VRChat Surpasses Peak Hype Concurrency of 20,000, About Half Using VR Headsets -- But Only 5,000 Logging in Via Facebook-Connected Oculus Quest Devices

Great catch from Adeon -- over two years after VRChat saw 20,000+ concurrent users, which many considered a Ugandan Knuckles (don't ask) meme/streamer-driven fluke, the virtual world just surpassed those usage numbers:

[W]ith more users joining VRChat from Quest and now Quest 2, the app reached a new record of 24,000 concurrent users over the Halloween weekend, CEO Graham Gaylor tells Road to VR. This eclipses the previous record of 20,000 concurrent users in early 2018 when the app went viral on Twitch... Earlier this year in April around 30% of VRChat users were using VR; in October the share of VR users was up to 43%. Among the 24,000 concurrent users specifically, Gaylor confirmed that an even larger share of users—52% or 12,500—were in VR.

If you check VRChat's Steam stats (embiggenate above), usage on Steam last weekend peaked a little over 19,000. So only as estimated 5,000 are coming in via Oculus Quest/Quest's version of VRChat. Adeon isn't surprised:

"Confirms a lot what I see too. I have lots of friends that have an Oculus Rift, but still choose to run the Steam version on it, just because of Steam’s social features, and Oculus requires Facebook to have Oculus friends. That’s one major oversight for Facebook. People don’t want to use the platform if its social features aren’t crossplay with their friends' setups."

It's an oversight -- and a paradoxical one: The main point for requiring Facebook log-in, an Oculus developer recently told me, was to encourage users to interact more in VR with their Facebook friends. (Data harvesting for ads being a secondary goal.) But because so many gamers have strong social connections apart from Zuckerberg's social network, the Facebook log-in requirement can actually disconnect them from many of their friends.

That to one side, VRChat's usage growth is impressive. I would not be surprised if its monthly active user numbers have also surpassed that of Second Life as well.

Comments

[Ryan Schultz]

Great post, I was going to write about this myself but you beat me to it :-) thanks for your insights!