VRChat Economy & New Generation Drive 149K Concurrent Users! — Metaverse Demographics Report 2026
On New Year’s Day 2026, VRChat announced that it had broken its record for concurrent users, reaching an unprecedented level. At a time when narratives of “the metaverse is over” are spreading following Meta’s downsizing of its metaverse division, how is the actual user population really changing? How high has the rapidly growing share of Japanese users reached? And what kinds of economic activities are taking place inside these virtual worlds?
In this article, the author “Virtual Girl Nem” — a heavy VRChat user, the author of Metaverse Evolution Theory (Gijutsu-Hyoronsha), winner of the IT Engineer Book Award (SHOEISHA), and a member of Forbes JAPAN’s “NEXT100: People Who Will Save the World” in 2025 — explains the latest state of the metaverse in 2026 based on a wide range of statistical data.
This article is a quick English version based on AI translation. The original Japanese version can be found here.
On New Year’s Day 2026, VRChat Officially Announced a New Record: 149K Concurrent Users, Up 9% Year-on-Year
On New Year’s Day 2026, VRChat’s Community Manager, Tupper, announced on X that the platform had reached a new record of 148,886 concurrent users. While it has become something of an annual tradition for VRChat to set new records during the year-end and New Year holiday period — when users around the world gather online — it is highly unusual for the company to make an official announcement on the very same day.
And according to graphs from the “VRChat API Metrics” project, which archives official VRChat API data and is maintained by the Swedish user Foorack (風楽) to preserve VRChat’s history, concurrent users reached 148,875 at 14:55 JST on January 1, 2026, almost exactly matching the official figure. Last year’s New Year record on January 1, 2025, was 136,567 users, representing approximately 9% year-on-year growth.
In the chart, the orange line represents users on the Steam version only (PCVR and desktop via gaming PCs). At 15:05, this segment alone reached 73,791 users, accounting for roughly half of the total — and marking another new record.
Myself also visited a shrine inside VRChat on New Year’s Day. It was a chance to exchange greetings once again with friends whom I rarely manage to meet due to differing schedules. New Year’s Day is the moment when users from around the world gather together, and the residents of this virtual world — engaged in countless different activities — briefly assemble in one shared space.
Growing User Base, Yet “The Metaverse Is Over”? Is Horizon Worlds Partly to Blame for Meta’s Struggles?
The chart below summarizes changes in VRChat’s concurrent user numbers up to January 2026, based on data from “VRChat API Metrics”. A sharp surge can be seen immediately after Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta’s large-scale investment in the metaverse and the company’s rebranding, often referred to the “Meta Declaration” (October 2021). However, what is more important is that growth has continued steadily overall ever since, following a clear upward trend.
Recent growth appears to have been driven by several factors, including the unprecedented “Sutanmi boom” in VRChat sparked by the popular Japanese streamer Sutanmi Japan (from June 2024 onward), as well as the widespread adoption of Meta’s new VR headset, the Quest 3S (from October 2024 onward). These increases did not fade as a temporary fad, but instead translated into long-term user retention — likely forming the backdrop to the latest record-breaking figures.
Services like VRChat, which allow users to wear VR headsets and communicate as avatars in immersive online 3D spaces, are commonly referred to as “social VR”. Since the aforementioned Meta Declaration, such services have also come to be widely labeled as part of the “metaverse.” While the term “metaverse” itself has no universally fixed definition, in my book Metaverse Evolution Theory (Gijutsu-Hyoronsha) I define it as a virtual space capable of supporting everyday life, satisfying seven conditions including economic activity and immersiveness.
According to the survey discussed later in this article, 82% of the 901 social VR users surveyed reported that VRChat is the platform they use most frequently.
Since social VR services do not disclose their monthly active users (MAU), the exact figures are unknown. However, given that VRChat, which is the most widely used platform, reached a peak concurrent user count of 149,000 this time, the global population of social VR is likely on the order of several million to around ten million when considering figures several times larger than that peak.
