Bigscreen Social VR Gets $11 Million from True Ventures Despite Tiny Usage

Here we go again:

Virtual reality remote desktop app Bigscreen has added $11 million in Series A funding to its pocketbooks as it looks to weather some waning investor interest in VR and build up its technologies while the VR headset market builds itself up. The round was led by True Ventures, with previous investor Andreessen Horowitz participating as well... The company announced in a blog post today that it now has more than a quarter-million registered users, also noting that its power users spend between 20-30+ hours in the app per week.

I sure hope that before getting out their checkbooks, True Ventures and Andreessen bothered to check Big Screen's Steam usage stats to note that via Steam, its peak daily concurrency is much less than 100 people, and that that figure hasn't even passed 150 folks in the last three months. (There are probably more people actually working at True Venture and Andreessen than actually use the product they just invested in!) For that matter, it would have been nice if TechCrunch's Lucas Matney had mentioned that low usage, rather than just uncritically report "the quarter-million registered users" figure the company is putting out, since it really just indicates a vast and yawning gap between those who registered to download the free software and those who actually use it.

See also: VR Chat getting $4 million with an even lower daily maximum concurrency.

I would say the deja vu goes all the way back 10 years, when companies like CBS and IBM were investing millions to turn Second Life into a more user friendly consumer and/or enterprise application. But Second Life's peak daily concurrency has always been in the five figures -- and not the double digits that this new wave of VR apps are getting, and still getting funding for.

Comments

[Pathfinder]

Strategy without tactics is the slowest path to victory.
Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

This is the latter.

[Clara Seller]

Well, in this day and age, I question anything that doesn't make sense. Investors don't generally throw millions at something that they can't obviously see a payoff for. Maybe they don't see this as something "for" our benefit. The public has pretty much said "no thanks". Maybe the big money will be paid if this can somehow be used "against" us. But they would never do that, would they?