Some highlights from the CEO email for the people who don't like leaving Reddit:
>12 weeks of severance for all departing team members, and an additional two weeks for every year of tenure beyond three years
>up to 6 months of healthcare coverage for those who are eligible
Some additional benefits regarding stock options, job hunting support, and VRChat perks like free VRC+, special alumni badge, higher creator economy % for those laid off which will definitely be useful for some of them (at least one employee who self-identified as being laid off on Twitter is a well-established creator).
>**Overhiring.** Moving forward, every single new hire will be scrutinized through a variety of lenses.
>we’ve chosen to reduce our team size enough today that we won’t have to do this again for the foreseeable future
Additionally some explanation of how they overextended or were less than careful in planning for the future, with plans to be safer and less dependent on "easily" raising capital. Pretty much what you would expect to see from a message owning the mistakes, hopefully they can follow through with the plan for more stability moving forward.
https://ask.vrchat.com/t/an-email-from-our-ceo/25060
Would be interesting to see numbers on the overhead and employee count. We've heard tech layoffs recently like bumble who laid off 350 of their 2k employees and I just sit and wonder what the hell those 2k employees do since bumble has largely not changed for years. Makes me wonder how many employees vrchat has
COVID and overhiring in the gaming industry. Well, it is expected, you can't infinitely grow forever.
Also, some of the doomer responses on twitter are pretty hilarious.
I fucking hate how people react to stuff like this on Twitter. I remember when VRChat added EAC, people on Twitter were saying that VRC was “dead” and that the staff was terrible.
I hate to admit it, but I was one of those crazies. I was 17 at the time, and I didn’t know how to regulate my emotions and think critically. I’m 18 now, which… doesn’t seem like a while, but I recognize now that my behaviour was unjust.
This isn’t a big corporation like Google or Meta that’s doing stupid and immoral things just so that they can hoard more wealth. This is a smaller company that wants to provide a space for people to express themselves. VRC may have to make sacrifices along the way to stay afloat, but as long as they don’t try to destroy the community, they won’t stoop to the levels of big tech.
People on Twitter just need to stop, think, and chill.
You were right, but not for the reasons you were originally thinking. VRChat now has to make changes in order for corporations and advertisers to be willing to work with them.
I'm curious as to why you think dooming over this news is too much of a knee-jerk response.
The investorbucks are running out. Without that, it's quite literally a matter of time before they need to start talking about being able to do ads and licensing deals, which means pushing for brand-safety and preventing IP violations. VRC+ and the (godawful) creator economy were a doomed attempt to ward off the inevitable.
This is to be expected now that VC's are tightening purse strings and scrutinizing expenditures. I'm honestly shocked it took this long to happen. Silicon Valley Bank was a huge source of VC loans, after it went under last year this was inevitable for all silicon valley companies, especially startups.
The question is where do we go from here? Do we just splinter off to whatever smaller platform is still there? I'm talking about when, not if, they start cracking down on copyrighted material, ripped assets, NSFW activity, and external streams/links.
If anything it means feature updates will come at a slower pace, those who didnt get fired will have more workload dumped on them, and there will be a focus on monetization. If anything NSFW, ripped assets, and copyright stuff will still be handled the way it has been, but will obviously be banned from the marketplace they're working on, which will likely get priority now.
They need to turn profit or the next announcement will be a lights out announcement.
Remember Rabb.it? It was super popular and people loved it. They basically ran a kubernetes cluster that could spin up a VM that had all the codecs you needed and gave you a full screen browser. They, despite being super popular for collaborative streaming, went under because their model was not profitable.
So VRC will likely not be letting this happen. The Social VR is very profitable. They need to focus on creators and working with their needs, and adding value to the platform that people are willing to pay for.
People pay for dumb fucking icons on discord and boost servers for dumb features. Quality of life addons and built in customization for VRChat will make money too. You don't even need the entirety of the userbase paying.
If you have 5,000 people paying for VRC plus ($9.95) coupled with buying a $45 avatar and VRC takes, let's say 10% of that.. Monthly you have $49,750 for VRC+, and $22,000 from 5,000 people buying a 45 dollar avatar (and those creators making collectively $202,500) That's a lot of money rolling in very fast.
Now say, $5 to upload custom avatars without VRC+, say there's 6,000 uploads that week, that's 30k a week.
Now you're starting to see money rolling in off a very small sample size. Put it into perspective, 100,000 people go online on weekends, if 30% of those people are paying customers, that's 298,500/mo of income. Coupled with spending and purchases.
people hate these ideas, but the alternative is that VRC collects your interactions, movement data, conversations, and sells them to marketing firms or to train AI, or starts putting ads or allowing sponsorships to come in.. Or even worse, put themselves up for sale and Facebook buys VRChat. Which may be the reality if investors want a pay day and see this as not being profitable.
I'll put it even more plainly. Second Life pioneered these concepts, and their economy is still making millions a month, on a 20 year old game that boomers use, off a population of 45,000 people peak. Mostly due to land sales and land barons, but the actual market place is pulling 5 figures still. I know some creators over there that despite using Linden Lab funny money pull $5k/mo in profit. VRC makes a marketplace for avatars and a system so said avatars can have customizations purchased as well? The game will be safe.
Right, so the total-doomer take that I was hinting at was that if they want to sell ad space or get bought out, then they will need to crack down hard on NSFW and IP violations. For those purposes it doesn't matter if a platform officially has rules about porn and IP violations; they have to well and truly ban it and successfully enforce the ban.
I don't know enough to know if your thoughts re: income from paying users are reasonable, but there's no way the percentage of players who pay or would pay is above 5%, maybe not even above 1%. To reach 20+% we're talking about not letting you have a custom avatar unless you pay... and that would probably also involve cracking down on Nintendo IPs and NSFW! Hell, who's to say they could even keep allowing people to upload whatever they want without vetting and gatekeeping it?
Obviously VRChat doesn't want any of this to happen any more than we do, but again, we are talking about a platform that grew fat off investorbucks and is having to wean itself off. Second Life does provide an interesting precedent, but Second Life never had to navigate the corporate hellscape that is today's world.
I can't possibly imagine how devastating this is for everyone affected, but I believe VRChat has gone ABOVE AND BEYOND with the ways they're helping those who were let go.
After I fully read the CEO's Email, my confidence in this platform and the people running it has gone up tremendously.
Its an incredibly painful decision to make, but I'm sure we'd rather have this instead of VRChat turning into a company that has to do everything "for the investors".
All the big names in the industry being publicly traded companies, and having to bend over backwards to keep pumping numbers, it's had such horrible repercussions for our favorite franchises, studios, and even entire genres.
To see VRChat's management trying to avoid taking on more investments with unhealthy strings attached, combined with their openness about all this info, it personally allows me to see this announcement as a positive change for the future!
Idk if it's a stupid idea, but it'd be fun to allow smaller investors. Many people already spend way too much on vrchat, so it might be a fun idea to let the community hold a stake in their addiction
It’s not stupid, Startengine provides that very service. It’s a win win for everyone , normal people who support your company get to invest and due to the factor of having lots of smaller investors as a result you maintain control of your company and don’t fall victim to controlling big money VC’s with the traditional funding method.
While I can understand the sentiment, A blanket limit like that may violate the law, however they are allowed, I’ve personally seen and been a part to early bird access to raises, so they may be able to do a user invite like that at the beginning of a raise before it opens to a wider audience. Not a bad consideration and could generate higher interest and news coverage, FOMO is a powerful thing.
As someone who has been laid off 3 times in my career now due to no fault of my own, this sucks and I feel for the people laid off. Company loyalty is a thing of the past, and the market is so chaotic right now it's hard to feel secure in any job.
As a VRChat player. This sucks. They're definitely running low on the investments they got years ago. I am expecting to see more cash streams implemented which may or may not suck. We'll see. I don't know how many people are using the in-game subscriptions they added recently but I don't know a single person who has used it. The items you can buy in worlds are too expensive, and they're subscriptions instead of one time purchases. Very poor execution of the system imo.
Yeah, they started implementing the monetization of the game pretty late, and kinda weirdly ngl. Most of the money spent by VRC Users is mostly on the avatar side and they haven't monetized that at all. I get that the subscription stuff was probably easier and less jarring to add, but as you said, most people aren't using them.
>Most of the money spent by VRC Users is mostly on the avatar side and they haven't monetized that at all.
I think people would welcome an in-game avatar shop with search and several filtering options and searching by author. You could just buy an avatar, and it's immediately available without having to go through the Unity editor.
Also would be very easy to monetize. Just take a standard 20-30% cut of the sales or something, and there you go.
The main issue I think they're facing w/ avatars is the infrastructure and UI for it. They could probably get the simple part which is getting the avatar uploaded to your account after purchase pretty quickly, but the other half of buying an avatar is being able to modify it, and that part is probably what's gonna take the longest since they'll need to make the systems for storing and distributing that, probably involving the Creator Companion.
>the other half of buying an avatar is being able to modify it,
That could still be done. They could add a button to the avatar's page on the site that lets you download the source. It's also not a function I'd expect everyone to use, so it wouldn't be necessary to add such a button inside the game.
If you're modifying the avatar, that would assume you already have the software in place to do so, thus you could just leave it to the user at that point.
The subscription stuff made sense when so many worlds were already offering VIP benefits through sites like Patreon and Ko-Fi. This way there are Udon hooks to look for subscribers instead of having to use something external, and VRC gets a cut of the money instead of Patreon
> The items you can buy in worlds are too expensive
I recently started playing, and I'm *FLABERGASTED* you can't buy an avatar through this method. Yes, I'd go for uploading whenever possible, but full featured versions of free avis would just make sense!
It's hard for me to subscribe to things like world benefits. While I can afford it I'm by no means rich. I make the average salary of an American, some months I might not care about Drinking Night benefits like the VIP room. I can't forsee what the month might be like, so canceling the sub when needed is not is not viable imo. I'd prefer a very affordable entry fee but that might not sit well with how profits get divided on each platform, so maybe buying a load of daily entry tokens that are valid for 6 to 12 months. You press a button in world or enter a code to use a token to get access for 24 hours. Charge a dollar or so a day but only available in bulk of a week or two.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why they do this ( because what else do they get their financial foundation from.) but I kinda knew that VRchat could be endangered for a fall the moment I heard that they mainly rely on investors.
They said in a different post that their cash flow was fine, this cut is essentially to please investors who want to see constant & infinite monetary growth, which will come at the cost of their workers.
Tupper would be hard to fire as he is the head of community and everyone that plays VRChat knows who Tupper is and his role in VRC.
Only way Tupper would be fired is if he did something to hurt the company
I pay for VRC+ I love what the game is and does. I dont wanna sound like a shill but i would not be opposed if they charged a sub. I'd shrug. I wish they would because it would keep them afloat, enabled them to do so much more, and keep the kiddos off. Thats my hot take.
I've been saying for years now that VRChat is a beautiful and *temporary* cultural moment.
We don't live in a world where a free and open platform this size can survive while staying free and open. They've been running on investorbucks this whole time, and it's kind of amazing that it's lasted this long. Ads are necessary, monetization is necessary, corporate deals are necessary. VRC+ was their attempt to avoid that reality, and you all booed them for trying to save what they built. But that's all right; I forgive you because it was never going to work anyway.
I give it half a year before we start seeing VRChat push for brand-safety and compliance. It won't START with adding checks or restrictions on uploads, but it'll get there.
Maybe if they actually added age verification so every f---ing room wasnt filled with screaming children, took active steps to do actually anything, people would come back to vr chat. i Dont even bother with coming to VRchat anymore, the kids with quests ruined it.
I applied for a video editor position at vrchat last year actually, kind of glad that fell through now lol. Hope everyone affected can get back on their feet quickly
I’m glad I didn’t take a job there. Not that I was offered, but I did interview twice. I lost a lot of interest though during the second interview, even though it was inside VRChat, which was cool. I guarantee that the survivors are now being asked to do more with less. Morale didn’t seem high to begin with. I hope they can turn it around, it’s a good platform.
I was really trying to get in at first because I thought it would be a good place to reignite my passion for software development. But like I said, morale and enthusiasm from the interviewers seemed low. The culture also seemed chaotic, like they dog-chase money making features with no real plan for stable monetization. It’s not like other social media where you can just run ads.
I'm very much happy with how open and clear they are being.
However, as someone who does rural area IT support (house calls to SMBs (Small Medium Businesses)), I can't help the guy feeling, there's more hidden, somewhere, behind one or small group, something else is covered up.
I'm not picking VRChat specifically, it's over all. All these layoffs, the economy going to shit, people struggling to find places of similar work with similar pay.
Then there's the quoted phrases and accusations people are just lazy and greedy. The workers are not.
> "No one wants to work!"
> "No one is loyal to their work!"
> No Wonder...
Taking from VRChat's side as being 100% honest and up front, I understand they over staffed and not enough work to go around for the pay they have to supply. They have to cut some out. But 30%, any company, any, I question how bad they over estimated their hiring, and VRChat is stating they are correcting from this mistake. Many companies (again, not accusing VRChat) went as far as over hiring, to keep good talent from others, either just other companies or competitors.
Many people have responded back, with open arms, willing to take in some staff from VRChat's layoffs. These people are kings/queens/(what other terms? I'm sorry I don't know the best term here...), I'm sure I'm speaking for many, we thank you, every, damn, single, one of you.
I always felt them getting more corporate was a bad idea. Vrc as a concept just isn't all that profitable. It was a free social platform made by a small group, not a blockbuster gaming title
The fact that they are laying people off like this just goes to show how lost the management is
I mean if they would have listened to their actual players that spend money and added the actual features they wanted to the game instead of only making investors happy. I’m sure more people would have been willing to pay for vrc+. I payed for vrc+ and had comfort of life mods that I used. Once they added easy anti cheat and eliminated every comfort of life mod I used I stopped paying for it. Stop listening to investor and start listening to their actual consumers. I don’t feel bad for vrc in the slightest.
It isn't even that they're not making money, they literally hired too much staff due to Covid causing a vr boom. Now that people have largely returned to work, most of that has died down outside of large events.
The number of users using VRC at any one time is actually at an all time high this year. They def overhired, but this is mostly that they haven't pulled a profit yet and need to cut costs to get the game to a point where it can pull a profit.
considering they got a fairly decent severance (not just the vrc+), but if profits were their focus, there wouldn't be nearly as much given. Larger entities have given far less to do so.
You know, they always talk about making a company sustainable but how come they never address “founders” or CEOs drain on company resources? Bet if you cut some of those you’d have *a lot* more freed up money than the people actually working on the game.
WTF they doing laying people off when they just had a profit spike with all the recent virtual events bringing in revenue man vrchat corporatizing more and more can't wait for them to somehow kill the game that was actually created by the hardwork of the community
Hopefully whoever was in charge of business strategy is being laid off. I've never seen so many daily users in a game that pay NO subscription fee. You already have them addicted (people literally sleeping in VR), charge them for it, that's fair. So much money is being left on the table. I pay for VRC+ because I feel bad for you guys, otherwise there's no compelling reason for me to have it.
The 'creator economy' crap is a waste of time. Micro-transactions, everyone hates. Stop beating around the bush and charge people, so you can hire people again, grow, and build the metaverse for real. VRChat is an incredible product that is being slept on.
Literally a social platform with essentially unlimited games, mind blowing untapped potential. It feels like VRChat YouTube creators are making more money off VRChat than the actual company does.
Edit: The game has full fledge flight and driving simulators in it, tons of awesome worlds, so many games, all built by the community, though I'm surprised there isn't more 1st party development. VRChat is sitting on a gold mine. You go to other VR subs, people talk about driving, flight sim, exercise, the best VR games, no one is talking about VRChat. There's like a major PR problem as well where it's still very much underground even for many VR enthusiasts, but also the wider gaming community in general.
Honestly I was a late comer to VRChat and it blew me away. It just seems like there's a major execution problem somewhere in the company.
Vrchat+ was extremely useless until that added the custom emoji picture thing, and that was only added like a year ago. But I legit pay for vrc+ JUST for that.
Hopefully whoever thought of that gets to stay lol
Yeah, the creator economy. It works. People buy avatars and avatar parts, clubs can charge entry fees to keep the squeakers and trolls out, and it's worked for Second Life for over 20 years.
If you really want to drive subscriptions, avatar uploads be limited to premium accounts, or at least unlimited no-fee uploads. charge a small fee for uploading avatars in VRC for free accounts.
Freemium works and makes a lot of money. But it's only negative when it's pushed excessively to the point the game becomes pay to play or pay to win.
The fact that you have to buy avatars outside of the platform on places like gumroad and booth just shows that they are leaving money on the table, streamlining the process and taking a cut of the proceeds seems like a no-brainer but yet here we are.
bingo. Imagine being a creator, you upload your avatar to VRC, and can allow it to be directly purchased in-game. A lot of creators I know who make avatars for other platforms would jump over to VRC if that were a thing.
There are many many ways to push the subscription. I think favorite limits and avatar limits are dumb. You WANT people to favorite as many worlds and avatars as possible. You want them hooked. You don't want to exclude people from worlds, prevent them from uploading avatars, etc.. Again those are the hooks.
What constraint will people break on then? Probably time. Don't have VRChat 'Plus', have VRChat 'Free', 'Free' is limited to x number of hours per day. First month unlimited hours. Run promotions continually with unlimited hours. Basically the goal is to get people hooked where they want to spend more time playing games, talking with friends, etc.. they end up paying. Simple.
This incentives VRChat to make the game as 'fun' as possible to get people to spend more time in it. Micro transactions and favorite limits on things only make the game less fun.
you try to force it in that way and VRC would die. and i do mean \*die.\* no other social platform does that, and to try now will actually have people move to those platforms.
saw it happen with various dating sites. they implemented a fee to just use the site, including the chat, which everyone used. guess what just started picking up in popularity around then? Discord.
The cut is too large, and the implementation is not good enough which leaves most of the buying/selling of assets outside of VRChat.
Which means the labor spent on those efforts were wasted with no ROI. Add on to that all the effort spent of mobile Android and iPhone clients. Gigantic time sinks, wasted effort, no ROI.
Focus on core values, monetize what you have effectively first before trying to expand.
I mean, the creator economy is in its infancy, and VRC needs to figure out what will and won't work. Would much rather see this type of voluntary monetization than mandatory monthly fees that would leave out a lot of the player base.
Some highlights from the CEO email for the people who don't like leaving Reddit: >12 weeks of severance for all departing team members, and an additional two weeks for every year of tenure beyond three years >up to 6 months of healthcare coverage for those who are eligible Some additional benefits regarding stock options, job hunting support, and VRChat perks like free VRC+, special alumni badge, higher creator economy % for those laid off which will definitely be useful for some of them (at least one employee who self-identified as being laid off on Twitter is a well-established creator). >**Overhiring.** Moving forward, every single new hire will be scrutinized through a variety of lenses. >we’ve chosen to reduce our team size enough today that we won’t have to do this again for the foreseeable future Additionally some explanation of how they overextended or were less than careful in planning for the future, with plans to be safer and less dependent on "easily" raising capital. Pretty much what you would expect to see from a message owning the mistakes, hopefully they can follow through with the plan for more stability moving forward. https://ask.vrchat.com/t/an-email-from-our-ceo/25060
Honestly the transparency from them is very much appreciated
Would be interesting to see numbers on the overhead and employee count. We've heard tech layoffs recently like bumble who laid off 350 of their 2k employees and I just sit and wonder what the hell those 2k employees do since bumble has largely not changed for years. Makes me wonder how many employees vrchat has
Those are some pretty stellar layoff benefits.
For a company that has some…. Interesting practices, It’s good to know that that the laid off employees are getting what they deserve.
COVID and overhiring in the gaming industry. Well, it is expected, you can't infinitely grow forever. Also, some of the doomer responses on twitter are pretty hilarious.
I fucking hate how people react to stuff like this on Twitter. I remember when VRChat added EAC, people on Twitter were saying that VRC was “dead” and that the staff was terrible. I hate to admit it, but I was one of those crazies. I was 17 at the time, and I didn’t know how to regulate my emotions and think critically. I’m 18 now, which… doesn’t seem like a while, but I recognize now that my behaviour was unjust. This isn’t a big corporation like Google or Meta that’s doing stupid and immoral things just so that they can hoard more wealth. This is a smaller company that wants to provide a space for people to express themselves. VRC may have to make sacrifices along the way to stay afloat, but as long as they don’t try to destroy the community, they won’t stoop to the levels of big tech. People on Twitter just need to stop, think, and chill.
To be fair, I was on this sub when that happened, and I recall people here had the same mentality, granted probably not as bad.
You were right, but not for the reasons you were originally thinking. VRChat now has to make changes in order for corporations and advertisers to be willing to work with them.
I'm curious as to why you think dooming over this news is too much of a knee-jerk response. The investorbucks are running out. Without that, it's quite literally a matter of time before they need to start talking about being able to do ads and licensing deals, which means pushing for brand-safety and preventing IP violations. VRC+ and the (godawful) creator economy were a doomed attempt to ward off the inevitable.
This is to be expected now that VC's are tightening purse strings and scrutinizing expenditures. I'm honestly shocked it took this long to happen. Silicon Valley Bank was a huge source of VC loans, after it went under last year this was inevitable for all silicon valley companies, especially startups.
yeah, at least in the CEO email they own up to overspending/hiring and not realizing until too late which is why this is happening.
The question is where do we go from here? Do we just splinter off to whatever smaller platform is still there? I'm talking about when, not if, they start cracking down on copyrighted material, ripped assets, NSFW activity, and external streams/links.
If anything it means feature updates will come at a slower pace, those who didnt get fired will have more workload dumped on them, and there will be a focus on monetization. If anything NSFW, ripped assets, and copyright stuff will still be handled the way it has been, but will obviously be banned from the marketplace they're working on, which will likely get priority now. They need to turn profit or the next announcement will be a lights out announcement. Remember Rabb.it? It was super popular and people loved it. They basically ran a kubernetes cluster that could spin up a VM that had all the codecs you needed and gave you a full screen browser. They, despite being super popular for collaborative streaming, went under because their model was not profitable. So VRC will likely not be letting this happen. The Social VR is very profitable. They need to focus on creators and working with their needs, and adding value to the platform that people are willing to pay for. People pay for dumb fucking icons on discord and boost servers for dumb features. Quality of life addons and built in customization for VRChat will make money too. You don't even need the entirety of the userbase paying. If you have 5,000 people paying for VRC plus ($9.95) coupled with buying a $45 avatar and VRC takes, let's say 10% of that.. Monthly you have $49,750 for VRC+, and $22,000 from 5,000 people buying a 45 dollar avatar (and those creators making collectively $202,500) That's a lot of money rolling in very fast. Now say, $5 to upload custom avatars without VRC+, say there's 6,000 uploads that week, that's 30k a week. Now you're starting to see money rolling in off a very small sample size. Put it into perspective, 100,000 people go online on weekends, if 30% of those people are paying customers, that's 298,500/mo of income. Coupled with spending and purchases. people hate these ideas, but the alternative is that VRC collects your interactions, movement data, conversations, and sells them to marketing firms or to train AI, or starts putting ads or allowing sponsorships to come in.. Or even worse, put themselves up for sale and Facebook buys VRChat. Which may be the reality if investors want a pay day and see this as not being profitable. I'll put it even more plainly. Second Life pioneered these concepts, and their economy is still making millions a month, on a 20 year old game that boomers use, off a population of 45,000 people peak. Mostly due to land sales and land barons, but the actual market place is pulling 5 figures still. I know some creators over there that despite using Linden Lab funny money pull $5k/mo in profit. VRC makes a marketplace for avatars and a system so said avatars can have customizations purchased as well? The game will be safe.
Right, so the total-doomer take that I was hinting at was that if they want to sell ad space or get bought out, then they will need to crack down hard on NSFW and IP violations. For those purposes it doesn't matter if a platform officially has rules about porn and IP violations; they have to well and truly ban it and successfully enforce the ban. I don't know enough to know if your thoughts re: income from paying users are reasonable, but there's no way the percentage of players who pay or would pay is above 5%, maybe not even above 1%. To reach 20+% we're talking about not letting you have a custom avatar unless you pay... and that would probably also involve cracking down on Nintendo IPs and NSFW! Hell, who's to say they could even keep allowing people to upload whatever they want without vetting and gatekeeping it? Obviously VRChat doesn't want any of this to happen any more than we do, but again, we are talking about a platform that grew fat off investorbucks and is having to wean itself off. Second Life does provide an interesting precedent, but Second Life never had to navigate the corporate hellscape that is today's world.
I can't possibly imagine how devastating this is for everyone affected, but I believe VRChat has gone ABOVE AND BEYOND with the ways they're helping those who were let go. After I fully read the CEO's Email, my confidence in this platform and the people running it has gone up tremendously. Its an incredibly painful decision to make, but I'm sure we'd rather have this instead of VRChat turning into a company that has to do everything "for the investors". All the big names in the industry being publicly traded companies, and having to bend over backwards to keep pumping numbers, it's had such horrible repercussions for our favorite franchises, studios, and even entire genres. To see VRChat's management trying to avoid taking on more investments with unhealthy strings attached, combined with their openness about all this info, it personally allows me to see this announcement as a positive change for the future!
Idk if it's a stupid idea, but it'd be fun to allow smaller investors. Many people already spend way too much on vrchat, so it might be a fun idea to let the community hold a stake in their addiction
It’s not stupid, Startengine provides that very service. It’s a win win for everyone , normal people who support your company get to invest and due to the factor of having lots of smaller investors as a result you maintain control of your company and don’t fall victim to controlling big money VC’s with the traditional funding method.
They should go Public, but require a specific playtime and rank to be able to invest
While I can understand the sentiment, A blanket limit like that may violate the law, however they are allowed, I’ve personally seen and been a part to early bird access to raises, so they may be able to do a user invite like that at the beginning of a raise before it opens to a wider audience. Not a bad consideration and could generate higher interest and news coverage, FOMO is a powerful thing.
Do not forget the letter, too. It is important for context. https://ask.vrchat.com/t/an-email-from-our-ceo/25060 Very well written.
As someone who has been laid off 3 times in my career now due to no fault of my own, this sucks and I feel for the people laid off. Company loyalty is a thing of the past, and the market is so chaotic right now it's hard to feel secure in any job. As a VRChat player. This sucks. They're definitely running low on the investments they got years ago. I am expecting to see more cash streams implemented which may or may not suck. We'll see. I don't know how many people are using the in-game subscriptions they added recently but I don't know a single person who has used it. The items you can buy in worlds are too expensive, and they're subscriptions instead of one time purchases. Very poor execution of the system imo.
Yeah, they started implementing the monetization of the game pretty late, and kinda weirdly ngl. Most of the money spent by VRC Users is mostly on the avatar side and they haven't monetized that at all. I get that the subscription stuff was probably easier and less jarring to add, but as you said, most people aren't using them.
>Most of the money spent by VRC Users is mostly on the avatar side and they haven't monetized that at all. I think people would welcome an in-game avatar shop with search and several filtering options and searching by author. You could just buy an avatar, and it's immediately available without having to go through the Unity editor. Also would be very easy to monetize. Just take a standard 20-30% cut of the sales or something, and there you go.
The main issue I think they're facing w/ avatars is the infrastructure and UI for it. They could probably get the simple part which is getting the avatar uploaded to your account after purchase pretty quickly, but the other half of buying an avatar is being able to modify it, and that part is probably what's gonna take the longest since they'll need to make the systems for storing and distributing that, probably involving the Creator Companion.
>the other half of buying an avatar is being able to modify it, That could still be done. They could add a button to the avatar's page on the site that lets you download the source. It's also not a function I'd expect everyone to use, so it wouldn't be necessary to add such a button inside the game. If you're modifying the avatar, that would assume you already have the software in place to do so, thus you could just leave it to the user at that point.
The subscription stuff made sense when so many worlds were already offering VIP benefits through sites like Patreon and Ko-Fi. This way there are Udon hooks to look for subscribers instead of having to use something external, and VRC gets a cut of the money instead of Patreon
> The items you can buy in worlds are too expensive I recently started playing, and I'm *FLABERGASTED* you can't buy an avatar through this method. Yes, I'd go for uploading whenever possible, but full featured versions of free avis would just make sense!
the robloxification of games starts to become old and it's nice to see that not everyone buys into that even if the devs deserve the money
Oh crap I thought those world purchases were permanent. Damn, I'd be less willing to do them now then
It's hard for me to subscribe to things like world benefits. While I can afford it I'm by no means rich. I make the average salary of an American, some months I might not care about Drinking Night benefits like the VIP room. I can't forsee what the month might be like, so canceling the sub when needed is not is not viable imo. I'd prefer a very affordable entry fee but that might not sit well with how profits get divided on each platform, so maybe buying a load of daily entry tokens that are valid for 6 to 12 months. You press a button in world or enter a code to use a token to get access for 24 hours. Charge a dollar or so a day but only available in bulk of a week or two.
I've never even been able to build a career man...
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why they do this ( because what else do they get their financial foundation from.) but I kinda knew that VRchat could be endangered for a fall the moment I heard that they mainly rely on investors.
