ZaBoss

UNLEASH THE BEES!!!!!! Our final April Fool's Day surprise: Enjoy a "Bee Blaster" Item with your VRC+ for April! 🐝

Please stop whining over VRC+ cosmetics. Weeks ago y'all lost your minds when VRC was down. What happens when, like RecRoom, they also can't make enough money? Everyone complains about VRC being greedy, but the VRC community are some of the greediest bastards I know.

People should care more about the very platform they spend a majority of their time in. It baffles me the amount of people who hate VRC and still use it for thousands of hours.

In news of Rec Room shutting down. Let's remember to upvote and recommend VRChat on the Steam store page. How many of you have been playing hundreds if not thousands of hours but never left a positive review? Help the platform grow with a few nice words to recommend to others!

I think VRChat has stuck to solid VR software principles reasonably well. For example, social interaction unmodified by game loops or objectives is something it has maintained over time. VRChat has remained a collection of worlds more than a platform of games and activities. I think this is what strong VR-first software looks like. It puts the power of VR in front and keeps interactions genuine, rather than wedging a bunch of game incentives in between people talking. Of you compare that to something like UG or Yeeps, the direction has been to put people in social games and hope that meaningful connections spring out of that. It happens sometimes, but most interactions between players can be transactional and brittle. The biggest gripe I'd have with VRChat overall would probably be that they are cross platform, though, being a social-first experience, is less of a problem than it would be for other sorts of game-y VR apps. VRChat is also directionally correct in their platform's content being almost entirely created by its inhabitants, though the execution here leads into the issues with VRChat. The most glaring one is the economics and social expectations that have been set. VRChat certainly makes far less money per user than RecRoom did and what Gorilla Tag, Animal Company, and UG ($14 ARPU) are. I don't think this is because their users can't spend more or don't demand it enough to - it's a problem with expectations. Most of VRChat's users are used to it being effectively completely free. Free avatars, free worlds, etc. But that doesn't work for a company to not only continue service, but also scale. Second, VRChat's general premise of instances, isolated worlds, portals, extreme levels of customizations, etc. I think is very misaligned from what is intuitive, what makes VR special, and what can likely grow far beyond VR today. I'm very convinced that instances and portals of isolated worlds break immersion more than developers care to admit and prevent full plausibility of VR spaces. Humans have an amazing evolutionary sense of geospatial presence and instances/portals break that. On extreme levels of customization: VR's most potent and most mainstream user group is 12-16 year old boys. The hoops required to make custom avatars is missing what Gorilla Tag and others have correctly picked up on: cosmetics as a social device are more important than unlimited customization. The last point I'll make is that VRChat's user base today is very, very different from the average teenage boy (or average person more broadly). Without going into specifics, I think its hard to position VRChat as a mustard seed for a more mainstream platform when it's culture is so greatly at odds with and drifting further from the mainstream. I've observed similar issues in games with complex creation tools, like BlobTown. That being said, VRChat definitely has its place as its own world in the future and is safer than most VR apps from Meta's active retreat from VR. But, I find it unlikely that VRChat is the fertile ground for whatever comes next.