This review is based on over 4 years experience with IMVU Inc. My standing with IMVU is as a developer, customer, and parent. The most recent activity I have viewed that impacts all levels of my experience as a user is what I will review here.
The sheer amount of neglect and direct disregard for their users needs is only surpassed by the incredibly disconcerting customer service. I have logged customer support requests for several reasons and some have yet to be responded to. There are three still pending from two years ago. One more recent customer service request I made was in regards to their Daily Outfit Challenge in which a naked avatar was on the second page. It took 6 weeks for them to respond and the only comment made to me regarding the matter was that it was being looked into. Six weeks is a great deal of time for small children to view such nudity.
IMVU claims to be in Beta yet has been open to the public for more than 5 years. This is a clear misrepresentation to avoid potential charges by users in regard to their false claims pertaining to their services.
Recently, November 2009, IMVU imposed a fraudulent program without notifying any of their user base as to the intentions they had. They added products, which they chose from their business partners, and propagated them to wishlists of those users that had no products on their lists. They hid this fact from the users to prevent them from removing the said business partners products. Many users purchased these items with IMVU Credits, the IMVU virtual currency which is purchased with real world money, for friends and relatives not realizing that the user did not wish to own those products as the wishlist indicated that the user had chosen the items.
This was a deliberate action as they indicated 4 days after the fact that it was an intentional move to 'avoid anyone not having a wishlist'. The products are poorly made and several of the products on the list are NOT general audience as they go against the very Virtual Goods Policy that IMVU claims to enforce. There was no way to contact anyone at IMVU Inc. as they implemented this program on a weekend, which most of these types of things they do, so that nothing could be dealt with until the following week. This is a consistent method that IMVU Inc. uses to ensure that they receive at least a few days of monetary income from programs they know will upset their users.
These products have now been forced to a new location with a tag that states they are recommended by IMVU, however, they have not removed the products that violate their own Virtual Goods Policy.
To add to this issue, only specific products are on this list and not rotated between the hundreds of other developers on the IMVU website which create content for them. This is a corporate monopoly which misrepresents the goods available in the product catalogue. These products can also be purchased repeatedly as, although the product may already be in the inventory of the user it was purchased for it is replaced repeatedly until the recipient added other products to their list. Many of the complaints made in the IMVU forums regarding this matter were that not only were users receiving items they did not wish to own but also receiving it multiple times. Clothing items cannot be used more than once at a time so this means that any additional purchases of said products only manage to waste the givers money.
Approximately a year ago another such program was implemented where IMVU Inc. changed the retail pricing for new users without informing them or anyone else that they would be doing so. The fluctuation they used could charge someone anywhere from 300% above or below the actual retail price of the product the new user was viewing in the catalogue. They did this without any warning to anyone and claimed later it was a test to see how new users would react to varying prices. They did not warn the new users of this fact, allowing them to choose for themselves if they wished to participate in such a 'test'. They did this as a blind test which caused many new users to not return to the site due to the sheer cost of purchasing the IMVU credits with real world money to afford the products they wished to own. This hurt the user based development community financially as well as implied that many of the user developers were grossly over charging for their products which prevented many of them from getting future sales from the new users signing up.
Over the past year the sheer amount of users that have had their accounts disabled without explanation as to why has been beyond comprehension. When asked for information as to what caused their account to be disabled it can take weeks, even months, to get a response from customer service, when a reply is actually given. There were many that were improperly disabled due to a 'bug' in their programming which falsely indicated that the user in question either posted or approved an 'Unfit for IMVU' (otherwise known as a UFI) product to the catalogue. There were no apologies or restitution made to those that lost business and products due to this incident. Unfortunately, this activity is still going on to this day.
I do not recommend IMVU to anyone, of any age. The issues I have mentioned here are only a small portion of the poor business practices shown by IMVU Inc. over the years I have been a member.
