VRChat

VRChat describes itself as a platform for experiencing, creating and publishing social virtual reality, and the middle verb is the one that matters: the worlds and the avatars inside it are made by the people who use it. The scale it offers is prose rather than a number — hundreds of thousands of worlds, millions of avatars, and more than 200,000 groups — and it publishes no count of its users anywhere. It is free on every platform it runs on and does not require a headset, which is the fact that separates the product from how the category is usually imagined; the company's own line is that you can jump in no matter your platform. There are no goals in it, which the company states as a feature, describing people who use it mainly as a social network for hanging out from home.

An instance is a copy of a world, any world can have many, and the distinction shapes everything: you join a public instance from a list, or an invitation-only one if a friend sends it, and the company says an instance can hold up to 80 people while the typical one is far smaller. Voice is proximity-based, so you hear the people standing near you and not the room, which is the mechanic the whole social experience rests on. Groups are half open and half paid: joining one is free, but creating one requires the VRChat+ subscription and an account with a verified email. Avatars can be cloned where the creator allows it, picked up from avatar worlds, or bought in a marketplace that does not permit explicit content. Building anything requires the Unity toolkit and the company's own scripting language rather than the usual one, since full C# access is not allowed, and a public world has to pass a community review process before anyone can visit it. Phones are supported with a hard limit worth knowing: on a device with less than 6 GB of memory the app becomes a companion or cannot be installed at all.

The client is free everywhere and the company says it is free forever, with the subscription an optional way to support the platform at 9.99 dollars a month or 99.99 dollars a year. Most of what it buys is convenience and display — more favourite slots, stickers, a camera drone, tenure badges — but one benefit is not cosmetic, and it is the detail a reader should stop on: age verification is available only to subscribers, so a user who will not pay cannot prove they are an adult. Underneath that sits a second currency, Credits, whose fees VRChat publishes with unusual clarity: the purchase fee is around 40 percent, the fee for spending is around 15.3 percent, and of what a viewer spends in a creator's store the platform store takes 30 percent, the creator 50 percent and VRChat and its partners 20 percent. A creator is paid half a cent per earned credit, cannot withdraw below 100 dollars, and is paid through a third party rather than by VRChat directly, with the company reserving the right to change the exchange rate. Its own documents disagree about how often a creator may ask for a payout, one saying every two weeks and another allowing a request a day, and the price of the credit bundles themselves is published by an app store rather than by VRChat.

The floor is 13, children below it are prohibited from making an account, and anyone between 13 and 17 needs a guardian's permission. The company's language about minors is the strongest it uses anywhere: zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation and abuse, permanent bans, referral to the authorities, and a sentence that carries the rest of the policy — minors cannot consent to provocative behaviour, so an adult who engages in it around them faces enforcement in any kind of instance. What is allowed is stated just as plainly, and it is not what a parent would assume: suggestive or inappropriate content is generally permitted unless it is exposed in a public place, and VRChat says outright that adults use it for dating, partying and other adult-oriented interactions. The tools it gives a user are the most developed in this batch — blocking that hides a person from you without removing them from the room, muting, hiding an avatar, a personal space setting that makes the people around you disappear while leaving their voices, shield levels that filter by category, and a safe mode reached by a key combination — with an automated trust system that blocks and mutes accounts it does not trust. Moderation is described carefully: automated systems scan profile text and catch harmful uploads but do not cover the text chat inside an instance, and the company says every warning, suspension and ban is reviewed by a human. The sentence worth carrying away is in the terms, which reserve the right to monitor use, including in private worlds, by making audio or video recordings, for security, for investigating a violation, or where the law requires it. There is no promise anywhere that voice is not recorded, and no retention period is given for anything recorded.

People who want a place rather than a feed, since there is nothing to win and the company presents that as the point. Adults are explicitly part of the audience, including the ones who come for dating and parties, and the platform says so rather than leaving it to be discovered. Creators are the other half: a Unity-based pipeline, a scripting language of the company's own, a marketplace, and a revenue share the company calls the biggest cut offered by any major user-content platform. A headset is optional, a desktop is enough, and a phone works if it has the memory — so the barrier to entry is lower than the category suggests, while the barrier to earning anything is an application and a 100 dollar minimum.

The most developed safety apparatus in this batch attached to the most permissive content policy in it, and the company does not pretend otherwise: it bans harm and hate but leaves suggestive material alone unless it is exposed in public, and it describes its own adult users plainly. The money is unusually legible by the standards of this directory — a 50 percent creator share, a 40 percent purchase fee, a 15.3 percent spending fee, a half-cent payout rate — which makes the platform one of the few here whose economics a reader can actually check. Two things complicate the picture. Age verification is gated behind a subscription, which means the only route to proving you are an adult is to pay, and the terms reserve the right to record audio and video including in private worlds, with no promise to the contrary and no retention period. Set against a product built on the feeling of standing in a room with people, that reservation is the one a user should read before trusting the room.