VRChat Reach 105,000+ Peak Concurrent Uses During New Years, Likely Fueled by New Quest 2/3 & Android App Users -- Up from 40K in 2021

VRChat concurrency data via the VRChat Metrics site.

Well this is metaverse news starting the year with a pixealated bang: Peak concurrent users in VRChat during 2023's New Year's Eve (typically the platform's biggest day, usage wise), reached 105,991!

That's quite a leap from New Year's Eve in 2021, when peak CCU reached just under 90,000.

And an even greater leap from NYE 2020, when peak CCU was 40,000.

Along with counting down to the new year, this new concurrency record became part of the in-world festivities.

"News was spreading that they broke 6 digits and that the servers were down and that if you tried to teleport somewhere you'd get booted out," as a longtime VRChat player tells me. 

Much of this user growth is likely due to people who got Quest 2 and Quest 3 devices over the holidays.

Add to that, the new VRChat app for Android recently went open Beta free to play, and already has 100,000 downloads on Google Play.

Here's a look at the NYE action, including a classic menagerie of celebratory avatars, including a human-sized hotdog and a friendly dinosaur skeleton, watching the ball drop across the physical world:

It's too late to make a 2024 prediction now, but it's very likely VRChat's NYE in 2024 will bring in well over 150,000+. Maybe even 200,000, if the iOS mobile app comes out!

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Comments

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Not too shabby, not too shabby, for a platform that has been around for (roughly) ten years (but on Steam only since 2017).

It will be interesting to see what happens to Second Life with the introduction of their mobile solution. I've been charting LL's meagre statistics, which include simultaneously online users, for about a year or so, and it's clear that the average is roughly 40,000, peaking during the weekends up to 54,000. There was no statistically significant difference by the end of the year, except that the USD-L$ exchange rate grew to unprecedented values, very likely due to the insane number of Christmas-themed promotions...

[Undecided]

People go with the new. Like how Worlds dot come userbase went to Second Life, many Second Life users went to VRChat back in 2014.

Each year, VRChat has set a new record number. The servers always tend to crash when the US timezones start having their new years. In 2020, there were 40k on, and the servive provider thought it was an attack and shut off the servers.

With VRChat now being available on Vive Store, Pico Store, Quest Store, and for android mobile phones--perhaps even Apple phones in the future--the new years records can only grow in numbers.