New World Notes

VRChat Peak User Concurrency Passes 40,000 -- Up From 24K Last November

VRChat had some technical troubles during the world's New Year celebrations last week, but it was one of those catastrophic success sort of things:

If you’re unaware, we had a bit of an issue at probably one of the most popular times to hang out in VRChat and traditionally where we set concurrent user records — New Years Eve, around the time that EST hits midnight. VRChat went down. Great timing, yeah? Let’s talk about what happened.

First off, before the issues started, we were chugging along with no problem. In fact, shattered our previous concurrent player record with over a mind-boggling 40,000 players online at the same time.

Notably VRChat's reported peak concurrency just last November was only 24,000. A lot of the user growth since then is likely attributable to new Oculus Quest 2 owners plugging into the virtual world over the holidays for the first time.

Also notable for longtime readers, 40,000 is roughly on par with median concurrency for Second Life. A veteran SLer who's recently transitioned over to VRChat tells me the new world reminds them of SL during its highly sociable glory years:

Grading My VR/Virtual World Predictions for 2020 -- Two Out of Three Hits?

One last look back at 2020 before it finally rots away like the leprous corpse it is, reviewing my predictions for the year I made on December 31, 2019:

• Magic Leap will fold.

Not exactly, but there were massive layoffs last April, impelled in great part by metaverse hubris, but the company has since pivoted to being an XR product for medicine and other enterprise use cases. No more "Wait where's the whale?" cracks from me, I hope the company succeeds with this pivot! Next prediction:

• There will be a major corporate transition by Linden Lab -- possibly a change in executive leadership, a substantial round of lay-offs, or even a sell-off of Sansar.

Well, clearly yes. Not only was Sansar sold off to a company called Wookey, but Linden Lab itself was bought. And there were, sad to say, substantial layoffs.

My third prediction might be up for some debate:

VRChat Survey: Over 1 in 3 Say They'll Pay for a Premium Subscription

Results from last week's not-super-scientific-but-still interesting survey on VRChat's new monthly/yearly paid subscription option. With 175 responses (a solid sample for this site), well over one-third say they will pay to subscribe. That is a minority response, but for a free-to-play virtual world, it's a relatively impressive response.  As a point of comparison, Second Life only has about 60,000 Premium subscribers, which is roughly just 1 in 10 of the active userbase.

And looking at VRChat user concurrency, this suggests a strong potential for good revenue. With 24,000 peak concurrent users, VRChat probably has monthly active users in the low to mid six figures. (A good rule of thumb is to multiply peak concurrency by 10x.)  So if this survey scales with actual subscriptions, that would translate to about $1 million a month in subscription revenue for the company, more or less. (A big "if", to be sure.)

This would be tiny in comparison with, say, what Roblox is reportedly making, but for a virtual world where a third to half of the users are actually using  a VR headset, that's a decent niche.

VRChat User Survey: Will You Buy the New Plus Subscription?

NOTE: If you're viewing this on a mobile device you might need to tap-slide-scroll on the survey below to view and take it:

After many years in free-to-play Beta and seeing impressive growth, VRChat is finally offering a paid subscription option (details here and summarized below). But are VRChat players actually interested in paying? Please take this survey, even if you're a very casual VRChatter -results shared next week!

Play Among Us in VRChat: New Fan-Made Version Adds Visual Tasks & VR-Based Body Language Gameplay to the Original

Attention AOC and other Among Us fans: There's a new community-fan, playable version of the hit deception and backstabbing game in VRChat: Click here to play. (No, not the horror-themed fan version of Among Us I mentioned the other week, that's another project still in development.)

While this VRChat version of Among Us is faithful to official original game, longtime reader Adeon Writer tells me, adds some new and interesting gameplay features only possible in a 3D, VR-enabled world:

"We had a group play it for about 3.5 hours straight." (Highlights in the video above.) "If you're one of the impostors in this one, you actually have to fake doing your tasks and stuff since everyone can see what you're doing with your hands and such, which is unexpected if you're used to the original, but kind of great. If you've got good players it opens up a whole new aspect of trying to deduct who's faking everything."

Here's how:

As Virtual World Grows, Real Cash Marketplace for VRChat Content Emerges

VRChat content creator "Markcreator" (last seen on New World Notes showing off this impressive VRChat-based tribute to Minecraft he built) is now selling buttons for VRChat for USD $12.50. This might not seem like news in itself -- unless you're specifically in the market for VRChat-based buttons -- except that it's another indicator of a larger trend: As VRChat continues to grow in usage and content, a marketplace of VRChat content selling for real world money is starting to emerge.

