I Tell Vice Why VRChat Has Gone Viral While Social VR Platforms Like Sansar & High Fidelity Have Not

Really good Vice article by Matthew Gault, giving an in-depth view of the madness, virality (and yes, unchecked racism and misogyny) that is VRChat. Matthew asked me why VRChat has gone viral where other social VR platforms haven't:

"VRChat seems to be taking off due to three factors that contributed to a perfect storm of viral growth,” Wagner James Au, author of The Making of Second Life and the social VR blog New World Notes, told me over email. “[It] lets users upload their own avatars via a Unity SDK [a popular and accessible game making tool], and has a basic physics engine,” he said. “[It] can be accessed without having to wear a VR headset, enabling more gamers to join in on the fun. YouTube and Twitch streamers discovered this potential for freeform, grabass anarchy and went nuts creating lots of VRChat-based videos that quickly went viral.”

More than anything, VRChat reminds me most of the very early days of Second Life (2003-2005), when much of the main activity and excitement happened in the free build sandbox areas, where people would collaborate on all kinds of impromptu, wacky creativity. (While Linden Lab did a better job keeping the user abuse down to a dull roar.) Contrast this with local favorites High Fidelity (with a daily peak concurrency under 10 people) and Sansar (which by Linden Lab CEO's own admission, is "still low"):

He pointed to Second Life developer Linden Lab’s Sansar as an example of another social VR app. It's developing high quality movie tie-ins and corporate education software such as recreation’s of sets from the upcoming Ready Player One movie. There's also High Fidelity, a VR program focusing on high quality images and blockchain backed market.

“Most gamers don’t care about all that,” Au said. “They just want to jump in immediately, start playing around with the system, cause and enjoy chaos, and have fun with each other.”

Much more here.

Comments

[Masami Kuramoto]

VRChat is fun because the copyright police hasn't discovered it yet. I watched some VRChat footage on YouTube and spotted several copyrighted characters within the first minute (Yoda, Mickey Mouse, Shrek, Batman etc.). It's just a matter of time until someone decides to crack down on that, and then the party will be over. VRChat doesn't seem to have a revenue stream at the moment, so they probably can't afford adding more and more servers while processing DMCA takedowns as well.