One thing I find interesting is that despite seemingly the ENTIRE INDUSTRY trying to kill VR and make it seem as uncool as possible... VRChat has grown almost every month for almost eight years now and is among the top 25 most played things on Steam.

Niche? Perhaps, but a big & hungry one.

April 10, 2026 - 20:27 UTC

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Gonna be interesting to see what happens when the Frame launches. Lots of folks (myself included) who've been waiting for modern equipment that's as far removed from Meta as possible.
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That's where I'm at. The sooner I can ditch a Meta headset the better.
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I am extremely curious as to how large that segment is. There are numerous other options on the market, but none as high profile or as affordable as the Quest line. If Valve can meet them on price, I think it’ll indicate how viable VR is as anything other than a niche toy for weebs and furries.
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Software devs dropped VR because it's slightly more effort to include VR support. Hardware devs dropped VR because Zuck failed to turn it into a crypto scam. Corpos are currently obsessed with AI so don't care to innovate.
Valve is still in because they actually know how to profit from innovation.
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It's very much adjacent to Second Life and other virtual spaces. A shame I really think it's not worth getting into without actual VR.
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Waiting for Valve Deckard to finally release so I can get back into VRC. 💀
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Capitalists hate that kind of slow, steady growth.
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As much as I barely recognize where the community is at vs the early days, it's the truest form of a modern day metaverse as it's gonna get and I think that's great. It's a bit corporate (mostly for the sake of moderation) but it's still got that freedom to let you effectively do anything you want.
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I’m not as involved as I used to be, but I’ve always thought they’ve done a remarkably good job of balancing the needs of being a self-sustaining business with the sovereignty of the community. The anti-cheat stuff was the worst thing I’m aware of, and even then I understood why they did it.
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And thats just our Steam-based users!
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Sometimes things should be niche. VRchat & bands show this - they know who they are & are popular to their fans, who they'd lose by trying to appeal to everyone
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Zuck: “this is the future!”
Creates a metaverse specifically for business meetings, gambling on speculative assets and digital real estate, where you cant be horny and dont even have legs
Everyone else: “im going to be a gay little critter and watch pirated movies with my dick out”
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Too bad it's full of racists and weirdos, from my experience. Ruined it.
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The reason VR chat can grow like this, is because it doesn't require VR to participate at all.
Considering we know the number of VR users from the steam survey, I would assume most of their users are on either flat or mobile.
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Nope, just had a VRchat developer confirm that the growth figures for Quest native users look about the same.
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It's been very consistent with its updates, there's a lot of great communities involved with making events and social gatherings, the creators are putting out phenomenal content week in, week out, and so much more.

I'm not surprised that it's the only thing that's kept me engaged with VR still.
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The thing that still gets me is how it completely ate Horizon World’s lunch despite dramatically less funds, and even its corporate trade shows like VKET look leagues better and more professional than anything Meta pulled off despite playing with the GDP of a small nation.
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uncritical support to everyone who worked on horizon worlds and absolutely fucked around and phoned it in
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Hiiiiii Hold Your Color CD hiiiiiiiiiii hello :3
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Um, what? Who is trying to kill VR? I only know the "metaverse" hype is naturally dying, not companies now trying to push hard to kill what they once hyped up.
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Meta have shut down like half of the VR game studios they acquired, delisted a bunch more games, and studios outside of that ecosystem can't find funding at all and have been shutting down or laying people off for the past year. It's seriously grim right now.
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But VRChat is fun, and the version Meta was trying to sell was that with all the fun bits scraped out and replaced with microtransactions.
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it's partly because mmos are no longer games you play for the social aspect and vrc is the closest thing
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The thing with VR chat is that you just need one of them. Imagine a fairly unique gaming platform whose first game was Roblox or Fortnite. How would you get anyone else into that space? They rented out every room in the building. It's such a killer app that it's their platform now.
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The average longtime user is using it to meet up with friends they live far from, the necessity of having everyone on the same platform means standing up a competitor without a serious misstep from VRC's devs is rowing upstream in molasses.
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Yeah, the three or four attempts at competing with VRC have all been absolute failures, even the one Microsoft(?) pumped funds into. They’ve done well enough at maintaining their community (contrary to a vocal minority who’ve said otherwise for years) that no one really cares to try anything else.
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Network Effect Gravity is powerful. Resonite is growing, but that's because it's catering to the subgroup of players who like it for Inworld Poweruser type interfaces, where VRC is external tools only
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I was a -gun store- the other day, and I was talking about my game with one of the dudes, and he mentioned getting his rig setup again 'to play VR chat'. Nothing about the visual appearance or vibe of this person screamed 'vr chat'. Was interesting.
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This one from a few years back springs to mind.
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VRChat is interesting cause despite its growth and internet cultural influence, you rarely if ever hear about the platform in the media.
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I truly wouldn’t have it any other way. I don’t want it to get to Roblox status, because then it’ll be ruined by IP holders and grifters.
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Same reason as a dozen other similar phenomena - it's got furries in it, so the mainstream media is required to ignore its existence other than as a curiosity.
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yeah I'm not surprised it's still growing as there's always new furries trying out VRchat for the first time as it's quite popular in the fandom
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There's the Ugandan Knuckles usage spike.
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More likely the yearly new-years' playercount spike - can see it basically every year in the graph above