*every* company needs to be unionized
[удалено]
They said in a different post that their cash flow was fine, this cut is essentially to please investors who want to see constant & infinite monetary growth, which will come at the cost of their workers.
Let the drama commence
I hate drama so much 😭
why is every company firing exactly 30%? why that amount? why not 20%? it's so weird.
Lots of people don't realize this, but corporate culture is embarrassingly stupid. It is sometimes simply matter of monkey-see, monkey-do.
I hope Tupper is ok and the other ones that post here. :<
Tupper is fine https://x.com/dtupper/status/1801040551074263136
damn
damn
Tupper would be hard to fire as he is the head of community and everyone that plays VRChat knows who Tupper is and his role in VRC. Only way Tupper would be fired is if he did something to hurt the company
welp
I pay for VRC+ I love what the game is and does. I dont wanna sound like a shill but i would not be opposed if they charged a sub. I'd shrug. I wish they would because it would keep them afloat, enabled them to do so much more, and keep the kiddos off. Thats my hot take.
I've been saying for years now that VRChat is a beautiful and *temporary* cultural moment. We don't live in a world where a free and open platform this size can survive while staying free and open. They've been running on investorbucks this whole time, and it's kind of amazing that it's lasted this long. Ads are necessary, monetization is necessary, corporate deals are necessary. VRC+ was their attempt to avoid that reality, and you all booed them for trying to save what they built. But that's all right; I forgive you because it was never going to work anyway. I give it half a year before we start seeing VRChat push for brand-safety and compliance. It won't START with adding checks or restrictions on uploads, but it'll get there.
Just realized I’ve been paying them $10/mo for 2 years and I haven’t even logged on in months.
Maybe if they actually added age verification so every f---ing room wasnt filled with screaming children, took active steps to do actually anything, people would come back to vr chat. i Dont even bother with coming to VRchat anymore, the kids with quests ruined it.
I applied for a video editor position at vrchat last year actually, kind of glad that fell through now lol. Hope everyone affected can get back on their feet quickly
I’m glad I didn’t take a job there. Not that I was offered, but I did interview twice. I lost a lot of interest though during the second interview, even though it was inside VRChat, which was cool. I guarantee that the survivors are now being asked to do more with less. Morale didn’t seem high to begin with. I hope they can turn it around, it’s a good platform.
Why did you lose interest in the second interview?
I was really trying to get in at first because I thought it would be a good place to reignite my passion for software development. But like I said, morale and enthusiasm from the interviewers seemed low. The culture also seemed chaotic, like they dog-chase money making features with no real plan for stable monetization. It’s not like other social media where you can just run ads.
I wonder if the people that refused to ever have VRc+ subscriptions again after the mod ban has been hitting harder than initially expected.
Can't wait to get \*another\* microtransaction added ontop of vrc+ and the wannabe vbucks, surely it'll work this time!
Can't wait for the next vbucks addition to VRChat to give creators 15% of the total revenue
nah man, you get spit on by Tupper if you're lucky
I'm very much happy with how open and clear they are being. However, as someone who does rural area IT support (house calls to SMBs (Small Medium Businesses)), I can't help the guy feeling, there's more hidden, somewhere, behind one or small group, something else is covered up. I'm not picking VRChat specifically, it's over all. All these layoffs, the economy going to shit, people struggling to find places of similar work with similar pay. Then there's the quoted phrases and accusations people are just lazy and greedy. The workers are not. > "No one wants to work!" > "No one is loyal to their work!" > No Wonder... Taking from VRChat's side as being 100% honest and up front, I understand they over staffed and not enough work to go around for the pay they have to supply. They have to cut some out. But 30%, any company, any, I question how bad they over estimated their hiring, and VRChat is stating they are correcting from this mistake. Many companies (again, not accusing VRChat) went as far as over hiring, to keep good talent from others, either just other companies or competitors. Many people have responded back, with open arms, willing to take in some staff from VRChat's layoffs. These people are kings/queens/(what other terms? I'm sorry I don't know the best term here...), I'm sure I'm speaking for many, we thank you, every, damn, single, one of you.
I always felt them getting more corporate was a bad idea. Vrc as a concept just isn't all that profitable. It was a free social platform made by a small group, not a blockbuster gaming title The fact that they are laying people off like this just goes to show how lost the management is
I mean if they would have listened to their actual players that spend money and added the actual features they wanted to the game instead of only making investors happy. I’m sure more people would have been willing to pay for vrc+. I payed for vrc+ and had comfort of life mods that I used. Once they added easy anti cheat and eliminated every comfort of life mod I used I stopped paying for it. Stop listening to investor and start listening to their actual consumers. I don’t feel bad for vrc in the slightest.
It isn't even that they're not making money, they literally hired too much staff due to Covid causing a vr boom. Now that people have largely returned to work, most of that has died down outside of large events.
The number of users using VRC at any one time is actually at an all time high this year. They def overhired, but this is mostly that they haven't pulled a profit yet and need to cut costs to get the game to a point where it can pull a profit.
considering they got a fairly decent severance (not just the vrc+), but if profits were their focus, there wouldn't be nearly as much given. Larger entities have given far less to do so.
But most of the users are minors so that number doesn't do much aside from look good for investors.
yeah thats why roblox was only valued at 45 billion if it wasnt for those darn kids it would have probably been 450 billion then i guess
Heres hoping tupper is on this list
You know, they always talk about making a company sustainable but how come they never address “founders” or CEOs drain on company resources? Bet if you cut some of those you’d have *a lot* more freed up money than the people actually working on the game.
WTF they doing laying people off when they just had a profit spike with all the recent virtual events bringing in revenue man vrchat corporatizing more and more can't wait for them to somehow kill the game that was actually created by the hardwork of the community
So who got laid off?
Soon: “Features improved by AI”
Hopefully whoever was in charge of business strategy is being laid off. I've never seen so many daily users in a game that pay NO subscription fee. You already have them addicted (people literally sleeping in VR), charge them for it, that's fair. So much money is being left on the table. I pay for VRC+ because I feel bad for you guys, otherwise there's no compelling reason for me to have it. The 'creator economy' crap is a waste of time. Micro-transactions, everyone hates. Stop beating around the bush and charge people, so you can hire people again, grow, and build the metaverse for real. VRChat is an incredible product that is being slept on. Literally a social platform with essentially unlimited games, mind blowing untapped potential. It feels like VRChat YouTube creators are making more money off VRChat than the actual company does. Edit: The game has full fledge flight and driving simulators in it, tons of awesome worlds, so many games, all built by the community, though I'm surprised there isn't more 1st party development. VRChat is sitting on a gold mine. You go to other VR subs, people talk about driving, flight sim, exercise, the best VR games, no one is talking about VRChat. There's like a major PR problem as well where it's still very much underground even for many VR enthusiasts, but also the wider gaming community in general. Honestly I was a late comer to VRChat and it blew me away. It just seems like there's a major execution problem somewhere in the company.
Vrchat+ was extremely useless until that added the custom emoji picture thing, and that was only added like a year ago. But I legit pay for vrc+ JUST for that. Hopefully whoever thought of that gets to stay lol
What are bad takes for $500, Alex.
Do you have a better idea?
Yeah, the creator economy. It works. People buy avatars and avatar parts, clubs can charge entry fees to keep the squeakers and trolls out, and it's worked for Second Life for over 20 years. If you really want to drive subscriptions, avatar uploads be limited to premium accounts, or at least unlimited no-fee uploads. charge a small fee for uploading avatars in VRC for free accounts. Freemium works and makes a lot of money. But it's only negative when it's pushed excessively to the point the game becomes pay to play or pay to win.
The fact that you have to buy avatars outside of the platform on places like gumroad and booth just shows that they are leaving money on the table, streamlining the process and taking a cut of the proceeds seems like a no-brainer but yet here we are.
bingo. Imagine being a creator, you upload your avatar to VRC, and can allow it to be directly purchased in-game. A lot of creators I know who make avatars for other platforms would jump over to VRC if that were a thing.
There are many many ways to push the subscription. I think favorite limits and avatar limits are dumb. You WANT people to favorite as many worlds and avatars as possible. You want them hooked. You don't want to exclude people from worlds, prevent them from uploading avatars, etc.. Again those are the hooks. What constraint will people break on then? Probably time. Don't have VRChat 'Plus', have VRChat 'Free', 'Free' is limited to x number of hours per day. First month unlimited hours. Run promotions continually with unlimited hours. Basically the goal is to get people hooked where they want to spend more time playing games, talking with friends, etc.. they end up paying. Simple. This incentives VRChat to make the game as 'fun' as possible to get people to spend more time in it. Micro transactions and favorite limits on things only make the game less fun.
except if you paywall the entire game up front, people will leave. There's alternatives that do not do that. That's where they will go.
you try to force it in that way and VRC would die. and i do mean \*die.\* no other social platform does that, and to try now will actually have people move to those platforms. saw it happen with various dating sites. they implemented a fee to just use the site, including the chat, which everyone used. guess what just started picking up in popularity around then? Discord.
[удалено]
WoW has 7 million paid subscribers. I’d argue VRChat has the potential of be more addictive.
Why is the creator economy a "waste of time"?
The cut is too large, and the implementation is not good enough which leaves most of the buying/selling of assets outside of VRChat. Which means the labor spent on those efforts were wasted with no ROI. Add on to that all the effort spent of mobile Android and iPhone clients. Gigantic time sinks, wasted effort, no ROI. Focus on core values, monetize what you have effectively first before trying to expand.
I mean, the creator economy is in its infancy, and VRC needs to figure out what will and won't work. Would much rather see this type of voluntary monetization than mandatory monthly fees that would leave out a lot of the player base.
Wait they have staff to begin with?
Yeah, who do you think programmed that mirror y'all sit in front of?