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: Virtual Reality
-
This new Time Magazine cover is so utterly wrong that it’s a perfect example of a problem that’s been festering for the last three years: Mainstream media stories about the Metaverse which are prominently (often exclusively) illustrated with images of people in VR headsets. There’s so many other interesting and original ways to illustrate a…
-
Since it keeps coming up, I should mention the recent single source rumor that Roblox is coming to Meta Quest this year. This one: Editor Alex Heath launched The Verge’s Command Line paid subscription newsletter last week with a mention of “hearing that Roblox is planning to come to Quest in the back half of…
-
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…
-
Neomance is another great VRChat explorer. Like Bradlee, he explores the platforms' many worlds, takes breathtaking photos of his favorites, and posts them in a dazzling cascade on his Twitter. Like many — most? nearly all? — of the active VRChat community, he discovered VRChat through "random YouTube videos, and I got on to socialize…
-
Above: Nintendo's consumer VR launch in 1994 Is the market for VR headsets small and active usage apparently low (especially among Gen Z) because virtual reality is still in "early days"? Reader Nadeja thinks otherwise: I don't think we are in the early days of VR. The earliest HMD were made in the 1960s. NASA…
-
Responding to our question on how many active users on the Quest VR headset there are, a reader points us to a recent market survey which suggests that use is quite tiny, especially among Gen Z: Piper Sandler completes 43rd semi-annual Generation Z survey of 7,100 U.S. teens… While 26% of teens own a VR…
-
Above: Most popular games in the Quest store as of today I spent much of last week pondering the mystery of why Meta hasn't announced that the Quest 2 has crossed a 10 million unit install base (as it almost certainly has by now, based on earnings reports). Reader Zack makes an even better point:…
-
With Meta's Q2 2022 earnings report out now, it's once again time to engage in some Quest 2 install base tea leaf reading. I've written about this multiple times (most recently here), but the basic gist is: Most or nearly all the revenue from Meta's Reality Labs division comes from sales of its Quest 2…
-
To the disappointment of many XR/Metaverse fans, Apple's slew of announcements at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference did not include anything about its much-rumored, long-awaited VR/AR headset. I'm not surprised, even though the New York Times just reported one is coming out next year. Because the thing is, I've been following such dubiously sourced predictions…
-
Here's the latest talk from Linden Lab veteran Jim "Babbage" Purbrick, who applied what he learned from Second Life and other pioneering virtual worlds in his work for Eve Online and Meta, with the focus here on user safety, i.e. keeping annoyances from trolls and other bad actors in the virtual world down to a dull…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 