Virtual Week-ality’s First Anniversary

Pan Diman. In-app picture taken by me, Pan Diman.

On September 18th, 2017, the very first newsstand avatar called “VR News or Whatever” was published by me, Pan Diman, as the result of an experiment with original content produced and promoted in VRChat.

In most articles, I always tried to refer to myself in third person, but today I’m making an exception because, after all, I’m the only person responsible for this project. Despite the fact VRChat placed a portal to my world in the hub many months ago, they never contributed to creation of these articles directly, and I believe I should have mentioned this at some point because a lot of people thought the newsstands belonged to the content created by the VRChat staff, which, sadly, is not the case.

This week, for the first time ever, I am launching my very own Patreon campaign, a link to which may be found on the Virtual Week-ality site that you can visit by scanning the presented QR code (not that you need it now that you're on this site now).

My site will contain all of the news published by me earlier, and it was designed specially for the web panels, though you should know that VRChat suddenly removed them about a month ago.

However, having a website should be a step forward. I’ve been publishing the news in VRChat exclusively until recently because the original idea was to make people stay in VRChat for as long as possible by providing them with the content they wouldn’t be able to see elsewhere.

After all this time, I’ll stop writing world reviews for FireWOLF109’s “Traveling Kitsunes”, because I don’t know a single person who reads them with every update. Every edition of Virtual Week-ality usually takes about 5–10 hours to make and publish, and I definitely spent over 500 hours just creating articles. Even though I never saw myself as a journalist, in the end, I hope I won’t be remembered only for this.

This year was quite a rollercoaster for a lot of users, and I hope VRChat will keep up the good work improving their platform before the app dies miserably as a huge disappointment at some point in the distant future.