of ALL Animaze subscriptions is 50% off for Steam FaceRig users