Recently, Meta announced layoffs of 1,500 employees in its metaverse division and the closure of a VR game studio under its umbrella, prompting some media outlets to quickly declare that “the metaverse is over.” However, the actual growth in user numbers suggests the opposite: steady and continued expansion.
Meanwhile, very few users from the world named Meta’s own social VR platform, Horizon Worlds, as the service they use most often. Seen in this light, while the population of social VR users as a whole continues to grow steadily, one possible reason for Meta’s struggles is that the increasing adoption of VR headsets has not translated into growth for its own social VR platform.
Japan Accounts for “About 27.5%”! Has the “Sutanmi Generation” Settled in as Long-Term Residents?
According to Similarweb, which aggregates web traffic data from around the world, 27.5% of all visits to vrchat.com in December 2025 came from Japan, making it the second-largest share after the United States.
While this figure represents the proportion of website traffic to vrchat.com rather than the exact share of VRChat users themselves, it is likely a reasonably close approximation.
Back in 2023, Japan’s share stood at just 12.9%. This suggests that the surge of interest triggered by the Sutanmi boom in 2024 effectively doubled the number of Japanese users, with many remaining active as long-term VRChat residents.
I myself was surprised while spending time in VRChat last year to see how many new communities and events had emerged from the “Sutanmi boom,” including fan communities centered around Tokoroba（トコロバ）, who became widely known as a close friend of Sutanmi within VRChat. These offshoot communities illustrate how the so-called “Sutanmi generation” has brought fresh energy to the platform as a new cohort of residents.
Metaverse Economy Expands on Both Spending and Income — Seize the “VRChat Dream”!
Another major change unfolding in social VR in recent years is the rapid expansion of economic activity. According to the survey “Metaverse Economy: Social VR Lifestyle Survey 2025”, which I conducted last year together with Swiss anthropologist Liudmila Bredikhina to investigate real economic behavior in social VR, both spending and income have been rising compared to previous surveys.
Spending
Among the 901 social VR users surveyed, about 40% reported that they had spent a cumulative total of over $3,500 on hardware devices. Likewise, around 40% said they spend more than $350 per year on VR content. That showed an increase of roughly 7 percentage points compared to 2023.
The most common purchases within VR content were virtual items such as avatars, outfits, gimmicks, and accessories. The data also revealed a clear correlation between play frequency and item consumption: the more frequently users log in, the more items they buy. Among respondents who play “almost every day,” 43% had purchased 50 or more items in total.
For residents of VR worlds, regularly spending money on virtual items has effectively become a normal part of everyday life.
Income
The number of users earning income through VR-related activities has also increased. 30% of respondents reported having some form of income from VR, an increase of about 6％ since 2023. Furthermore, those who answered that VR activities already form the core of their livelihood rose from just 2% in 2023 to 5% in 2025, more than doubling in two years.
While the shift is gradual, VR is clearly evolving from a mere hobby into a genuine economic activity.
In fact, 2025 saw a series of reports of creators earning huge sums from selling VR-related items, with some users surpassing ¥20 million (around $130,000) in total sales on BOOTH alone. This is nothing less than the “VRChat Dream.”
Around me, too, I have begun to see more people who have switched their main profession entirely to VR-based work.
When asked, “Do you think the economy inside the metaverse will continue to expand?”, 84.9% of respondents answered yes. From the perspective of actual residents, many believe that both the economy and the population will keep growing. At the same time, concerns were also voiced, such as fears that “the peaceful nature of the metaverse may be lost” or that it could become “dominated by large corporations.”
Economic activity is an essential element in transforming the metaverse from mere entertainment into a world where people can truly “live.” With the population continuing to rise steadily, economic growth is likely to accelerate even further. Because the metaverse is not bound by physical constraints or limitations, I believe its economic scale may ultimately surpass that of the physical world.
That said, the road ahead is filled with challenges, and progress will hardly be straightforward. As one resident among many, I sincerely hope for the healthy development of the metaverse. The metaverse in its current, formative stage is something that can only be experienced now. Anyone with even a passing interest should try stepping into it for themselves.
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