VRChat Web Usage from Japan Grows to Over 25% the Total!

Update, 10/23: Woke up realizing this: If VRChat's reported 10 million monthly active users are about 2.5 million people from Japan, which has a total population about 124 million... about 2 percent of the Japanese are VRChat users. 

Last I checked in August, Japan-based traffic to VRChat's website was second only to the US, and nearly 20% of the total, compared to 40% of traffic from the US (according to SimilarWeb). Japanese usage has grown quite a bit from that:

In September, Japan-based traffic jumped to 27%. (Above.) I.E. , it's safe to assume roughly 1 in 4 people playing VRChat are Japanese nationals.

This is a surprising usage trend for a US-based virtual world. Typically, most usage is from the US followed by the UK and various European nations. According to SimilarWeb, for example, Japan traffic to SecondLife.com is currently not even in the top five by country, which in September, was held by traffic from the US, UK, Germany, Russia, and France. And we know Second Life's Japanese community is highly creative and active -- it's why we translate key NWN articles into Japanese.

So why VRChat's overwhelming popularity in Japan?

For starters, my indispensable Japanese translator Sanny Yoshikawa points to a huge trade show for virtual world fans, VKet Real, held in several cities in Japan and in VRChat. That's also an entire talk show on Asahi TV (a top broadcaster in the country) hosted inside VRChat. Then of course there's already the overwhelming popularity of Japanese pop culture across the international VRChat community, particularly avatars based anime and Japanese games.

But I know that's just the start; I strongly suspect there's greater cultural affinity with the platform than, say, Fortnite. (Japanese usage of Epic's game/platform: About 5%.) I'll be exploring more soon, and there's fun introductory videos to VRC's Japan-based community like the one above.

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Comments

[Martin K.]

According to google trends, the jump in user interest in Japan this year appears to be similar in size to the jump in user interest in the US in late 2017/early 2018, see: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fg%2F11gfhqhs78&hl=en . It remains to be seen whether the numbers stay on the same level or wear off within a few months (as they did in 2018 in the US before catching up again in later years).

Anyway, this reminded me of how important VRChat's viral success back in 2017/2018 was for today's social VR (if not the whole VR gaming industry): yes, it was driven by YouTubers, but it was made possible by voice chat and a desktop mode, which was introduced only a few months earlier. Within months after VRChat's success started, Rec Room pivoted hard and announced that they will port their (formerly strictly VR-only) app to flat-screen PC, which then opened the pathway to other flat-screen platforms including consoles and mobile. While Rec Room grew their community in this way, Oculus/Facebook/Meta dropped their VR-only social experiments (Oculus Home and Facebook Spaces) and apparently designed Horizon Worlds based on Rec Room, including the cartoonish art style, free in-game world building and hosting, a mobile version of the app, etc. This development then pushed Roblox to seriously invest in a VR version and provide in-game voice chat.

In other words: many characteristics of today's social VR apps can be traced back more or less directly to the viral success that VRChat had in late 2017/early 2018. It didn't have to happen in this way as the many failed social VR apps prove.