Milestone: VRChat Peak Concurrent User Numbers Start Surpassing Second Life's

Source: This user-made VRChat concurrency tracker by @OhNoItsFusl

It's been building for many months, and last weekend, it finally happened: Social VR/virtual world VRChat surpassed Second Life's concurrent user rates, probably for the first time: When 40,540 people were logged into SL, VRChat counted 42,513 online users.

This news via longtime virtual world explorer Adeon Writer, who's been tracking VRChat-versus-Second Life CCU numbers for quite some time. (Second Life's current usage rates are published via this API.)

What's striking, as Adeon tells me, is that there wasn't any particularly special event in VRChat happening last weekend that drove up user log-ins :

"Just your average Saturday peak in VRChat," as he puts it. "It's just growing, I think. I just thought it was interesting as I've never seen VRC's online count be higher than SL's at any given time."

Me too. For the longest time -- i.e. well over 15 years -- Second Life has attracted daily peak CCU rates in the 40K+ range, often approaching 80K at its apex of concurrent activity, around 2007-2008.

Now, a much younger virtual world (VRChat was launched in 2017) is finally starting to attract those usage numbers too.

This isn't to say VRChat's CCU is always higher than SL, because Second Life's 40K+ CCU happens at a very steady rate:

"Might be another year before they are on equal footing [in median CCU]," Adeon observes. "For now SL hangs around 40K basically week-round, VRC’s average is only 27k [median CCU], but growing steadily over the months.

"And honestly that 40K in [Second Life] feels really stagnant, hidden away in a skybox and idle-y. Second Life is just so big that 40K users are spread out and it feels empty."

So that's another 2021 prediction I made last year that's been borne out. But for longstanding (and longsuffering) SL users, a more pertinent point might be: Will Second Life's concurrency ever grow again?

Comments

[Summer Haas]

"Second Life is just so big that 40K users are spread out and it feels empty" is the real lesson here.

I noticed something years ago when I was running a RP sim, there is an extremely tight balance in setting up the space where people are excited to play in. People gravitate towards people to a point, then they gravitate away. You have to find a point where you make the space just small enough where people are asking you to expand, then keep it just at that point. The space always needs to feel just slightly too cramped in order to be successful. The very moment you expand beyond that is when people start leaving and you get a ghost town because you create a perception that "nobody goes there".

This seems to be the thing VRChat has learned but SL has not. If SL had about 1/10th the amount of space it does today it would seem 10 times busier and be more popular because of it.

[Adeon Writer]

" If SL had about 1/10th the amount of space it does today it would seem 10 times busier and be more popular because of it."

I'm not so sure that is necessary to fix the problem. Remember, VRChat has many badly designed worlds as well. The difference is they never make it up the rank in the world list; instead, it's filled with instances of the worlds people like the most, which also happens to be the ones where they aren't super spread out.

If you've ever tried to use Second Life's destination guide out of shear desperation to find areas of Second Life that are alive, you'll see it's rarely updated and most of the locations drop you off in the middle of nowhere. Because no one uses it.

In VRC, it's the *main* way to drop off somewhere.

[Sean R. Lynch]

VRChat is what Sansar should have been.