New World Notes

FTC Action Against Meta's Acquisition of Within Seems Poorly Placed When Meta is Losing Badly to Rec Room & VRChat

Above: Within's Supernatural on the Oculus store with nearly 10,000 user ratings

Fairly big bombshell just dropped:

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within [producer of the highly popular fitness app called Supernatural], potentially limiting the company’s push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals... John Newman, the deputy director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Competition, said the agency acted on the Within deal because Meta was “trying to buy its way to the top.” The company already owned a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, he said, but then chose to acquire Within’s Supernatural app “to buy market position.” He called the deal “an illegal acquisition, and we will pursue all appropriate relief.”

Maybe I'm missing something, but Within's Supernatural is nowhere near "the top", even in the Quest 2's ecosystem of some 10-12 million headsets. With nearly 10,000 user ratings in the Oculus store, Supernatural likely has usage in the six figures.

That's not nothing, but claiming that's "the top" misses the big picture: Meta is currently losing the platform war on its own platform. Compare Supernatural's usage with numbers announced by the metaverse platform Rec Room last April:

In Praise of Rec Room's Live Creation & Teaching Features -- and a Defense of Its Cartoonish Graphics (Comment of the Week)

Many interesting comments in last week's post about Philip Rosedale's desire to bring back in-world, collaborative creation as the gold standard, including this one by Martin K., going into detail about how many resources it has for that feature.

Have a look at this page, it links to Discord servers of dozens of classes that are taught live in VR. (Discord is typically used for scheduling classes and other asynchronous communication.) These are not videos but live classes in VR. 

How many such live classes about creating worlds are there in VRChat? In Second Life? Supporting a culture of live teaching is probably reason enough to support live collaboration.

Rec Room the company also has a very active YouTube channel devoted to in-world creating and scripting (see above).

Writing further, Martin somewhat objects to my comment that Rec Room's cartoonish, blocky graphics may not be broadly appealing: 

Only People Not Already Using Metaverse Platforms Have "Lost Interest" -- And Most People In Them Don't Care About the Metaverse Per Se

I missed this Yahoo! News article from last week but I can't let this claim pass:

“People have kind of lost interest in the metaverse, because characters look like cartoons with no legs,” Marc Petit, Epic Games’ VP and general manager of Unreal Engine, told Yahoo Finance. “I mean, who wants to be that? This is not attractive.”

Petit’s critique is a not-so-thinly veiled reference to Meta’s “Horizon Worlds” platform. The company’s primary metaverse experience, “Horizon Worlds” features avatars without legs and graphics that are far from those found in modern big-budget video games.

It's true there's little public interest in Horizon Worlds, but then again, Rec Room's avatars are also leg-free and the company just reported 3 million monthly active users on VR headsets alone (mostly on Meta Quest, ironically enough), so this criticism doesn't generally apply.

The "people" who have lost interest in the Metaverse, broadly speaking, are not metaverse platform users themselves. But then again, well over 500 million other people are already active in one or more of them.

Which brings me to my other point: Most people in metaverse platforms aren't interested in -- or even aware of -- "the Metaverse" per se, but in the fun, creativity, and community they have in the specific platforms they play in, or that their friends are playing. VRChat is also thriving, and does not even call itself a metaverse platform. Any mass market product that depends on Gen Z consumers knowing what venture capitalists say about a concept from a 1992 novel is going to have a bad time.

Speaking of which, another burr from the article:

BREAKING: Rec Room Has Over 3 Million Monthly Active VR Users, Most on Meta's Quest 2; That's 10x More Users Than Meta's Horizon Worlds & Venues!

Just got this pretty amazing breaking news note from Shawn Whiting, Head of Influencers & Partners at Rec Room:

"Shortly after the holidays, Rec Room crested 3 million VR monthly active users... A majority of those VR monthly active users are Quest 2. [Emph mine - WJA]

"We're very happy with the VR growth but at this point VR is a pretty low percentage of our monthly players. Rec Room is seeing much more growth on iOS, Android, PlayStation, and Xbox due to there being billions of those devices out there collectively." 

So that's something! Last December I estimated Rec Room had 4-5 million monthly active users across all devices, but based on Shawn's wording, total Rec Room numbers is likely to be well over 10-12 million MAU.

This is quite an impressive milestone for metaverse platform growth -- and more key, for usage of the Quest 2 headset on metaverse platforms. Quest 2 has an install base over 10 million, so at least 15% of that (i.e. 1.5 million) are active on Rec Room.

This is also a sharp wake-up call for Meta:

Rec Room, Which Already Has a 3 Million+ User Headstart on Facebook Horizon, Is Hiring Like Crazy

In case you missed it (and I meant to blog this last week, sorry), Rec Room is hiring like crazy, with around 60 open positions.

"We're growing a lot," as Rec Room Influencer/Partner Head Shawn Whiting tells me. "Mobile (iOS and Android) is growing very quickly so almost every team is hiring to keep up," Here's the company career page.

Rec Room, which Facebook/Meta's Horizon roughly resembles in terms of graphics and avatars ((but launched first), has something that Facebook/Meta does not:

Rec Room Creation Community & Development Features More Powerful & Robust Than Many Assume, Argues Rec Room Creator

In response to my post on VRChat's impressive creative community, a Rec Room creator recently sent me this strong case for their own platform of choice, and included the videos featuring great user-created contest in Rec Room seen here.

"There is amazing work and talent there, and it was all built in game. ALL of it. All of the modeling, texturing, animations, programming, costumes, etc. To me that's the magic of Rec Room," they told me.

This and Rec Room's multi-user collaboration aspect, they argue, is in sharp contrast to worlds with tool sets that are tightly integrated with a 3D engine and require a lot of offline, solo creativity:

"For most other things like VRChat," as they put it, "you'll be in Unity for days doing all of that stuff. In Rec Room, you're doing it with up to 40 people across almost any platform, voice chatting and co-building and hanging out the entire time. You don't have the friction of needing to go download Unity or ROBLOX Studio and learn all of this dev tool stuff on your own. Plus other Rec Room users will teach you how to build in real time."

As evidence of all that, this Rec Room creator pointed me to the world's highly active Discord channel for creators, then went on:

Rec Room Reports 1 Million Monthly Active Oculus Quest 1 & 2 Users -- And Higher Peak Concurrency Than VRChat

Impressive figures for Rec Room via Road to VR:

Rec Room has seen a significant uptick in users recently, as it now reports over one million monthly active VR users on the platform... Rec Room Designer Shawn Whiting told Road to VR that given today’s news, virtual reality users are actually a relatively small percentage of overall users. “That’s the number for VR monthly active usership, but we’re much higher than that once you look across all platforms,” he says.

Although a minority, VR users have been remarkably dedicated, Whiting tells us, and they’re still growing past that one million per-month active rate.

“Our VR daily active users spend an average of 2.7 hours in Rec Room when they visit,” Whiting tells Road to VR. “Quest 2 is about half of our VR users [and] VR growth has been amazing the past few months.”

... Besides bumping past one million monthly active VR users, over the weekend the platform reports it’s hosted 45,000 concurrent players...

On Twitter, Whiting clarified to me what is meant by "active user" and the breakdown of HMD ownership: "Active would mean you logged into your account and loaded into the game. We mention 'Quest 2 is about half of our VR users' in the article, so add Quest 1 numbers to that and you have your answer."

Much to process from this post! Assuming these figures are accurate, it suggests several things: