VRChat Runaway Growth Hit a Daily Peak Concurrency Plateau?

Sure seems so, judging by its performance over the last few weeks. Buoyed by rude, crude YouTube/Twitch videos and memes, the free social VR platform doubled its daily peak concurrency from December to January to 15,000, then reached a peak of around 20,000 in mid-January. But last Sunday (typically the busiest day for social VR), VRChat's daily peak was down to around 15,0000. (Click the SteamDB chart at right to embiggenate) We'll have more clarity based on next Sunday's performance, but it's likely the world has settled into a decent groove of user activity. That might not be a reflection of plateauing user interest, as opposed to scaling and other challenges -- according to a company blog post last week, staff had to deal with a potential malware threat, while also working to keep up with consumer demand:

Please be patient with us (and our response times!) while we continue to work hard on major updates to provide increased security, more reliable servers and an overall improved VRChat. A patch went out this week and we’ll have another one out shortly.

None of this takes away anything from VRChat's success, of course-- it's still by far the social VR market leader, and even if new user growth has plateaued for the moment, they are in a great place to improve their scaling architecture and software in preparation for further growth.

 

Comments

[Justin O'Neill]

What's good to see, is that people are actually ordering Rifts and Vives for the first time just because they think VRChat looks so cool on Youtube. VRChat is definitely helping us get over this chicken and the egg hump.

[Pulsar]

The number of Steam reviews and Google Trends are following the same path, going down as well.
https://trends.google.it/trends/explore?date=2017-08-01%202018-01-27&q=vrchat,%2Fm%2F02sz9d
But it is still easy to find and to meet a bunch of people. I gave a try and I was smiling the whole time. If they play their cards well, maybe this one has some potential.