Premiering online and at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah next week, Reality of Hope is a short documentary depicting two friends who first meet in VRChat's large furry community --- and after a medical crisis emerges, the friendship deepens into real life in a surprising and powerful way. It's directed by Joe Hunting, whose last VRChat-based documentary was picked up by HBO in 2022.
As expected, VRChat hit another platform concurrency record over the New Year's Eve holiday, hitting nearly 140,000 CCU as peak. (136,589, to be exact.) That's a new record breaking the last one of 100,000+ on NYE of 2023/2024, though falling a bit short of the 150,o00 I predicted last month.
This continued usage growth is pretty impressive for VRChat the company, especially after coming out of some painful layoffs in 2024, when 30% of the staff were let go. Despite those cutbacks, another milestone was achieved. Ironically, while avid VRChat users know all about that, most of the tech world was still on holiday when it haappned, and probably didn't notice.
VRChat community head Tupper has the details on Bluesky, where they also reveal a new record: Over 200 users in a single, uncapped shard/instance. Up until now, VRChat instances are usually capped at around 50, but the company did some updates to grow the potential of its instanced concurrency:
Bullet Time Agent, as we covered here, is a VRChat-based, free-to-play adventure game (trailer above) created over several years as a one person labor of love by longtime community creator "Lakuza". Near pro quality in polish, ambition, and gameplay, Lakuza even hired voice actors for Bullet Time Agent, which takes up to ten hours to complete; VRChat the company helped him stage and promote it.
Here's how many times VRChat players have visited it: 168,445+
Here's how many times VRChat players have favorited it: 31,914+
Here's how many tips VRChat players have given him through several tip jars located throughout the game world: Twenty-nine.
Yes, only 29:
"A world that took 3 years+ to make and so far it has had 29 tip jar donations (roughly $291, which I believe Tilia takes a portion of too when cashed out)," as Lakuza explains on X/Twitter. "So this is 29 people supporting out of somewhere between 32,000 to 100,000 people."
This is a painful case study on what kind of worlds monetize on VRChat, and which decidedly do not:
Recently saw a Reddit rant about a VRChat avatar with a hilariously ridiculous number of triangles (above), and had to laugh in recognition at the title: "Friends joining with these half a million polygon avies are literally ruining the experience (not only for me)! This is outrageously stupid and unnecessary!"
Maybe unnecessary, but also inevitable, on metaverse platforms: When you give novice grassroots creators UGC tools for enhancing their avatars, many will add so many enhancements, they often end up making avies with quite a lot of polygon junk in their trunk.
This also has been a challenge in Second Life for many years. Many of the top-selling mesh bodies in SL are extremely resource heavy, and tend to degrade performance of everyone around them, including the users wearing these bodies. (They're so resource heavy, a former Linden Lab engineer once compared them to a local DDOS attack!) Some SL shopping events have even taken to setting up a "viewing sim" near the actual kiosks, so shoppers can view the wares at a safe, less laggy distance.
As for VRChat, there's some guidance in place which makes this less of a social problem:
Via the VRChat metrics site and a highly helpful VRC source, here's the latest concurrency trends for our favorite next gen metaverse platform. If you click to embiggenate, you'll see that peak concurrency has been trending toward 120,000 in recent weeks, hitting just shy of that over the Thanksgiving weekend holiday.
That's decent growth from last New Year's Eve -- that holiday is typically the platform's biggest day, usage wise -- when it reached the 100,000 CCU milestone. (105,991, to be exact.) This concurrency has been steadily, slowly creeping up every weekend, with most of the usage from Quest users.
Given these trends, I think there's a pretty decent chance VRChat reaches another milestone soon: 150,000 CCU for this New Year's Eve.
Because historically there's been a spike of user growth every holiday season:
This video above could be gameplay footage from an upcoming PS4 game by a professional studio, but it's actually only available in VRChat. Bullet Time Agent is a one person labor of love by a longtime VRC community creator known only as "Lakuza", who I've been following since at least early 2020.
Yes, he's been developing this game in his spare time for almost 4 years, mostly working on his own.
Available to play in VRChat today at 4pm PT, you'll be able to find it in the Quest store and in-world search under "Bullet Time Agent 1-1", "Bullet Time Agent 1-2", and "Bullet Time Agent 1-3".
"I'd easily be putting in at least 6 hours per day, and then on weekends, most of the day would be spent on the project," Lakuza tells me.
As the game name suggests, it turns Matrix-style bullet time into a major gameplay mechanic, in a story where you're a reformed thief with a world to save. Somewhat surprisingly, the game will be completely free-to-play, Lakuza's only reward being peer recognition by the VRChat community. Then again, you know a metaverse platform is successful when people create amazing things for their community as an end in itself.
Ghost Hunters is a new social party game in VRChat that's got a great asymmetrical twist: One player gets to be the ghost, everyone else (1-11 other players) get to be ghost hunters trying to tag the ghost before they're spooked into unconsciousness. World link here.
It's the latest game by longtime community creator Jar, a star subject in my Making a Metaverse That Matters book, as someone who's managed to turn their virtual world creativity into a full-time job supported by a community of supporters. Her Patreon is backed by nearly 3000 subscribers, earning her an income that would easily put her in a top earning bracket. (And is far less susceptible to job cuts now plaguing the game industry.)
Which is no surprise -- her VRChat games are more popular than most "professional" VR games. As I wrote:
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.
You know a virtual world is compelling when its inhabitants kick against the walls of reality until they finally succeed at bursting through. Here’s five of my favorite VRChat worlds which create what’s seemingly impossible on the platform to totally rewrite the limits of our virtual experience.
While I can’t claim these are the absolute most boundary breaking worlds, many were recommended by some of the most popular and beloved creators on the platform:
Created by Japanese player “Raii”, Fractone is a fully realized simulation of a music synthesizer replete with all the controls you’d expect from one in real life, which also generates music in real time as you play it. (Watch a demo basic here; watch a live concert, complete with a light show, right here.)
Beloved VRChat game developer Jar considers it among the most technically ambitious worlds on the platform.
“To me that’s impressive because by all means that shouldn't be possible to make and yet there it is,” as Jar puts it. “Also not many digital synthesizers are multiplayer/collaboratively compatible, even outside of VR, so that’s cool.”
You know a virtual world is compelling when its inhabitants kick against the walls of reality until they finally succeed at bursting through.
Join my Patreon for free to read about five of my favorite VRChat worlds and my interview with the creators, who've built what’s seemingly impossible on the platform to totally rewrite the limits of our virtual experience.
