New World Notes

Inside VRChat's Informal Economy: An Estimated 350+ People Make Real Money from that Metaverse -- Many Likely Earning a Full-Time Income! UPDATE: More Like Over 1000

Above: One of nearly 1,000 VRChat-tagged items being sold on Gumroad

UPDATE, 9/29: There are over 33,000 items for sale on Booth, a Japan-based content selling platform like Gumroad. Hat tip: A snarky anonymous reader who's cued me to update my estimate of people who make money from VRChat. Conservatively estimated, that's over 650 individual creators, bringing our total tally to roughly over 1,000.

VRChat the company has yet to roll out its long-promised monetization options for creators -- but VRChat the community has went ahead and created an informal, unofficial economy of its own across many platforms. By my rough but conservative estimate, over 350 are making at least a side income from their VRChat content -- and of that number, likely over 30 are making a full-time living from VRChat. 

That's in addition to notable examples like StudioCyFy, a company started on the strength of the developers' VRChat game worlds, and "Jar", who recently announced she was creating VRChat worlds on a full-time basis.

"Over 350" is an educated guess based on a tally of top content creation platforms:

• On Patreon, over 160 creators are creating VRChat content (worlds, avatars, etc.) and have at least one patron.
• On Gumroad, nearly 1,000 VRChat-tagged items are being sold on the platform; primarily avatars, many selling for $50 or more. Assuming individual creators sell an average of 10 VRChat items, that's about 100 creators on Gumroad.
• On YouTube, over 90 channels are devoted to YouTube content and have 10,000 or subscribers. (Indicating a dedicated YouTuber with a large enough subscriber base to monetize through advertising and direct sponsorships.)

So that's at least 350 VRChat content creators earning some kind of income from their VRChat content!

But how many of them are making a full-time living? That's a controversial (and interesting!) question, but here's some back-of-envelope tallies to help us reach a safe base number:

Watch: Hilarious VRChat Parody of Bo Burnham's "Welcome to the Internet" by YouTuber With Successful Career as a VR-Based Musician

"Do you want to live in the Metaeverse all of the time? Little bit of Metaverse all of the time?"

This is a pretty brilliant VRChat-themed parody of Bo Burnham’s very brilliant “Welcome to the Internet”, created and performed by YouTuber TFMJonny, who tosses the original lyrics into the Internet content vortex of the Metaverse, and spins out some clever and on-point tweaks along the way.

For instance, where Burnham had the lines "apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime", TFM tells me, “I rewrote those lines to ‘apathy's an amnesty and boredom is sublime’ to reflect the dichotomy between regular Internet culture and VRChhat culture. 

“Most of VRChat consists of sitting around doing nothing and just being social with friends," he explains. "There aren't any particular goals and thus the game can quite often turn into a money and time sink. Those lyrics were some of the last I wrote and are probably my favorite because they differ entirely from the original because it highlights this stark difference.”

TFM shot the entire video in VRChat using VRCLens to insure every angle matched that from the original video -- and went into Unity, to recreate Bo Burnham’s set:

This New VRChat World is Created by Someone Whose Game Worlds Are So Popular, She Now Makes a Full-Time Living Via Fan Donations

Kitchen Versus Kitchen is a zany new world game in VRChat (click here to play) from a mysterious developer known only as Jar. Her hit VRChat worlds are so popular, they account for roughly 1 in 10 of the virtual world's total user activity, and are more popular than most VR games made by established game companies. (Seriously: More on that below.)

This new game, as you might imagine, takes its inspiration from solo/local co-op cooking games which seem ideal when translated into a social VR setting. 

"I've played games like Overcooked and Diner Dash before and really enjoyed them with friends, and since VRChat is a social game it just seemed like a natural fit to do something similar," she tells me. "Also game mode aside, there was (and still is?) just an overall lack of worlds with cooking activities and everyone loves cooking, myself included."

As is screamingly apparent from the trailer above, the race to cook the right recipe in time quickly leads to all kinds of culinary mayhem. Getting all that to work in VRChat on a technical level, says Jar, was no easy job:

Watch: Profound Chat About Living With Cerebral Palsy IRL Via a Wailugi Avatar in VRChat (Syrmor's Latest)

"I think of this whole disability as one joke that God put on me... I don't think I would be the person I am now without this disability. It's helped my perspective on the world."

Here's the latest interview from Syrmor, the Toronto-based embedded reporter in VRChat, in a characteristically surreal and zany yet but also profound interview with someone who speaks about their real life through the safe distance of their avatar -- in this case, a wheelchair-bound British guy with cerebral palsy and a Wailugi avatar. After a good natured North American trolling (referring to football as "soccer" never fails to enrage a Brit), Syrmor's questions evoke powerfully honest answers from "benjiboi420" about his life online -- questions that would be socially difficult to ask or answer in another context. 

VRChat Gets a Gray Goo World. In the Form of a Waffle House.

