CHAPTER 7
VRChat and Finding Furry Anime Utopia
Chris “Strasz” Hornyak was only a casual VRChat player at first, randomly exploring the platform with his spouse, both wearing VR headsets while at home in the same room, adventuring in the virtual world while trying not to whack into each other in real life.
Then COVID-19 came calling. During the lockdown, Chris tells me, “Exploring VRChat effectively became our way of going on dates.”
VRChat became something more transformative to Strasz, a longtime virtual world enthusiast and MMO gamer, when he descended by elevator into a massive virtual rave in a basement space with glass and metal floors:
“And I remember going into this environment and everybody was dancing, and I was shoulder to shoulder with people, and there's like lights and music playing and everything was going on and I got so overwhelmed,” as he describes the experience now. “Everyone was dancing and swaying, and I kept expecting to feel their elbows bump mine, I kept expecting to feel their body heat. I completely felt like I was there and I've never gotten that elsewhere.”
It also connected him to the Metaverse in a direct and profound way. “I read Snow Crash growing up and I wanted to visit the Black Sun so bad and it was the closest I ever felt to having that experience.”
While it may come as a surprise to anyone who assumed Meta would shape the future of the Metaverse, its purest contemporary incarnation so far resides in VRChat, a small startup first bootstrapped by a tiny team that does not even call what they're creating a metaverse platform. (But more on that later.)
By my estimate, based on user concurrency and other variables and sources, VRChat has over 5 million monthly active users, occasionally climbing toward 10 million around the holiday season, when there's an influx of new VR headset owners.
While VRChat has received far less media attention than Meta, it trounced the Internet giant on its own territory. In 2022, Meta could only count some 200,000–300,000 monthly active users in its metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds.
But the true kicker is this: Owners of Meta's Quest 2 headsets overwhelmingly prefer playing in VRChat over Meta's own virtual world.
This preference became so pronounced, it actually helped nudge Meta into raising the price of that headset. Senior adviser John Carmack said as much at a 2022 Meta conference: “[S]ome of the most popular apps on Quest are free apps, VRChat and Rec Room, that we get no revenue from at all … sitting there at the top of our ranking list in many cases.”
In other words, Quest 2 owners were not buying enough premium content from Meta but instead using their headsets for free-to-play metaverse platforms that directly compete with its own virtual world.
When Philip Rosedale speaks to me about VRChat, he ranks it as parallel to Second Life in terms of ambition, achieving an experiential leap that complements his career goal of deeply connecting people across the Internet.
“VRChat has a lot of very, very powerful properties,” as he puts it. “Most importantly—most importantly—you can use your hands when you talk to somebody, and you can see your [avatar] body when you look in the mirror with somebody. I think that's just earth-shatteringly good.”
Simulating a mirror's reflection in real time is computationally challenging, and it's one of the many marvels VRChat made possible in its virtual world. Rosedale is not only talking about the technical breakthrough but how that effect creates a bond with one's avatar and people in the same shared space as you. “That idea of standing and looking at a mirror when you're next to somebody else, that's a really interesting modality for experience.”
None of this success, however, was preordained. For the first couple years of its existence, VRChat seemed nothing like the best new metaverse platform on the Internet, but rather, an also-ran VR social app fated for obscurity and abuse by the worst Internet trolls.
This is the story of how the best contender in recent years for “The Metaverse” crown succeeded in the most unlikely way.
Knuckling Under
Cofounded by game industry veterans Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey, VRChat is not officially called a metaverse platform. (At least not yet.) But it very much emerged from that well of inspiration.
“I backed the Oculus Kickstarter in 2012 with many of the same motivations as others,” as cofounder Graham explains. “I'd read Snow Crash, Ready Player One, and all the typical VR enthusiast books and was excited to jump into VR for the first time.”
Back then, Graham spent many of his hours chatting about VR and related topics on Reddit.
“One day I had this revelation: Why are we doing this on Reddit when we could be doing it in VR? I quickly built a prototype, posted the download link on Reddit, and we immediately had a small community spring up.”
That was in 2014. In its first few years, that small community remained as such. In September 2017, VRChat was attracting a maximum of 105 users from Steam over a 24-hour period, and the all-time concurrency high for the year was 115 people total.
“[VRChat] has a steep hill to climb,” I snarkily blogged at the time. And quickly consumed those words.
Three months later, VRChat catapulted.
As the platform approached New Year's Eve in 2018, a number of popular YouTubers discovered it, learned its creation tools well enough to make rudimentary content, and began streaming video from VRChat itself, broadcasting their smartass antics to hundreds of thousands.
What followed next conveys many lessons in the launching of metaverse platforms, some of which are still being learned, including:
- Metaverse communities will instantly convert pop culture fandom—from TV, movies, video games, and beyond—into content.
- Video streamers, especially on Twitch and YouTube, exert enormous power to turn viewers into players. For better and worse.
A slew of avatars made to resemble “Ugandan Knuckles,” an Internet hell spawn meme with more than a little racist connotation, invaded VRChat, followed by a wave of viral videos.
A crush of new users followed, and as the world entered 2018, VRChat was peaking at 20,000 concurrent users.
At the time, I expected this to be a passing blip of interest, as coteries of Internet trolls, finally bored, went off to search for other easy targets. After all, that very thing had happened to Second Life through its phase of peak media attention, with trolls from the 4Chan message board and other acrid wings of the Internet regularly exploding the grid with self-replicating Mario confetti, giant dancing dildoes, and suchlike.
But then a strange thing happened:
VRChat usage kept growing. And evolving.
“Shock value memes like the Ugandan Knuckles thing are only interesting for so long, but stuff like building a social community or a social circle, those are the things that make people stay,” as one veteran VRChat resident put it to me at the time.
“Really, though, we didn't see that large of a jump in trolls during that incident,” VRChat's founders tell me now. “Most of the people coming in were amused and were looking to see what was going on; they weren't really trying to troll or disrupt things … at least not in a malicious way.”
In any case, Graham and Jesse want to assure me that the Ugandan Knuckles viral moment was not the chief cause of VRChat's user growth.
“A lot of people tend to think that specific moment was a stroke of luck for us—when in reality, fostering a community that could create anything (and spread it like wildfire) was very much part of the plan,” as they put it to me. “Obviously, we couldn't have known that specific meme would've taken off like it did, but that's okay—that's part of the magic. We want to let people create and share the content that works for them.
“VRChat is all about UGC—that's what makes it such a different platform. Everything is created by the users, and we try our best to give them as much freedom as possible. That was the case before that particular meme, and it's certainly the case after.”
As VRChat's growth continued, another surprising trend emerged.
In 2019, the company reported that 30 percent of its daily users wore an HMD.
By 2022, however, the founders tell me that ratio had reversed, with 70 percent of active users wearing HMDs.
Graham and Jesse attribute that to Meta's debut of Quest 2 headsets in the interim. “They offered users a (relatively) affordable way to get into VR. While we were (and are) still experiencing PC-based growth, that of course has lots of limitations.”
VRChat, in other words, has effectively become one of the few killer apps of consumer VR, with daily usage outstripping hit VR games like SuperHot and Beat Saber. (Ironically, Meta bought the developer of the latter game for $2 billion.)
Core to this success was a feature that VRChat's creators implemented around the time when Knuckle-flavored trolls were running roughshod in the community.
Game of Trust
As part of its user safety tools, VRChat founders Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey and their team created the Trust System, with a series of ranks in ascending order of karmic credibility:
- Visitor
- User
- Known User
- Trusted User
Each rank is instantly identifiable by the color of the avatar's name tag floating above their head, with the highest rank of transcendence, Trusted User, emblazoned in royal purple.
“The Trust System was meant to solve a problem that we were having early on during our time on Steam,” Graham and Jesse explain to me. “In short, people were uploading stuff, often before they really understood how to develop or create content for VRChat. This led to disruptive avatars, broken worlds, and unhappy users.
“That's always the biggest challenge with UGC. You want to give people complete creative freedom, but obviously, at a certain point you need to tweak things for the sake of quality, safety, and stability.”
The Trust System also gave new users a kind of game mechanic that encouraged them to return many times to the virtual world—and in doing so, appreciate the people and platform within it.
Where most game systems mainly reward repeated (if not mechanical) activity, the implicit challenge of VRChat's Trust System “game” is to prove oneself to be a consistently positive person and a valuable member of the community.
“Letting people spend some time hanging around VRChat (and learning all the unspoken social rules that are present here) lets them understand the platform better,” the founders explain, “which means that they could be thinking more of the community when uploading content.”
The system also confers a sense of status to established VRChat community members that first-time visitors can quickly notice.
“[New users] would look out for people that had more experience that relates to User and above, because it was a good sign that you knew the social customs and VRChat,” as Strasz puts it.
The Trust System was an important function for VRChat gaining escape velocity in terms of organic growth. Now that it has, the system has become a kind of leveling mechanism for new players. Where traditional MMOs might have newbies level up by killing various numbers of rodents and such, VRChat rewards new users for spending time exploring the virtual world, expressing themselves, and connecting with others.
“People come in and [say], ‘Okay, I want to make a world, I want to make an avatar,’ and then they see, ‘Oh, I have to be this user [level]’,” Strasz explains. “So then they socialize, they bounce around a little bit and make friends. That does have a good benefit because it means … they're going to be interacting with people that also do those things.”
By making trust an explicit goal, VRChat quickly became a social space for newly minted owners of virtual reality headsets. VR enthusiasts who initially bought a headset to play games now devote most of their time in VRChat to being with other people.
Strasz credits this trend to a yearning for a “third place”—sociologist Ray Oldenburg's term for spaces that are not home and not work, such as a local park or pub, where people connect for fun, enjoyment, and creativity.
“It's been going away, especially in the United States. There's not a lot of places people can go and hang out, meet people, meet friends, and a lot of places that, post-college, you can go to and be like, ‘I'm going to meet people and feel like I'm hanging out with them rather than it just being like a Discord call’ or something like that. And I think that's what makes VRChat so sticky.”
Unlike the neighborhood sports bar, however, what emerged (and continues to emerge) from VRChat is a third place that could exist only in the digital world. Miraculously, wackily so.
Communities Create Community
One day, a 20-something Persian-Canadian videographer from Toronto was wandering the world of VRChat when he stumbled upon a sexy anime girl who turned out to be a drunk Finnish man engaged in an existential argument with a small purple dinosaur.
“We as a species,” the Finn slurred, “we have frickin’ invented this shit….”
“But I'm not human,” the dinosaur demurred.
“That's OK,” the anime girl replied, poking her green lightsaber at the baby T-Rex for emphasis. “You're still a mind.”
The young Canuck hit Record and uploaded this Camus-but-blotto convo to YouTube. It subsequently changed his life.
Hilarious, surreal, but also somehow poignant, it rapidly went viral.
“That's when it really clicked in to me how crazy talking to someone from across the planet in VRChat actually was,” the Canadian says now. As a videographer, he had shot Toronto street protests and guerilla interviews with activists.
“I didn't expect to be doing VR interviews,” he tells me. “However, as it grew I realized it had potential, and I wanted to take it more seriously.”
And so began the career of “Syrmor,” who effectively became VRChat's first embedded reporter.
Up until then, most VRChat videos were mainly rude memes and coarse trolling. Syrmor's videos, by contrast, are whimsical and moving.
In VRChat, Syrmor interviewed a bullied kid with ADHD and social anxiety who explained, while wearing a Kermit avatar, how being in the virtual world helped him express who he really is. Syrmor riffed with a man dying of ALS confined to a wheelchair in real life, who visited VRChat with the help of his attendants, and chatted with Syrmor about taking magic mushrooms at pagan festivals while riding a sports car as a mushroom-shaped avatar in VRChat. Syrmor quizzed a chatty penguin who unburdened himself, speaking about his offline life as a military contractor who witnessed the gory aftermath of an airstrike he helped conduct. “And the first time I saw that was the first day of the job,” he told Syrmor, tiny flippers flapping for emphasis, “and that was a ‘holy fuck’ moment. Like what the fuck am I doing?”
Syrmor met people of all ages, from around the world, with tragic and horrible and occasionally sweet secrets to share. And just as I experienced in my own embedded journalist years in Second Life, Syrmor kept coming across an endless parade of people eager to tell their real stories through the safety and distance of their avatars.
After his early interviews with combat veterans in VRChat, other retired military personnel began contacting Syrmor, wanting to unburden themselves as well.
“I just started getting a ton of emails from veterans who wanted to talk,” he tells me in VRChat one day, as we wander a surreal re-creation of a shopping mall from the ’80s. “I feel more and more people are seeing VR as a legit way to discuss what's on their chest, or to feel like they're getting their story out there.”
Syrmor's experiences with vets here match mine in Second Life—as I touched on in Chapter 2—strongly suggesting that metaverse platforms continue to create possibilities of catharsis for lonely or suffering people unable to express the truest sense of themselves in their offline lives.
A squat black and white cartoon cat in VRChat, Syrmor chortles when I tell him his YouTube channel devoted to VRChat interviews now has more subscribers than the YouTube channel of People magazine, and simply says, “Nice.”
It is also true: With well over 1 million followers, Syrmor's YouTube channel has more viewers than many legacy media brands.
He's not alone. As with any other successful metaverse platform, there are hundreds if not thousands of YouTube and Twitch channels devoted to VRChat. A dozen or more have viewerships approaching Syrmor's reach, most devoted to random virtual adventures or technical tutorials, some of them just as thoughtful. It's where I first met Chris “Strasz” Hornyak, who got his start creating long-form videos attempting to express the eldritch uniqueness of VRChat, sometimes citing Foucault along the way. When a virtual world community becomes active and deep enough that people in it start citing postmodern philosophers, it's probably long past time to take it seriously.
In a 2021 survey I conducted jointly with Syrmor and his massive user base of VRChat fans, 59 percent of VRChat users were 20 years or older, with 14 percent stating their age as 31 or older; two out of three were male, but (very notably) the remaining gender split was almost exactly equal between females (17 percent) and those who selected “trans/nonbinary/other” (17.5 percent).
Asked what they most love about VRChat, respondents overwhelmingly selected “Community.”
A Community Endlessly Creating
Any extended visit I've made into VRChat feels like I'm diving into a sea of stories, endlessly flowing together, all full of longing for human connection.
One day I wandered into a bucolic, forest-shrouded dog park, watching a bizarre menagerie of avatars play fetch with an assortment of adorable, AI-powered virtual canines. The dogs were actually created as a project funded by Dr. Brenda Freshman, a professor at CalState Long Beach, with an aim of studying how VR experiences like this might benefit isolated senior citizens. But since the park was open to the general VRChat public, many visitors began trickling in, often there as a way of recovering from the grief of losing a pet in real life.
Her colleague on the project casually mentioned a phenomenon he noticed that seemed just as striking: Many VRChat users were logging in mainly so they could be in the virtual world with others while they slept in real life.
I boggled at the idea that people around the world, most of them strapped into VR headgear, would actually crawl into bed so they could sleep alongside other people scattered around the globe. But searching through VRChat's world list, I found dozens of places where “sleep” was mentioned in their description; randomly teleporting into one, I found myself in what seemed like a cozy home in a Japanese fishing village at night beneath a gentle rain. And sure enough, all around me, I could hear avatars peacefully snoring through their microphones.
Another day I met “Yumi,” a young guy living somewhere in Germany who felt too out of shape and shy to hit his local nightclubs—but then discovered he could dance in VRChat. His surprisingly agile moves were tracked by his full VR body rig, then replicated on his avatar (an adorable anime girl in pigtails), causing nearby VRChat users to gather and cheer, turning him into a resident celebrity and social media star.
“I would have never danced this much in my life EVER if I didn't decide some months ago to buy VR,” he told me. “I feel a lot more confident in myself since then.”
As creators grew more confident with the platform's tools—VRChat is deeply integrated with the Unity 3D editor—they began building entire interactive experiences, full-fledged games, even mixed reality projects.
It's how I met with a semi-anonymous inventor in Japan (“Micchy” in VRChat) who was busily creating a serial communication bridge between VRChat and Raspberry Pi, so that he might achieve a modest goal: Control an 8-foot tall Transformers-type robot in the real world—from within VRChat. (Ng the inventor from Snow Crash only drove a van from within the Metaverse.) In ways like this, VRChat's developer community is experimenting with mixed reality projects that connect the virtual world with external technology—the last and most challenging feature to qualify as the full-fledged Metaverse.
I also met “Jar,” a steadfastly anonymous programmer who gave up her technical programmer day job to make social games full-time in VRChat. She created and launched a survival co-op game world called Murder 4, and within 8 months, it had been visited nearly 8 million times; her two most popular games typically attract 2,000 to 4,000 concurrent players at any given moment. This might not seem like much, but it competes in usage numbers with even the top selling VR games made by professional studios. At peak, for instance, Murder 4 has more online players than typically enjoy the hit title Beat Saber on Steam.
Meta, I should again note, bought the developer of Beat Saber for $2 billion. To create content on its own platform, VRChat the company has paid Jar roughly zero dollars.
As Jar's VRChat games became popular, so did she, with a growing fan base intrigued by her mysterious avatar name and distinctive appearance, which resembles a shadow in humanoid form, with white hair and a jeweled mask.
Before the advent of metaverse platforms, it was rare to find game developers who had a close and active relationship with their fans. But like most other VRChat creators, Jar holds court in her own Discord with her most avid supporters, a server with the tongue-in-cheek name The Cult of Jar. (“I like to think the name is slightly satirical because there are some creator-centered communities online that come across as cult-like.”)
Jar's VRChat games generated a community of players who play often and support their creator. Nearly 1,500 of them contribute to her Patreon, giving her a solid full-time living.
“I feel so much more liberated,” Jar told me once. “Being able to do what I actually enjoy doing during the day is working wonders for my personal well-being. Like a kid in a candy store, I have a huge list of ideas, and I get to choose whichever ones I am most passionate about.”
I met “Merlin,” a VRChat community member who created UdonSharp, which compiles code written in C#—a very commonly used programming language—into Udon, VRChat's official scripting language. By doing so, he enabled thousands of C# programmers to quickly join and contribute to the VRChat creative community. And he did it all on a voluntary basis to serve other VRChat creators, even while unemployed, living in large part off donations from VRChat users.
Merlin's efforts in turn unleashed successive waves of innovation in VRChat, such as “Udon Tycoon,” a user-made game reminiscent of the classic PC game Roller Coaster Tycoon, but in VR and in a multi-user virtual world, with new building tools built on top that enabled players to create and save their own roller coaster tracks with others. Played by tens of thousands of VRChat players in its first week of launch, it evinced more engineering and design ambition than most corporate-funded VR games.
Cultivating an extremely open development platform capable of attracting such a wide range of applications, however, comes with its own unique problems. And in mid-2022, VRChat's connection to its community was tested as never before.
EAC and the Ironic Challenge of Metaverse Community Management
The crisis erupted in the summer of 2022 with the introduction of Easy Anti Cheat (or EAC), a program that blocks modified versions of VRChat. As the official announcement explained:
- Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes as well as other information. These users—often without even realizing it!—run the risk of losing their account, or having their computers become part of a larger botnet.
User rage immediately spiked. A portion of their anger was understandable, because some mods blocked by EAC included accessibility features, such as text captions for deaf users and contrast for colorblind users.
But the collective protest that followed threatened the health of VRChat itself, with many thousands of vengeful users bombarding its listing on Steam with bad reviews. VRChat's aggregate review score on Steam dropped in days from Very Positive to Overwhelmingly Negative.
“The EAC situation was a tough one,” founders Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey acknowledge to me. “We knew that EAC was always going to be a hard sell, to say the least. EAC mostly addresses something that isn't entirely visible to all users. This led many people to believe that we were doing it for some nefarious purpose. Of course, we weren't! Our Trust & Safety and Security teams were pushing for it knowing the burden mods were having on our team and users.”
This is not uncommon for metaverse platforms: The vast majority of users, being positive members of the community, see little of the platform's dark side, and so when a restrictive technical change is made, imagine the worst. These platforms’ success depends in great part on community management teams fostering positivity while also squelching the worst bad actors and most offensive content. But because that content isn't seen by most users, the community can respond to an imposition like EAC with paranoia and outrage.
“The sheer number of people losing their accounts due to mod use was staggering,” as the founders put it to me. “Not to mention the number of harassment reports we received explicitly due to people being attacked by malicious mod users.”
They still had to confront the other conflict this unleashed: anger that genuinely valuable mods—for instance, to help users with visual impairments—were also being banned.
“We knew, though, that not all mod users were malicious—many were just there to add in quality-of-life fixes or functionality that we'd yet to implement in VRChat. It was one of those things that had to be done, but we knew that no matter when we did it, it'd be a rough time.”
As the community protest raged, the founders reviewed the feedback and started prioritizing the legitimate user-mods that would be lost due to EAC:
“We knew that we'd lose some trust with the community, and we wanted to prove to them that we were still the same company and that we still wanted to make VRChat the best platform possible for our users. We prioritized feedback focused on accessibility, and then organized teams to blow through as many tasks as possible.
“We got lucky in that some of the most requested features were stuff we already had prototyped—we just weren't ready to release them yet. But with the pressure, we polished them up and sent them out, essentially in these live beta releases that let people try the new features without being locked to a beta server.”
In a month or so, the VRChat team raced to put out over 40 new features. The community response to EAC was so jarring, VRChat's founders even enhanced their system of interacting with the community:
“[We] revamped our communications process completely,” as they put it. “We started doing weekly developer updates, as well as implementing video developer updates. We don't ever want the community to get surprised by something like that again, and so we're trying to loop them into the process as much as possible.”
This approach has proven to be successful in other platforms. While it's probably impossible to prevent all mistrust and paranoia among community members, it's important to engage deeply with the most dedicated users. That way, they can become advocates to the rest of the community.
While the introduction of EAC did cause a rift with the user base, I noticed an entertaining irony at the time: The “protest” by some VRChat users over the company's ban on modified clients had all the indications of a vociferous but small subgroup, rather than a broad community uprising. Indeed, VRChat's user concurrency levels showed a substantial increase of users after the protest started.
This, by the way, is another sure sign of a successful metaverse platform: community members so passionate that they'll launch a coordinated protest against the company—but never log off from the actual platform.
VRChat Swallows the Internet
At a certain point, irked and alienated by the barrage of virtual genitals that beset much of Second Life, an inventive husky dog named Graywolf Midnight departed that virtual world in search of new digital lands. Specifically, a land more attuned to his VR headset and his furry avatar.
“VR finally let me actually jump into the body of the avatar I had been working on and constantly tweaking for over a decade,” as Mr. Midnight explained to me. (We first met him in Chapter 3, when he groused about Facebook's policies on real names.) “Which is what Second Life had always been trying to simulate but was never quite convincing enough, since you are just looking at your avatar on a monitor; you aren't actually embodying it.”
Embodiment is crucial to “furries,” the Internet-driven subculture devoted to roleplaying as humanoid cartoon animals, the kind you tend to encounter at a theme park. Many furries describe themselves as feeling uncomfortable in their own real-life body and prefer imagining themselves as these fanciful creatures.
All of this may seem marvelously odd and even worthy of ridicule, but seeing that many if not most furries tend to be Internet savvy and work in tech, I often say this: Do not mock furries, for a furry is almost certainly keeping your company's servers online.
And making your metaverse platforms viable. Furries dominated Second Life's developer community for years, creating quirky and amazing experiences in that virtual world. Midnight was one of them, using the internal scripting system to re-create famous effects from classic video games in Second Life. Graywolf also perfected his avatar (at least as much as the world would allow): a silver-furred Siberian husky who walks upright on hind legs.
Six or seven friends made the exodus with him from Second Life to VRChat, but as a testament to the generational divide in metaverse platforms, Midnight rarely meets other users who are SL veterans. “Most people in VRChat, if you mention Second Life,” as he puts it to me, “will have the typical, ‘Oh I've heard of that, didn't it die?’ response that you've probably heard before.”
Graywolf's experience was not isolated but part of a broader immigration trend into VRChat. At launch, VRChat's default avatars were mainly standard attractive humans. Within a few short years, however, furries and anime characters (mostly of the schoolgirl variety) came to represent a near-plurality of the user community.
“I often call VRChat an Internet culture melting pot,” Strasz tells me, “made up of a bunch of distinct Internet cultures that usually don't rub shoulders, and they all have been interacting in this space. And that's made something that's really fascinating to stand and watch.”
As Strasz recalls it, a Japanese community member figured out how to customize VRChat's standard human avatar into an anime-style character. Tutorial videos of this went viral within the online message boards and Discord servers of the far-flung anime community. Many of them piled into VRChat. “I think for the furry community, it was the same sort of deal. As soon as a couple of furries popped up, and, you know, everybody else did.”
A longtime community member before becoming a VRChat employee, Strasz tells me he's surprised to see how this shift of the population has been welcomed by the startup.
“The thing that always amazed me is that the company does not really try to put its finger on the scale when it comes to the community,” as he puts it. “I think a lot of virtual worlds make this mistake of trying to say, ‘We want this demographic or we want that demographic.’ It doesn't play out that way. And for a lot of companies, they see it as a failure.”
Second Life is a notable example here. The early Linden Lab team was quite welcoming and impressed by the creativity of the virtual world's furry community. Indeed, when a JIRA proposal was posted to send CTO Cory Ondrejka to speak at Furcon, the annual furry convention in San Jose, every single staffer voted on it. As the original Linden Lab team faded away, however, newer staff evinced growing discomfort at so much aggressive tail wagging. (Especially as widely shared screenshots of furry sex in Second Life began to taint the brand.)
By contrast, says Strasz: “VRChat goes with the flow, and it's very much like, ‘Oh, we have these people, cool. Alright, what do they want? What can make them happy?’”
The Lure of the Market and the Future of VRChat
For all of VRChat's creative energy and explosive user growth, one notable feature remains conspicuously missing: user monetization of their own content through a virtual economy. At the start of 2023, none yet officially exists.
In its absence, an informal economy has rapidly grown. I estimate well over 1,000 VRChat content creators earning revenue from the content they created; some from custom-made avatars sold on sites like Gumroad (sort of an Etsy for digital content), or like Jar, from creative donation sites like Patreon.
Even more financially successful are creators like Syrmor who shoot videos in VRChat, uploading them to Twitch and YouTube; VRChat-focused channels that boast 500,000+ subscribers are easily able to earn a very good full-time living, in the six figures or more, from Google ads and direct sponsorships.
In early 2021, VRChat the company announced the ability to sell user-generated content in-world as coming soon. As of publication, however, VRChat had yet to fully follow through on that promise—despite the growth of VRChat's creator economy.
“VRChat has not rolled out its long-promised user-to-user economy,” I pointed out to the founders recently, “even as many VRChat creators monetize their work via Patreon, Gumroad, etc.
“So why the delay?”
“In short: getting it right,” Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey tell me. “We really want to have a creator economy—it's absolutely one of our biggest priorities. Helping find a way for users to show creators how much they love what they're building is absolutely crucial for us.”
Their caution is well placed. In Second Life, the arrival of an economy where L$ could be exchanged for US$ drove enormous outside interest, but it also accelerated the shift into hyper-consumerism. Where once stood collaborative art projects across the virtual world, shopping centers and weekend-long sales events quickly came to dominate.
VRChat's founders seem fully aware of that dynamic:
“[We're] very cognizant of the impact an economy could have on the community. Creators would obviously be impacted pretty heavily, but so would regular users. In many ways, introducing an economy can be incredibly destabilizing. Suddenly, creators have obligations and considerations they didn't previously have. Socially, users might feel compelled to behave entirely differently due to where they've spent their money.”
