High Downloads, Low Usage: Comparing Steam's Top Social VR Downloads to Concurrency Rates

On Mondays I often check concurrency rates of top social VR games on Steam, but to switch things up, let's compare those rates with total downloads (all six are available for free): 

• VRChat: 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 total downloads (and 9300 peak concurrent users yesterday)
• Rec Room: 200,000 to 500,000 total downloads (and 461 peak concurrent users yesterday)
• Big Screen: 200,000 to 500,000 total downloads (and 96 concurrent users yesterday)
• Altspace VR: 100,000 to 200,000 total downloads (and 32 peak concurrent users yesterday)
• Sansar: 20,000-50,000 total downloads (and 14 peak concurrent users yesterday)
• High Fidelity: 20,000-50,000 total downloads (and 7 peak concurrent users yesterday)

VRChat is clearly far and away the market leader, but it's notable how much churn that game and the others are seeing -- i.e. lots of people downloading them on Steam over the last couple years, but most giving up after a few tries. VRChat probably has about 150,000-200,000 monthly active Steam-based users, and a Rec Room team member recently pointed me to stats suggesting that game has roughly 30,000-50,000 monthly active Steam users. So generally, under 10% of Steam users who try these games end up becoming active users. 

Still, that massive churn rate for a free-to-play virtual world experience shouldn't be surprising:

After all, Second Life currently has about 400,000-600,000 monthly active users (depending on how you define a "user"), but during its 15+ year lifespan, upwards of 60,000,000 people have tried Second Life.

All Steam data via the indispensable SteamDB Info.

 

Comments

[Roland Legrand]

14 peak concurrent for Sansar... 7 for High Fidelity... So basically these are environments for events, but without meaningful interactions outside special events? Or maybe it's time to admit these experiments failed and need pivoting or closing down?