(this year's is lasting impressively long)
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AND THATS WITH PEOPLE LEAVEING TO GO TO NEOS! And the other one?
But yeah I love being in social vr spaces
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Every corpo attempt at VR misses what makes VRChat good: you can be a furry or an anime waifu and talk about sicko stuff with other furries and anime waifus

Meanwhile Zuckerberg thought we all wanted to be Temu Miis and attend business meetings
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my metric of metaverse worthiness is "can i be a fox" (and the recent sequel "can i be twilight sparkle")
roblox does score uncomfortably high on that metric (not for free but decently cheap)
though i will note e.g. resonite (with a furry ceo) leans Generic Human™ when advertising to businesses
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Zuck: We've added legs!

Me, remembering the Second Life world in 2007 that was a to-scale recreation of Twilight Town from Kingdom Hearts 2: Good for you, little man.
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It's funny how VR by its nature seems inoculated against corporate exploitation - a major American corporation will not touch furries+anime waifus+sicko stuff (everything VR was built on and doest best) with a 10 foot pole. A corp cannot help but insist that VR business meetings are where it's at.
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It's like I don't unappreciate what some of the devs did in Horizon Worlds because there are positives there, amongthemanynegatives, but god. They just had none ability to compete with VRChat. Something like the seasonal vkets alone blew out 99% of what was available in Worlds.
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ive been playing nonstop for the past 8 years and while i have some gripes with the platform the self expression is unmatched

even with the limitations you have tons of really cool events, worlds, and people to meet.
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wanna do dancing classes? theres groups for that
wanna go on hikes with a treadmill? theres groups for that
wanna go to a rave in any location you can think of? there's groups for that.
it doesn't fully replace any of these activities mentioned but it has its own up and downs.
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My consistent top Steam game for the past few years and one of the best places you can karaoke! Hell my avatar here is my usual VRC self.
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I think the thing with VR is everyone thought it was the next big thing, the NES of the new frontier of entertainment.
And I think actually it was more like the “Tennis for Two” of the new frontier of entertainment.
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Interesting since VRChat's been shooting itself in the foot often, at least based on what some friends have mentioned.
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They rotate pretty consistently between

- An update the community has been requesting for years
- An upcoming feature to address how slow the scripting is.
- Tone-deaf, horribly-communicated debacle
- Previously announced scripting feature is canceled or they're doing something else now instead
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Grumbling on social media from the ultra-hardcore users almost never has ANY bearing on reality.
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Currently they're at "we want your full government id even though you don't live in a country that requires us to have it"
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a thing i love about this chart is the way you can see people getting their vr sets as christmas gifts and immediately setting up camp
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I love hosting movie nights in VR Chat whith my own files prepped from my own collection. When I screened Toy Story for its 30th anniversary, I spliced in the original Disney Pixar logo sourced from a 35mm film print scan, which then faded into the 3D version of the movie.
streamable.com/nkrlhf
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I try to pay attention to details like that. It makes me feel like a projectionist at a movie theater. I even try to keep my movies in 5.1 surround sound for VRC.
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This is just PCVR on Steam. Here is the stats site for all platforms:

metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s
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