VRChat is broken in many ways and there’s no way it can gain mass adoption in its current state. But the experience of using it at its best convinces me that billions of people will use something like it in the future.

who says the metaverse has to eat the world?

just because there’s only 30,000 people means it’s not meta?

The general idea of "the metaverse" at least as it exists in sci-fi is that there's only one - it's the metaverse, a singular, canonical, ubiquitous layer of VR over the real world. The assumption here is that, because Facebook is doing it, it will eat the world through sheer force of will. Every other platform will either be assimilated by Meta or rendered obsolete by Meta's control over standards and influence over governments. Facebook wins without even stepping into the ring, the game's already over, omae wa mou shindeiru.

I personally don't think it will go that way - I think no matter what Facebook does, it's just going to wind up as one of many attempts at VR in the marketplace (it's too late to capture the market and own it now IMO, and i just don't trust VR to ever be more than niche, even in gaming) which means the "metaverse" in this case is just marketing and hype.

There aren't 30 million working VR headsets in the world.

yeah - there have been about 5 million oculus quests sold. so VRChat is basically less than a percent of all VR users, if that steam stat is to be believed.

it's niche.

I think you would have to compare against total users currently in VR games to get a percentage popularity. For example I own a Oculus and am not currently playing VRChat on Steam, however that doesn't mean I've never played VRChat off of the oculus store.

Steam charts is only tracking players in Steam with the software launched, VRChat is also available through Oculus's own stores for desktop and quest, where it has 8,000 reviews for the quest version and is fourth overall in popularity after Beat Saber, Rec Room and Youtube VR.

Rec Room (which looks more like what Meta has in mind, they even did laser tag) is at 13,000 or so reviews, but is only at a 30 day peak of 3,600 users on Steam.

[1]https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/section/55416991837...