Wagner James Au / New World Notes

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Steam Protest Against VRChat’s Mod Ban So Far Leads to Little Change of Actual VRChat Usage on Steam

2022-07-27 (6)

VRChat July '22 concurrency via SteamDB

Ever since a user protest against VRChat's recent announcement banning mods led to a bombarding of bad user ratings on VRChat's Steam page, I've seen dire warnings of disaster for the platform. But having covered user protests on metaverse platforms for quite some time, my general rule of thumb is:

Don't look at what the protesters are saying, look at what they're doing.

Because far as we can tell, VRChat user activity on Steam is still about the same as it was before the announcement this Monday. Yesterday, peak Steam daily concurrency was about 25,000. Last week Tuesday, it was about… 27,000. It's down a bit further today, so the most we can say is the EAC/mod protest might have caused a few thousand users to leave VRChat (at least temporarily). But it's way too early to say.

Will check back in later to see whether usage trends up or down. But until then, I suspect this is yet another metaverse platform protest that basically translates to, "I am never playing this game I am currently playing right now!"

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3 responses to “Steam Protest Against VRChat’s Mod Ban So Far Leads to Little Change of Actual VRChat Usage on Steam”

  1. Martin K. Avatar
    Martin K.

    It’s the same pattern over and over again: if you don’t enforce reasonable rules in order to build a community faster and later find out that you have to enforce some reasonable rules, a part of your community will leave. That loss is just a long-term consequence of the faster community building due to the lack of reasonable rules. It applies to modding of online games just as well as to toxicity and IP infringement: you can be lax on rules for a while to build your community faster, but at some point the problems with an unruly community come back with a vengeance.

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  2. Nadeja Avatar
    Nadeja

    Your last line is probably right: when people really like something or are addicted, usually they protest for a while against the unwelcome choices, hoping the situation changes, but then they swallow it and stay, rather than to quit. Only a minority leaves.
    In the meantime, however, in the past few days Neos VR daily user concurrency on SteamDB rose from 250-350 to above 1000, with a peak of 1400 on July 27th.
    Maybe someone is having a look at alternatives to VRChat (and someone would still play both) and Neos is arguably close enough.
    About a thousand aren’t so many for VRChat, but a nice jump up for Neos.
    If a good amount of them stay, that would be good news for Neos.

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  3. Wagner James Au Avatar
    Wagner James Au

    Good point! Reminds me of OpenSim seeing a little spike any time there was a big SL controversy.

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