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VRChat’s head of community says the popular social VR platform set a new concurrent user record over the New Year’s Eve celebrations.

The News

As first reported by UploadVR, VRChat’s head of community ‘Tupper’ detailed concurrent user numbers as they rolled in across the various Western Hemisphere time zones during the platform’s annual 24-hour NYE celebration, making for a peak of 148,886 concurrent users during the Central Time Zone ball drop.

Here’s the full breakdown, courtesy Tupper, which includes all supported platforms:

Across the board for US TZs:

• ET: 147,226
• CT: 148,886
• MT: 141,184
• PT: 127,708

Notably, Tupper says that also Japan’s had “a strong showing,” although they declined to details the exact numbers, noting however “it did surprise me.”

Additionally, Tupper says that recent “normal weekend” numbers float around 120-125k concurrent users at peaks.

My Take

VRChat doesn’t regularly publish user figures, or user breakdowns across platforms, which is a real shame since it could be one of the best ways of telling just how well VR is doing overall during these post-holiday periods—right as a flock of new users is coming in to try the massive, free and extremely well-known social VR platform.

And yes, while I tend to call it a social VR platform, VRChat is actually much more than that nowadays, as it also undoubtedly pulls in a significant share of users across flatscreen, which include PC, Android, and iOS.

As it is, engagement doesn’t appear to be slowing down on PC, according to data obtained from SteamDB. Above, you can see the massive bump in 2018 leading up to recenrt ~75,000 concurrent users connected through the Steam version of the app. Notably, those local peaks always coincide with the holiday season.

That said, all platforms eventually plateau, although it’s difficult to say when that might be for VRChat. It’s still attracting a lot of maker talent, thanks to its flexible user-generated content platform, and is still the go-to place for a variety of Internet subcultures.