My latest VRChat world is working exactly the way I wanted it to. Ha ha ha! pic.twitter.com/9IKBZvge8y

— coopertom (@thecoopertom) August 12, 2021

From Coopertom, the brilliant but deranged mind who gave us Four Seasons Total Landscaping in VRChat, comes a new VRChat world that's a rite of passage for any user-created virtual world: A Gray Goo machine. I.E., A thing capable of making an infinite number of things, until the mountain of things crashes the world. And Coopertom being Coopertom, he set his Gray Goo in a Waffle House.

Click here to enter if you're a VRChat user. 

"I made sure that the spawn objects were super low poly," Tom tells me. That way, by just pushing the button, hundreds of Waffle House chairs or for that Waffle House waffles can be spawned, without the world crashing immediately.

And yes, you can keep spawning objects until the whole Waffle House crashes. However, unlike the early Gray Goo incidences in Second Life, which threatened to bring the entire world down, the crash in VRChat is more localized:

VRChat User Survey Results: Profile of a Passionate Virtual World Community

Here's the key results of my VRChat user survey with beloved VRC reporter Syrmor, primarily drawn from subscribers of his YouTube channel and my virtual world blog New World Notes. While it's not wholly scientific and has a relatively small sample size of 165 respondents, it is (I believe!) the first public survey of the rapidly growing and evolving virtual world community. 

Which takes us right to the question above: Asked what they most love about VRChat, respondents overwhelmingly selected "Community":

"Personally I can say that VRChat has made life better for me as a whole," as user Fryman574 puts it. "I've had the ability to join communities I would have never known about if it weren't for VRC... [and] I've been able to meet so many cool people; like one of the best things to do in VRChat in my opinion is finding someone who has a story to tell and spend your day talking to this person. That's actually how I was able to meet my boyfriend of 6 months now."

Like this person and many others, VRC user Flamant says this community has offered social connections that have been difficult to find in the material world:

"I can be myself around other people in VRChat which is something i have always struggled with, with my social anxiety. And in that way it has helped me forge an identity as a person, now being able to be vulnerable and open myself up to others without fear. I have met some truly kind people in this virtual world that has come to feel more like a home than my actual surroundings..."

Next up: Avatar/ real life gender identity, how they first discovered VRChat, other virtual worlds VRC users play, VR usage, and much more:

How to Connect Your Kinect to VRChat for Full Body Tracking

Here's the latest clever hack for VRChat: An Xbox One Kinect connected to the virtual world, so the user's real life movement is tracked and mapped onto their avatar.

In this video above, VRCer "Zotteke" is using a Quest 2 to log into VRChat while dancing in front of a Kinect; Zotteke's furry avatar does the rest. The body tracking is fairly decent (especially for an older device that's likely sitting in your closet if you still have one), even accounting for its single camera:

VRChat Users: Please Take This Short Survey from Syrmor & New World Notes! (Use PC/Mac For Best Results, Include Account Name to Be Quoted)

Acclaimed VRChat reporter Syrmor is back after a short hiatus with a moving new avatar interview (watch above)... which is a good time to re-up this VRChat user survey that we're conducting together. Take below (use a desktop/laptop for best results) and include your VRChat name if you'd like your opinions to be quoted!

Physics-Based Remote-Controlled Toy Cars Are the Latest Amazing Thing in VRChat

Remote control cars for VRChat players are the latest amazing user-made innovation in VRChat, and creator Chris B. is not just content to make them amazingly physics-based, but she even shot this pitch-perfect Saturday morning cartoons-style commercial-but-with-furries to promote them too. As the ad mentions, they run on VRChat's internal Udon scripting system (specifically, the C#-to-Udon compiler); and as you can tell by the way they move and bounce, the cars make use of Unity's existing Newtownian mechanics which is also part of VRChat:

"Unity's physics engine has a lot of really neat features that are under-utilized in VRChat," as Chris puts it to me. "Stuff like ragdolls are perfectly possible, but nobody does them for some reason."

More on how she made her cars' physics so satisfying:

VRChat Raises $80 Million in Venture Funding, Proving the Metaverse is So Far VR's Most Successful Application

For some reason this huge news hasn't yet been picked up by any of the major tech outlets that I can see, but VRChat just raised $80 million in funding:

The VRChat team is excited to announce that we have closed an $80M Series D investment round. This latest financing was led by Anthos Capital, alongside existing investors Makers Fund, GFR fund and others. We welcome Anthos and are proud to have them on board!

This new investment will allow us to expand the VRChat team, iterate on the platform and grow our community. This includes the ability for creators to earn and enable more people around the world to access VRChat. Partners like Anthos Capital open unique opportunities to help us further our goal as a virtual universe.

As a reference point to how huge this funding round is, consider the fact that in 2017, VRChat only raised $4 million. Defying the bearish performance of nearly all other VR-related startups since then, usage has continued to grow since then, with monthly active users I'd estimate to be in the low six figures -- and even more notable, 1 in 3 daily users (i.e. about 40,000-100,000) logged in via HMDs, With VRChat concurrent numbers starting to pass Second Life's CCU this year, I'd estimate VRChat now has over 1 million monthly active users (and that's probably a conservative guess).

Looking at larger market, VRChat is one of the most-used VR applications, easily eclipsing usage of high-end games like Half Life: Alyx and indie hits like Beat Saber. And far as funding goes,  take a look at this: