Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Update, 10/23: Woke up realizing this: If VRChat's reported 10 million monthly active users are about 2.5 million people from Japan, which has a total population about 124 million… about 2 percent of the Japanese are VRChat users. 

Last I checked in August, Japan-based traffic to VRChat's website was second only to the US, and nearly 20% of the total, compared to 40% of traffic from the US (according to SimilarWeb). Japanese usage has grown quite a bit from that:

In September, Japan-based traffic jumped to 27%. (Above.) I.E. , it's safe to assume roughly 1 in 4 people playing VRChat are Japanese nationals.

This is a surprising usage trend for a US-based virtual world. Typically, most usage is from the US followed by the UK and various European nations. According to SimilarWeb, for example, Japan traffic to SecondLife.com is currently not even in the top five by country, which in September, was held by traffic from the US, UK, Germany, Russia, and France. And we know Second Life's Japanese community is highly creative and active — it's why we translate key NWN articles into Japanese.

So why VRChat's overwhelming popularity in Japan?

For starters, my indispensable Japanese translator Sanny Yoshikawa points to a huge trade show for virtual world fans, VKet Real, held in several cities in Japan and in VRChat. That's also an entire talk show on Asahi TV (a top broadcaster in the country) hosted inside VRChat. Then of course there's already the overwhelming popularity of Japanese pop culture across the international VRChat community, particularly avatars based anime and Japanese games.

But I know that's just the start; I strongly suspect there's greater cultural affinity with the platform than, say, Fortnite. (Japanese usage of Epic's game/platform: About 5%.) I'll be exploring more soon, and there's fun introductory videos to VRC's Japan-based community like the one above.

Read more of my VRChat coverage here!

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