Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Originally posted on my Patreon

Courtesy my metaverse pal Neil Barbour, research analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, here's some pretty interesting virtual world user data infographics, based on a survey that the top intelligence firm recently conducted.

Over 4000 consumers participated. And while the overall sample was demographically diverse, Neil notes, "respondents were heavily tilted toward millennials in urban settings. This dynamic likely produced an outsize representation of digital natives, or virtual environment 'early adopters,' which while not an accurate representation of the overall population still provides valuable insights into a wide range of consumer perceptions." Agreed!

In the first slide (above), S&P asked consumers about what specific virtual experiences they engaged with recently.

No surprise that Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite are the most popular platforms named, since all of them have 100 million monthly active users or more (or in Roblox's case, much more). Just as interesting to me is that VRChat is the fourth named virtual experience, when that platform's MAU is much smaller (closer to 12 million).

Relatedly, Second Life is pretty high up among the platforms named, even above virtual worlds with far higher MAU, including Rec Room and ZEPETO, both of which have tens of millions users. (But skew much more Gen Z, who are much less likely to take an online survey, versus Millennials.)

Another notable datapoint is that most of these platforms have seen increased usage (at least in this S&P survey) from 2024 to 2025:

The three leaders saw an increase of participation from 4-7%, since 2024.

Neil Barbour's take on this trend:

What really stands out is the year-over-year comparisons regarding engagement. I think casual market observers assumed that the popularity of shared virtual spaces would burn off as we moved away from the pandemic, but here we are in 2025, and this is one of the few consumer entertainment segments seeing untrammeled upward momentum.

So, why’s that happening? Look down the list of metaverse experiences we asked about. Playing games is the big one, right? People want to play games. But a lot of them also said they want to interact with people, create new content or even watch a movie. A traditional video game can do some of that, but these big metaverse-style operations tick more of those boxes by design, and they do it without asking for any money up front. So, there’s a demand-side component.

But there’s a supply-side component as well. Roblox and Epic have put a lot of money behind bringing new content into their ecosystems, and it appears that consumers are responding.  Now, in the case of Roblox, we know that even though the top line is growing, the bottom line is still struggling. So, it’s one of those scenarios in which investors are subsidizing the content pipeline to some extent in the hopes that the business model will right itself and they’ll end up with a Netflix rather than a Quibi.

Now to spelunk down into usage trends for local metaverse platform favorites, Second Life and VRChat.

Check out Second Life user participation length:

 

30 minutes to 1 hour were the overwhelming choice (by nearly 70%), with just 1 in 5 saying they spent 2 hours or longer in-world.

In S&P's data, VRChat session times were eerily like those of Second Life.

Overall, my main takeaway here is that millennials are active users of virtual worlds like SL and VRChat, but don't necessarily spend large lengths of extended time in them during an individual session.

I contrast those numbers with 2009 Second Life stats shared by Linden Lab that shock me to this day:

Back then, the hardcore active user base of 125K or so were logging into SL over 50 hours a month — with nearly 50,000 of them logging in over 200 hours per month!

Thanks again to Neil for his data. This is just a small sliver from a much larger report, so be sure to follow him on LinkedIn to request the whole deck!

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