VRChat is Laying Off 30% of Team

It sounds like they are a lot bigger than I would have expected. This isn&#x27;t an email you write to 5 people. Perhaps that is a sign of the problem.<p>I worry that VRChat has worked its way into a local optimum that may be hard to get out of. They&#x27;ve appealed very strongly to niches - people with alternative lifestyles who enjoy the freedom to express themselves in unique and interesting ways. I think it&#x27;s wonderful but it actively inhibits me from wanting to use VRChat because I don&#x27;t identify with that. So how do they grow to 10x their current user base without alienating their existing loyal users? This is going to be a classic business dilemma for them I think.

VR is just standstill on PC. Steam VR is not dead but not having in any movement at all. In typical Valve fashion their own efforts were one-and-done (Index and HL Alyx). VR is not a gimmick but a niche and relatively expensive hobby sub genre. Like building your own cockpit with controls for Flight Simulator or a racing game.<p>Edit: Deleted the Twitch VR Chat part cause seems like they reverted the policy changes <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;twitchsupport&#x2F;status&#x2F;1799589284367696213" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;twitchsupport&#x2F;status&#x2F;1799589284367696213</a>

&gt; We took too long to add management.<p>I&#x27;m not saying they&#x27;re wrong. I am saying I&#x27;ve never once seen a situation where adding more managers would improve velocity. I can imagine that such a thing exists and I have nothing whatsoever against the notion of leveling up their leadership. <i>I just haven&#x27;t personally seen it.</i><p>&gt; Some different roles and expertise are needed for the next part of our journey.<p>Yes, starting from the CEO. He was the one who built a company structure that wasn&#x27;t equipped to meet its needs. It&#x27;s clear their senior leadership isn&#x27;t as good at their jobs as all those newly unemployed ICs were at theirs.

I appreciate the candid letter, but honestly this sounds like a bad leader. Not an evil one, just a bad one. The lack of strategy, and lack of alignment, and praising what management brings... this is someone that is asleep at the wheel.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine a company that&#x27;s been flat for 10 years is going to welcome management with open arms. While they&#x27;ve given themselves more runway, hard to see them not get sold off or close up in the future.

There is one thing I wanted out of VR... TO BE TRANSPORTED... That&#x27;s what all the initial hype was about. You go in VR, and you supposedly get this feeling of presence that blows your mind.<p>Instead the whole thing seems to have gone in the direction of lofi social stuff - which only the relentlessly computer bound will ever desire. I don&#x27;t get the argument at all that this is THE mainstream path to mass adoption. Who thinks that if they really succeed in siphoning off a significant portion of REAL world interaction into this simulated lofi hell that this is going to be a great way to live? I mean really.<p>There is only one VR experience that really blew me away. It was a free demo of Deckard&#x27;s apartment in blade runner. You could go out on the balcony and see the city with a flying cop car going past on a loop. Vangelis playing in the background... It was breathtaking. I setup my area so I could sit on my couch, on this balcony, with a glass of whiskey in reach, watching that cop car fly past for ages.<p>Rights holders made the demo maker take it down.

Tip for anyone job hunting: ask the company if they’re profitable before accepting the offer.<p>If they are, huge bonus points. If they aren’t, ask them more about how they run their business and how they plan to fund it over time.

The severance package looks decent, but damn, I wouldn&#x27;t want to be a developer in such a niche market space looking for new work. I wish the best to everyone getting the short end of the stick here.

Had they gone the route of open development, modder would have, and had been, developing a lot of functionality for the platform for free. Instead, they slapped Easy Anti-Cheat and killed the modding community.<p>Close walled platforms will always wither sooner or later. They had massive potential back in 2021, when VRChat felt like the start of a new internet. Instead of letting the communities flourish, they were tempted by VCs and their unsustainable business model.

VR sort of died out at the same time as “Metaverse” and NFTs&#x2F;web3 did.<p>Tech is way out of reach for regular consumers. It’s clunky. UX for games and applications is difficult to use.<p>The locked in ecosystems with various devices doesn’t help as well (Apple vs Facebook&#x2F;Occulus).

Not surprised but still concerned that eventually the good times will be over. vrchat right now feels like a place not yet touched by eternal summer (or the modern equivalents of... eternal bots, ads and ai?), full of real people, diversity of experiences, and talent.<p>It&#x27;s also a wild place to see the most obscure hardware of vr in use such as face tracking and haptic suits. And some people even have adult peripheral integration.<p>For me it&#x27;s my motivation to learn 3d art. Don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d continue if I didn&#x27;t have a place to share it.<p>I don&#x27;t want the inevitable enshitification, but there&#x27;s no way it will be a free ride forever. EAC was already a blow to the community. I just hope it retains some charm when it reaches some stable state of monetization.<p>And I hope it inspires more VR-as-a-social-tool programs, since I think games are far more of a novelty in VR than being able to meet people at events without leaving my house. It seems like a natural evolution of meeting people over chatrooms.