"The VRChat avatar market is already pretty large on websites like Gumroad," as Mark tells me. This is because VRChat the platform itself does not (yet) have an in-game marketplace of its own -- while the user community does have a pent up demand for quality content for VRChat.

Indeed, a quick search on Gumroad (a site for selling 3D content) turns up over 300 VRChat-tagged items for sale, with some items selling for as high as $80.

"I know multiple people personally that are supplementing or completely sustaining themselves on avatar sales," Mark tells me. "There is much demand from people that wish to express themselves through their avatar, I see a lot of parallels to Second Life in that regard. It will be interesting to see if there is also a sufficiently large market of world creators looking for the next thing to improve their personal projects."

Which brings us back to Mark's buttons:

Dev Makes Minecraft-Style Real-Time Group Building... in VRChat!

Yes, what you're looking at above is Minecraft-style group building in VRChat. The insanely cool brainchild of "Markcreator" (his VRChat account name), it's now available to play for yourself: Click on his Twitter here for more details and the VRChat teleport link.

It's actually dubbed "Udon Minecraft", with "Udon" being VRChat's scripting language, and to judge by the demo video, it captures all the prim-based group building fun that made Minecraft so massive, transplanted to a new platform.

"The goal was and is to make a playable version of Minecraft in VRChat," Mark tells me, "that supported Minecraft building mechanics in real-time with friends and other players.

If you're a developer, you'll want to read Mark's behind the scenes notes, because he came up with some clever workarounds to make this possible in VRChat. Read on:

Launching Today in VRChat: "The Devouring", a Horror Survival Game Made From Scratch (Including Music!) By a 4 Person Team

VRChat's creative community continues to impress. This is the trailer to a new survival horror game in VRChat that was co-developed by Lakuza, who also created a VRChat game with bullet-time effects earlier this year.

“It’s a 5-6 hour horror game essentially and we've modelled everything from scratch, including the music,” he tells me.

While the game is technically launching tomorrow, the lobby area is open now. They're even going to have a Hollywood-style launch party at 8pm PT today. If you already have VRChat installed, click the link here to join the fun. 

"The Devouring" was created over the course of nearly a year by a four member team, who collaborated together in VRChat from around the world. (Lakuza doesn't remember exactly where in the real world his team is located.)

Finally opening to the public, Lakuza’s main feeling is “a massive relief”.

“At some points it felt like it was stuck in the ‘1 more month’ phase," as he puts it to me, "and definitely had stressful/burnout points throughout, since it’s a world we all worked on in our spare time after our real life jobs.” (So basically it sounds like crunchtime at an actual game studio, except without that little "getting paid to work" part.)

Developing it was no easy task -- and some potential game spoilers ahead:

VRChat More Active But Also More Insular During Pandemic Says Syrmor, VRChat's Embedded Reporter

We haven't checked in lately with Syrmor, VRChat's beloved embedded journalist and videographer -- the Errol Morris of VRChat, basically -- so here's a video he just uploaded, an in-depth interview with a slightly drunken hamster which smells like mayonnaise. (Actually Meowriza, a famous trans bodybuilder and cosplayer in real life.)

"I took a break for a while at the start of the year but I'm starting to upload again recently," Syrmor tells me. "There is an influx of new players on VRChat because of quarantine, so lots of cool new people to talk with! I'm now mixing my interviews with strangers and with different types of Internet personalities."

But has the culture of VRChat changed since the pandemic?

VRChat Concurrency Steadily Returning to Peak Levels of 2018

Via SteamDB

Remember in early 2018 when VRChat had a brief hype phase thanks to various YouTube and Twitch streamers and fairly juvenile/offensive memes and thanks to both, hit a peak concurrency of over 20,000 on Steam? After that, concurrency promptly dropped back down and many assumed its high point had long since gone.

Since then, however, VRChat's Steam concurrency has been steadily climbing back toward that 2018 level, with no signs of dropping. Over the last few weeks, its weekly peak has been in the 15,000s and 16,000s, and that's up from weekly peaks in the 12000s in February. If this steady growth continues, VRChat's Steam concurrency will once again be peaking around 20,000 -- but now, on a regular basis.

And those are just users coming in via Steam: