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When you think of corporate brand engagement in VR, Meta is typically the prime suspect. In the past, they’ve brokered exclusive deals with Wendy’s for a Horizon Worlds social experience, and KFC for its finger-lickin’ weird escape room. Now, McDonald’s Japan has opened its own little slice of brand engagement heaven in VRChat, underlining just how big the social VR platform has become in Japan.

Available from now until June 17th, the official McDonald’s Japan world isn’t particularly massive, only featuring a single room where you can munch on virtual fries and take photos at few of the virtual photo spots, which include a super-size fry container to climb into, virtual cardboard cutouts of various McDonald’s mascots, and floating promotional text with flying fries everywhere.

On the surface, it’s essentially the same sort of promotional brand experience you see pop up in Japan from time to time, albeit completely in VR. Under the hood though, it’s leveraging some of the most recent developments in getting Japan’s Gen-Z to the golden arches, mashing up Japanese virtual streamers (aka VTubers) and the country’s love for VRChat.

本日3/19(水)より「マクドナルド 渋谷東映プラザ店」が
ティロリミックスと特別コラボ！#Ado #YOASOBI #星街すいせい pic.twitter.com/j8c5rDzK77

— マクドナルド (@McDonaldsJapan) March 19, 2025

The world was built around McDonald’s most recent marketing campaigns in Japan, celebrating the release of its annual ‘Tirori Mix’ animated music video collaboration. First released in 2022, Tirori Mix mashes up vocals from beloved J-pop idols with an animated short that remixes the “Tirori” chime played in McDonald’s Japan restaurants when an order is ready. This year’s collab included Ado, YOASOBI, and Hoshimachi Suisei, which you can catch here.

But why VRChat and not Horizon Worlds? VRChat hasn’t released specific user stats, however Japanese users make up the top visitors to the the company’s website, according to Similarweb, accounting for over 33% of users. And there’s a good reason why.

Any random visit to VRChat can confirm just how big it is in Japan; it’s chock-full of Japanese language worlds—everything from recreations of the historic streets of Kyoto to more demure spots for community meetups—although one of the most important factors is VRChat’s support for user-generated avatars.

While anyone can create a unique avatar in a standard 3D modeling software like Blender and upload it to VRChat, or otherwise buy one, being able to have a persistent avatar across multiple platforms has increased the platform’s cross-promotion among Japan’s anime-garbed VTubers.

And VTubing is big business in Japan. Massive talent agencies like Hololive, Nijisanji and VShojo have essentially co-opted Japan’s long-engrained idol culture by recruiting, training, and managing this new subset of idols, which don full-articulated VR avatars.

Notably, Hoshimachi Suisei, who is featured in Tirori Mix 2025, is a one of the biggest Japanese language VTuber, who is not only the most popular Music VTuber in Japan at 2 million+ subscribers on YouTybe, but has also performed live concerts, appeared on TV, and even ranked on the Japanese music charts.

Meanwhile, Meta is fighting to gain consistent engagement in Horizon Worlds, which notably limits avatar customization and operates within a more closed ecosystem. To boot, in a bid to gain more traction among users, the company recently announced it was launching a $50 million creator fund to incentivize the creation of new and improved content in Horizon Worlds.

And while Meta may be after its own Gorilla Tag-style hit on Horizon Worlds in the short term, until it opens up avatar customization to include more than its standard avatars and pick-and-mix of accessories, it will have a hard time tapping into that sort of cross-promotional gold Japan’s VTubers have been so successful at driving.