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: VRChat
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Steam Protest Against VRChat’s Mod Ban So Far Leads to Little Change of Actual VRChat Usage on Steam
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…
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Above: Steam's VRChat ratings bombarded by protesters A Metaverse platform is nothing without a thriving community, but the flipside is portions of that community can seem to endanger the platform. VRChat is experiencing that now, due to an announcement that seems benign on its face: “Modified clients” are a large problem for VRChat in a…
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VRChat/metaverse lovers, pencil in July 27 on your calendar, because that's when HBO is premiering "We Met in VR", Joe Hunting's feature length documentary devoted to the VRChat community. Watch the trailer above, featuring some VRChat worlds that have also been covered here, including the deaf community which teaches sign language in VRChat, and Udon…
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When we talk about user-generated content on metaverse platforms, it's important to focus not just on 3D models and scripted experiences in-world, but metaverse content created for external consumption — for instance, quite prominently, for social media/streaming video platforms. With VRChat, for instance, in compiling a list of YouTube channels focused on that platform, there's…
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As comparison data to that chart on blockchain-based metaverse platforms from yesterday, here's VRChat's daily peak concurrency on Steam since 2017. (Via SteamDB.) Important qualifier: This is not a full reflection of user activity on VRChat, since it doesn't count people logging in via the Quest headset/store. After a brief spike in late 2017/early 2018…
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While VRChat does not actually describe itself as a metaverse platform (yet?), it is by far the leading contender in that space. I feel like I've been writing about that little appreciated theme for at least the last couple years, but this new video from Quintin Smith (Wired, Edge, Eurogamer) of People Make Games makes…
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Update, 4/21: Avatar Dynamics is now live. Check out this post for tutorials and community-created samples of this avatar-to-avatar tech! As promised last year, VRChat recently updated its avatar dynamics to enable far more interactivity between avatars and the virtual world, and (even more key) avatar-to-avatar. Now in open beta, the VRChat community is already…
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Remember "Dream Drive" (aka "Micchy" in VRChat), the Japanese inventor who is jaw-droppingly creating a robot in the real world that is controllable from within VRChat? Of course you do! We don't fully have a Metaverse along the strictest definition until there's a way to bridge the virtual world with real world devices. So here's…
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I've seen some insanely ambitious VRChat projects but good god just watch this video already. It's from "Dream Drive" , a Japanese inventor who is creating an 8 foot tall Transformers-type robot in the real world… that is controllable from within VRChat. That's possible, he tells me, by virtual serial communication between VRChat and Raspberry…
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NFT? Maybe that should mean Not Friendly Transactions. Allie Volpe of Bustle recently asked me who will be rich in the Metaverse: Virtual plots of land or massive yachts won’t be signs of wealth in the metaverse if other users aren’t on the platform to witness it, especially if outsiders don’t see value in these…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 