Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: Rec Room
-
Bad news for Rec Room, a metaverse platform with impressive user growth across multiple platforms. (For my book's new afterword, I'm tracking it has having around 40 million monthly active users, mostly on mobile and consoles.) Despite that, the company co-founders announced they were laying off half the staff. The stated reason in the announcement…
-
Like life, the Metaverse finds a way. While the long-awaited, official Rec Room app for Vision Pro is still in development (the company's partnership was announced last June), here's a Rec Room streamer already unofficially exploring the virtual world with Apple's HMD. This is possible, as "Grizzly" explains, via the iVRy Driver for SteamVR, an…
-
Screengrab via Rec Room's Shawn Whiting Update, 4:00pm: Shawn tells me he can't comment beyond the tweet featuring Rec Room in the VisionPro menu, but then adds: "might be more tomorrow too :)" While Apple VisionPro may not be primarily targeted at or architected for VR/virtual world/Metaverse usage, it may still become an interesting niche…
-
With news that Microsoft is shutting down its VR metaverse platform AltspaceVR, along with widespread layoffs across most of the major tech companies, you might assume the Metaverse as an industry is also feeling the string. Not so much. On a quick tally of leading metaverse platforms in terms of active users, along with promising…
-
Update, October 17: Carmack later acknowledged that Rec Room and VRChat do make money for Meta via 30% commissions on in-app payments. However, as most free-to-play multiplayer games/worlds monetize at under 10% (usually much less), it's still likely the case that the vast majority of Rec Room/VRChat players on Quest aren't paying Meta anything through…
-
Above: Within's Supernatural on the Oculus store with nearly 10,000 user ratings Fairly big bombshell just dropped: The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within [producer of the highly popular fitness app called Supernatural], potentially limiting…
-
Many interesting comments in last week's post about Philip Rosedale's desire to bring back in-world, collaborative creation as the gold standard, including this one by Martin K., going into detail about how many resources it has for that feature. Have a look at this page, it links to Discord servers of dozens of classes that…
-
I missed this Yahoo! News article from last week but I can't let this claim pass: “People have kind of lost interest in the metaverse, because characters look like cartoons with no legs,” Marc Petit, Epic Games’ VP and general manager of Unreal Engine, told Yahoo Finance. “I mean, who wants to be that? This…
-
Just got this pretty amazing breaking news note from Shawn Whiting, Head of Influencers & Partners at Rec Room: "Shortly after the holidays, Rec Room crested 3 million VR monthly active users… A majority of those VR monthly active users are Quest 2. [Emph mine – WJA] "We're very happy with the VR growth but…
-
In case you missed it (and I meant to blog this last week, sorry), Rec Room is hiring like crazy, with around 60 open positions. "We're growing a lot," as Rec Room Influencer/Partner Head Shawn Whiting tells me. "Mobile (iOS and Android) is growing very quickly so almost every team is hiring to keep up,"…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 