Since the birth of the Internet, social networks have always been a place that must be fought for by military strategists and contain unlimited potential. This field has spawned countless industry giants - including Meta, Twitter, Snapchat, Tencent and other companies that have established a huge user group are busy digging deep into the moat, and latecomers such as ByteDance have also been made one after another. I want to redefine the power map in the social field.
In 2013, VR has emerged again, allowing people to see the prototype of the next generation of social networks; and the fire of the concept of the meta-universe in 2021 made people realize that the few opportunities that can shake the status of the former social giant are approaching.
Facebook has changed its name. Meta launched Horizon Worlds first. ByteDance's acquisition of Pico and the 2D virtual social company Wave Particle is obviously very big. Tencent has been unable to hold on to it recently. At the Spark 2022 conference, Senior Vice President Ma Xiaoyi confirmed that it has established an XR business line. It can be foreseeable that the VR social field may usher in a wave of fierce competition.
However, whether it is Meta, ByteDance or Tencent, it can only be regarded as a latecomer in the field of VR social networking. In the "pre-meta-universe era", the three giants AlspaceVR, Rec Room and VRChat are the most familiar VR social applications. Recently, Rec Room officially announced that the number of users has exceeded 75 million. It makes people wonder what charm this app is that it can attract so many users?
VR version with many underage users Roblox
Rec Room was officially released on the Windows platform by development studio Rec Room Inc. (formerly Against Gravity Corp) in June 2016, supporting applications through multiple platforms such as SteamVR, Oculus Quest and PSVR. The biggest feature of
Rec Room is that it combines a large number of multiplayer mini-games, including FPS, battle royale, cooperative action adventure and various sports games. It also provides in-game tools that allow players to use their creativity to create their own exclusive games, and players can also gain benefits through the content they create. Initially, Rec Room attracted the interest of many people through multiplayer easter egg shooting mini-games, and developed a group of seed users.
From June 2016 to May 2019, Rec Room can be regarded as a VR-exclusive social application, but due to the scale of the VR consumer group, Rec Room has not had a large user base. According to SteamSpy's data in January 2019, about 1 million users of the Steam platform have installed Rec Room, with daily active users ranging from about 30,000 to 50,000. With the launch of iOS version in November 2019, Rec Room is no longer limited to the VR platform and seems to have opened up the Ren Du meridian , and has achieved a leap from 1 million users to 75 million users in the past three years from 2019 to 2022. We list several key time nodes:
●In December 2020, Rec Room founder Nick Fajt told TechCrunch that its number of registered users has increased by 200% in the past 12 months.
●On March 25, 2021, Rec Room revealed that its registered users had reached 15 million when it received US$100 million in financing from Sequoia, Index and Madrona Venture Group.
●On December 20, 2021, Rec Room revealed that the number of registered users reached 37 million when it received 145 million financing.
●In April 2022, Rec Room announced that monthly active VR users had jumped from 1 million a year ago to 3 million.
●In June 2022, Rec Room announced that it had 75 million registered users.
From today's perspective, Rec Room almost replicates Roblox's success route - the picture is not very exquisite, but it provides users with tools to create games by themselves, and has corresponding monetization channels to revitalize the entire content ecosystem and ensure a continuous output of new content. Therefore, when Rec Room logged on to iOS and Android platforms, it became a mobile game that integrates creative tools and a large number of mini games, and is an excellent replacement for Roblox and 4399. Unlike Roblox and 4399, Rec Room can also support mainstream VR platforms including Meta Quest 2, so there are quite a few hardcore VR users.
Roblox. Rec Room style is very similar to it
TheVerge wrote in a March 2021 report that Rec Room founder Nick Fajt claimed that the main users of the platform are teenagers aged 13 to 16.This is not a strange thing in itself, because the teenager group is the one who is most curious about new things and is most willing to try. But after looking through recent comments on the Steam platform, comments related to underage users will be quite exciting. We took a random screenshot of a few comments, which contained all kinds of complaints.
Although we often joke that meta-universe social interaction must "start from the doll", so many minors are undoubtedly a double-edged sword for the Rec Room ecology. On the one hand, children and young people are the most dynamic and creative groups. Rec Room is injected with this fresh blood, which can make the entire community more active and also promote the birth of excellent community works. On the other hand, although Rec Room launched the "Junior Mode" in 2017 and was certified by COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), the minors have not yet established a solid worldview and values. The unblocked social platform has magnified some potential risks and may also cause some adult users to turn to other social platforms that are not as young as they are, just like the migration of QQ and WeChat users. Therefore, how to balance the experience of underage users and adult users on the Rec Room platform may affect how far Rec Room can go in the VR social field.
is also VRChat
, which is also VR social applications that are facing complex situations due to the increase in minor users, and VRChat. A report released by the CCDH Center for Countering Digital Hate in December 2021 showed that VRChat is full of abuse, harassment, racism and pornography. VRChat users, including minors, suffer abuse every 7 minutes on average. Although Meta has established VR code of conduct, there is no response to reports of violations of the code of conduct. "Facebook has launched a meta-universe-related concept for Oculus. During Christmas shopping, Mark Zuckerberg promises privacy and security to be at the heart of VR and the meta-universe, but our researchers found that contrary to his promise, the meta-universe is a paradise for hate speech, pornography and child sexual abduction."
February 23, 2022, BBC News Researcher Jess Sherwood also published an article saying that the minimum use age of VRChat is set to 13 years old, but after she registered a VRChat account and set it to a 13-year-old girl, she actually saw characters simulating sexual behavior in some rooms of VRChat, and some sex toys and condoms were displayed. During this period, several adult men tried to approach her virtual characters.
"VRChat feels more like an adult playground than a children's playground. A lot of the rooms are decorated with pink neon lights, like you see in places like the red light district of Amsterdam , full of sexual cues," said Jess Sherwood.
"This is a dangerous design and we see that the product was launched without any safety recommendations in mind," Burrows, a staff member from the NSPCC UK (National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse) told the BBC.
Meta-universe social interaction, should we "start from the doll"?
From the cases of Rec Room and VRChat, it is not difficult to see that the current metaverse social software still has many shortcomings in protecting minors. The closed nature of VR headsets when used makes it difficult for outsiders to understand the user's experience. The lack of real-name authentication and youth mode also gives a few people with ulterior motives an opportunity to take advantage of.
In the mainstream meta-universe social platform model, while the platform gives users the rights to freely create scenes, customize character images, and freely conduct voice chats, it should also realize that these rights will be abused and powerful means are needed to prevent the spread of bad content.
These functions should be included in the design at the beginning of the project of the Metaverse social platform, so as to supervise users' behavior in VR without infringing on the user's privacy rights, and ensure that when illegal acts occur, the victim can provide conclusive evidence to bring the perpetrator to justice.
Only when everything is ready can the post-00s and even the post-10s become aborigines of the metaverse without worries and explore new things.At this stage of meta-universe social networking, everyone may not be ready.
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