This is What Strong User Growth on a Metaverse Platform Looks Like

As comparison data to that chart on blockchain-based metaverse platforms from yesterday, here's VRChat's daily peak concurrency on Steam since 2017. (Via SteamDB.) Important qualifier: This is not a full reflection of user activity on VRChat, since it doesn't count people logging in via the Quest headset/store.

After a brief spike in late 2017/early 2018 due to the infamous Ugandan knuckles meme, VRChat's user concurrency slipped for a time but then in mid-2019, started steadily and strongly growing to now in 2022, when VRChat's peak is consistently over 30,000 every day, and sometimes over 40,000K. (Again, this is only via Steam -- the total CCU tends to be nearly double that, counting Quest devices.)

This data is just a bird's eye view of the real thing that's important to have on a metaverse platform:

The positive feedback loop of a thriving virtual community. People creating content for others to enjoy, both creators and players coming back the next day for more, often bringing along their friends. Another key point: Chat itself is also user-generated content, some of the most important kind, because it's something every user can contribute, and build on.

This is the kind of growth that doesn't happen simply because someone buys an expensive virtual yacht, or a real life celebrity starts selling official merch on the platform. At best, those cause a brief uptick of activity. Without virtual community, a metaverse platform, no matter how much VC funding it gets, goes nowhere.

Comments

[Martin K.]

But growth is not everything: if a social VR platform is not profitable, user growth can be good as long as it helps to attract more investment money, but once that source dries up, user growth can be a problem because it leads to increasing costs (for staff, servers, network traffic, etc.) and further decreasing profitability.

Maybe High Fidelity didn't "fail" in comparison to VRChat and Rec Room, but Philip Rosedale saw and understood the problem with lacking profitability of social VR apps several years earlier than his competitors.