Grading My VR/Virtual World Predictions for 2020 -- Two Out of Three Hits?

One last look back at 2020 before it finally rots away like the leprous corpse it is, reviewing my predictions for the year I made on December 31, 2019:

• Magic Leap will fold.

Not exactly, but there were massive layoffs last April, impelled in great part by metaverse hubris, but the company has since pivoted to being an XR product for medicine and other enterprise use cases. No more "Wait where's the whale?" cracks from me, I hope the company succeeds with this pivot! Next prediction:

• There will be a major corporate transition by Linden Lab -- possibly a change in executive leadership, a substantial round of lay-offs, or even a sell-off of Sansar.

Well, clearly yes. Not only was Sansar sold off to a company called Wookey, but Linden Lab itself was bought. And there were, sad to say, substantial layoffs.

My third prediction might be up for some debate:

• We will see at least one Second Life-type virtual world (monetizeable user-generated content in an open world with collaborative content creation) reach six figures in monthly active users.

With concurrency numbers now competitive to Second Life, VRChat almost certainly has monthly active users in a similar range to SL (i.e. mid-six figures). Rec Room also recently reported concurrency numbers competitive with SL, and while that company is being coy on monthly active users (see my conversation with one of the founders below), it also seems to have MAU in the mid-six figures.

As to the other part of the prediction: VRChat and Rec Room both enable collaborative user-generated content, but so far, users are not yet able to monetize their creations on the platform. (At least not officially; there is a thriving real cash "gray market" for VRChat content.) However, Rec Room took a clear step in the monetization direction just last month:

 Rec Room announced back in September that it was working on a way for its users to earn real cash by creating content for the game. In a recent update, the social VR platform has now taken its first big step in generating that functional economy by letting premium users sell their creations for in-game tokens... And although there’s currently no way to convert back from token to hard currency, the studio said back in September that, in the future, users would be able to do just that, even saying its users could potentially “support themselves” by being full-time Rec Room creators.

So I'd say this prediction is at least half correct, more if you're feeling generous. Now let's see how my predictions for 2021 play out.

"With its recent launch on Xbox, Rec Room has reached a new peak of some 35,000 concurrent users in the app"

That over 35k number was just one quick CCU sample. Now imagine that over a full 24hrs (DAU) x7 (WAU) x4 (MAU). That + being #1 on Xbox 😋

— Shawn Whiting (@ShawnRecRoom) December 18, 2020

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[gilliesdaniel05]

Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds, VR & Internet culture leadership, a substantial round of lay-offs, or even a sell-off of Sansar With concurrency numbers now competitive to Second Life, VRChat almost Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.