Click here to experience Magic Heist in VRChat, a new community-made game world/ride that seems ideal for exploring over the Thanksgiving holidays. Co-developed by acclaimed VRC creators Fins, CyanLaser, and Lakuza, it is, to judge by the highly-polished trailer (watch above), pretty much indistinguishable in quality to a big budget console game for the family. Much of that has to do with the fact that Fins paid out of pocket to hire professional voice actors and license the soundtrack (the biggest part of the budget).
While it may look like a game built over a year, the team built Magic Heist in just about a month, Lakuza tells me, racing to finish it by deadline for the Raindance Film Festival contest:
Click here to visit the showroom, but to be honest, it's not much more than what you see above -- an experimental deployment from an R&D lab associated with Hyundai, it looks like. (And Google has no word about it having some kind of official launch or ribbon cutting, so apparently not a marketing project.) However, this does mean that Hyundai is the largest car company with a presence in VRChat, and not Nissan, as previously reported. But the latter world, by contrast, is being used for marketing, and could definitely use take some advice from what was previously tried in Second Life.
Last weekend VRChat hit what looks to be another all-time peak concurrency record for the platform, crossing over 55,000 users online at the same time (see above data from VRChat Status, a user-run concurrency tracker).
Much of that record seems attributable to a VRChat-based furry conference promoted by VRChat the company. Speaking of which, this furry influx pushed VRChat's weekend concurrency over that of Second Life, which peaked last weekend at 53,326, according to SL Grid Survey. Second Life was once the key immersive home of furries online, but to to judge by these stats, much of that fur has flown.
"VRChat has much of the same discovery issues that've plagued Second Life," notes Adeon Writer, a denizen of both worlds, responding to my observation that Nissan's VRChat marketing campaign doesn't seem to attract many visitors. "Mainly, as there are more and more places to visit, it becomes harder and harder to become discovered and retain attention from so many other possible places you could be. I don't think Second Life ever managed to solve this in a meaningful way. VRChat hasn't yet either."
That sounds very right. Also (I should add) as sub-communities in virtual worlds become more and more cloistered, it becomes an even more difficult challenge for outside marketers to engage with the world's user base as a whole. That seems to be happening in VRChat as well.
Reader and SLer Kaylee West has some solid ideas Nissan could do well to learn from:
Nissan seems to be the biggest real world brand to deploy a virtual marketing campaign in VRChat, the would-be Metaverse:
Nissan Crossing, in Tokyo’s Ginza district... has been recreated in stunning virtual reality showcasing the all-new Ariya electric crossover. The virtual gallery can be found under the name “NISSAN CROSSING”* on the social VR platform VRChat in the “Worlds” category. The VR venue provides a new means of digital communication and offers a variety of content and experiences, including new announcements and briefings. An inaugural tour will be held by year-end to highlight the risks of climate change and how a future with electric vehicles could look.
Development of the virtual gallery was made possible thanks to the support of leading VR creators.
"I think this is very clever because it is like an influencer marketing [campaign]," says Sanny, my indispensable Japanese translator. "Nissan credit all names of creators." A VRChat reporter name @OculusTan on Twitter has a video of the launch party:
Writing about Udon Tycoon in VRChat last week, it occurred to me that I haven't covered a Second Life-based project of similar ambition and scope in a long time. (Beautiful sims, to be sure, we gotthat covered, along with light roleplay game experiences in SL.) But Udon Tycoon has user-created, physics-enabled, save-able coaster building that's rideable and instantiated in the same world at the same. Is there a recent SL project (say within the last 3 years) with roughly comparable inventiveness?
This is not a concern troll post, I'm genuinely curious -- it's quite possible (as has happened many time before) that there's some amazing project quietly being built deep in the heart of Second Life that the creators don't bother to promote, since they're not concerned about publicity per se, and enjoy the creation as an act in itself. Which is great for them, but the world should know too. (Well, I sure would.)
Mic is open below -- let me know! Please include links and contact info wherever possible.
UdonTycoon is a new VRChat experience [search “Udon Tycoon” to play] that’s easily the most amazing game I’ve seen created on the platform. (And I’ve seensome amazing ones.) Basically a mash-up of Roller Coaster Tycoon but in VR and in a multi-user virtual world, it includes a user-controlled toolkit that enables players to create and save their own rollercoaster tracks and -- this part makes my head spin -- share them in the same space with other players at the same time.
“Yes, it's all fully networked,” lead creator Reimajo tells me. “[Players] can even preview the parts that other users intent to place with them.”
Reimajo and her collaborators have been building this in their free time for over a year, coding gameplay (as the name suggests) in UdonSharp, the user-made C#-to-Udon compiler popular with VRChat developers. But at first, she didn’t even intend to turn it into a full-fledged game: “[W]e just worked way too long on some things that we personally found cool because nobody else had done it before.”
That community tinkering aspect distinguishes UdonTycoon -- or for that, most every other great VRChat experience -- from professionally made VR games.
“A regular game studio couldn't justify the development time that we put into some ‘gimmicks,” as Reimajo puts it. “That's why most VR games today are still not very immersive and use laser pointer UI for example, or simple buttons that you can only click with your trigger button, but not physically press with your hands.”
Launched last week, it’s already attracted nearly 40,000 visits, which is a higher play rate than most studio produced VR titles. (As I write this, only some 1500 people are playing Beat Saber on Steam.)
“All of that is mostly just the product of hanging out in VR with my friends and I'm the person who codes all the time,” Reimajo adds.”I taught that to myself 2 years ago when Udon was pretty new, together with all the needed Unity skills. There was a lot of stuff that I was missing in VR (why are there no good non-plane flying games?) so I wanted to learn how to make it myself.”
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.
"Over 350" is an educated guess based on a tally of top content creation platforms:
On Patreon, over 160 creatorsare 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:
"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:
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:
NIssan's Marketing Program in VRChat Could Learn Some Hard Earned Lessons from Second Life
"VRChat has much of the same discovery issues that've plagued Second Life," notes Adeon Writer, a denizen of both worlds, responding to my observation that Nissan's VRChat marketing campaign doesn't seem to attract many visitors. "Mainly, as there are more and more places to visit, it becomes harder and harder to become discovered and retain attention from so many other possible places you could be. I don't think Second Life ever managed to solve this in a meaningful way. VRChat hasn't yet either."
That sounds very right. Also (I should add) as sub-communities in virtual worlds become more and more cloistered, it becomes an even more difficult challenge for outside marketers to engage with the world's user base as a whole. That seems to be happening in VRChat as well.
Reader and SLer Kaylee West has some solid ideas Nissan could do well to learn from:
Continue reading "NIssan's Marketing Program in VRChat Could Learn Some Hard Earned Lessons from Second Life" »
Posted on Monday, November 08, 2021 at 04:38 PM in Comment of the Week, VRChat | Permalink | Comments (2)
|
|