“Throw Me Some Numbers”:
User Growth Rate Getting Back to Zero
by Pan Diman
The “average players” number grows again. Image taken from Steam Charts.
This week, we took a closer look at Steam statistics on Steam Charts. in order to analyse recent user activity in VRChat and compare it to the numbers from the days before the app became significantly more popular.
Ever since the January memes died, more and more people started to call VRChat “dead” without acknowledging the fact its popularity reached a whole new level in just a couple of months.
Some users think that the main issue was that VRChat couldn’t handle dozens of thousands of concurrent users during the Ugandan invasion, and the devs had no other choice but to force their community to stay small, as the company seems to be in no position to be able to support their user base… or is it?
On September 21st, VRChat Inc. received a huge amount of $4 million from HTC, and while they were celebrating, their platform achieved some recognition thanks to the media, followed by more attention from streamers and YouTubers, including PewDiePie and Jameskii. That’s when VRChat greeted hundreds of concurrent users online, and eventually those numbers turned into thousands.
Despite sounding juvenoid, a lot of users call those earlier days (before PewDiePie made his first video on VRChat) “The Golden Age of VRChat.” However, the earlier version left a great impression on users not just because of how small and friendly the community used to be, but because the VRChat team already adapted to the state of a platform that didn’t require a lot of resources.
You probably know what happened after that. Many left VRChat because of annoying memes, hackers, poor servers, issues with moderation, and, as Bornato said, “Popularity brings bad people who can ruin a good community.”
To put it shortly, VRC gained its popularity because of the creativity of its player base, but it may also be the reason why we lost a lot of users. Creating custom content is great power, but we all have to be aware of our own responsibility.
Ugandan Knuckles, also known as “the problematic meme.” Screenshot by Pan Diman.