When I last talked with them on this topic, VRChat's founders seemed to still be thinking through the implications of unleashing an official economy on its community:
“[There's] not just one way to introduce an economy into a social platform,” as they put it to me. “Almost every platform does it differently, and there's a reason for that. What can you buy? How do transactions work? There are almost endless variables we have to consider.
“When we roll out a creator economy, we want to make sure that it's done right, and that our community is happy with it. The last thing that we'd want to do is implement a system that they feel lukewarm about—or worse, ruins what makes VRChat so special.”
Therein lies the secret to VRChat's success to strong user growth and a very dynamic and diverse creative community:
“We've built VRChat with them. A large chunk of our team is made up of VRChat users. Many people—most, I'm sure!—were active, engaged users way before they were hired.”
VRChat user “Merlin,” for instance, who created the much-used C# scripting compiler I mentioned previously, was eventually hired by the company to do contract work, and then brought on as a full-time developer. Up until then, he was unemployed, living in large part off the Patreon donations of the VRChat community who supported his work on the scripting compiler.
“Overall it doesn't feel very different in my case,” Merlin told me about corporate life at VRChat Inc. “I knew a number of the people I am now working with from being friends with them in VRChat.”
“It's not just a product for us,” as Graham and Jesse tell me. “It's a home. It's a refuge. We're not just building an app; we're building the app that we all hang out in after work or on the weekends.”
VRChat's most pressing scaling challenge may be another one that eerily parallels Second Life: The very name implies it's for a relatively niche category—in this case, of people who want to, well, chat in VR. That's an immediate growth limiter, even beyond the limiting factor of VR itself. (As I've frequently mentioned, the fact remains that virtual reality tends to make many, or most, females nauseous.)
I expect to see expansion of VRChat to other, non-VR platforms starting in 2023, such as consoles and mobile. But doing so may also segregate the community by device ownership—many VRChat worlds are optimized for some devices but not for all of them. As I write this, however, the company is introducing a Groups feature that may enable new communities to arise around shared interests, and may help keep them connected across technical barriers.
So far, as you might have noticed, all this happens while VRChat the company makes little or no mention about being a “metaverse.” That's by conscious decision:
“We don't really find metaverse to be a dirty word—and we aren't afraid to say that VRChat is, in a way, a metaverse,” the founders explain to me.
“At the same time, though, we think that ‘metaverse’ also doesn't entirely capture exactly what VRChat is and what makes it special. This is especially true with how popular the phrase got during late 2021 into 2022. A lot of things were describing themselves as ‘the metaverse,’ and it started to feel a little less precise. In other words, the term felt diluted by then.
“In short, while VRChat could be described as the Metaverse,” as Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey put it, “it's probably better described as simply VRChat.”
Getting Started
Content creators interested in establishing a brand in VRChat might first want to gain proficiency with Unity, and then with VRChat's SDK. Star creator Jar goes into some more specifics:
“If you download the VRChat Creator Companion, you can use the Client Simulator feature, which lets you play your worlds in Unity easily without having to upload to VRChat. If you are working on a basic game, this is really useful. If you are making a slightly more complicated game, there is another tool in the VRChat SDK that lets you run multiple VRChat windows on one computer. I use this all the time to playtest my games … with clones of myself. It's faster than getting your friends to come join the world and help you play.”
But even more key than any particular technical tip, the true starting point is becoming part of VRChat's culture and community:
“For someone that wants to create content, there's an old Internet saying: ‘Lurk more,’” as Strasz says. “And I think that's really part of the key. I find that a lot of people from outside of VRChat don't normally understand the culture, and they get it wrong.
“If you're an individual, get in and just spend some time [there]. For companies, have someone on your team just literally spend an hour or two every day looking around [in VRChat], interacting with people and poking around, finding communities and talking.”
Star VRChat YouTuber Syrmor, standing beside me in the virtual world's ’80s mall, peering up through his roly-poly cat avatar, offers similar advice, albeit more snarky:
“You have to be embedded, and spend hours in public worlds interacting with random people, and see what's going on, and what the [current] meme is. ‘Oh this week everyone is into clown women.’ Why? No one really knows why but you're on ground zero of this phenomenon.”