Eight years after arriving on Steam, VRChat just hit a new peak concurrent player count

Anime characters, bearded men, and a lizard gather around a treehouse

(Image credit: VRChat)

Its reputation as a virtual Roblox for catgirls, memelords, and Sonic the Hedgehog cosplayers hasn't done VRChat any harm, with player numbers continuing to rise. As SteamDB reports, VRChat recently hit a record peak concurrent player count of 66,284 on Steam—though that doesn't count users accessing it via the Meta store, Google Play, or elsewhere.

VRChat enjoys a record number of players on New Year's Eve every year, when a big official party serves as a meet-up spot for players who then head off to do their own thing elsewhere. It probably also helps that a bunch of people who got headsets for Christmas spend the next couple of weeks living in virtual reality, then put them in a cupboard by February.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.