With Scant Users, "Social VR" is Still Not Very Social (or Sociable) At All

I hope everyone developing Sansar and High Fidelity and every other social VR platform takes a look at these numbers and processes them. Click to embiggenate:

The LIVE VR Multiplayer Online List uses Steam's API to track active usage of any Steam-based game classified as multi-user VR. I took the screen cap at prime time hours last night, and as you can see, there's not even 1000 total users in the top 10 social VR games on Steam!  That includes widely-ballyhooed platforms like AltSpace VR, which doesn't have even ten total users in prime time. By contrast, top multiplayer Steam games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike regularly draw active users in the hundreds of thousands every hour. 

And yes, I know some/most of these games can be accessed without having to log into Steam (by far the largest PC game platform, with well over 100 million active users), but even if combined usage was 10x what we're seeing above, it would still be a tiny total. Remember, there's now about two million premium Oculus and Vive headsets on the market. But somehow, nearly none of those two million, despite so many options, use those headsets to be social.

Yo Ebbe Altberg, are you finally looking at these numbers I've been writing about for years?

Here's another recent data point, shared by a pro-VR subbreddit:

"25% of VR users on steam are playing Star Trek. 26.5% if you want to be accurate. 2704 VR users online and 718 of them are on Star Trek. That seems like a crazy high percentage of users! 1 out of 4 people playing VR tonight was playing this game."

He's talking about Star Trek: Bridge Crew, a new social VR game based on one of the most well-known franchises in the world... which is being played by less than 1000 people. More people in a single theater on a single screening saw the latest Star Trek movie. (And I'm not even getting into the fact that less than 3000 total people on Steam were using any kind of VR game/software, because that way lies madness.)

One small reason why social VR isn't used so much? Well, check out  these virginal dorks in Bridge Crew:

How many female fans of Star Trek who are also VR geeks (and there are not a few of these) will ever come back to Bridge Crew after something like that? (And as AltSpaceVR shows, this is not an isolated incident.) But as I said, this is a small reason within a much more fundamental set of problems for the unsocial nature of social VR.

Comments

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Kudos for "embiggenate". Made my day. Sometimes something hits you out of the blue and makes you smile.

[Robert Smith]

Wow, I hope Second Life continues for many more years. Seeing those numbers, it will always be preferable to continue in the RV that has survived for many years. Every time I see the SL Marketplace and see the section "What other residents are buying now" and see how quickly that changes every time I refresh my browser I think "Here the money moves and will continue to move as long as it is alive ". Maybe Linden Labs looking inside their own walls and compares hundreds of thousands of connected users and sees the tens of thousands that are always connected, you might think SL is at a low point. But if those tens of thousands of users who are always online are real players who come in to stay and not those who enter to dress and never return .... SL has much more life than we think.

[Pathfinder]

The "what percentage of Steam users have VR hardware?" stats on Steam are pretty telling, too.

https://i.gyazo.com/74e9a45e4f818f1d4196d9e73b01cfa2.png