Interview with Sheru: Part 2
Part of the "VR is Alive" Spotlight Series, Season Two
ArmaniXR: For the second part of this interview, I am fortunate to join social VR consultant Sheru in a favorite world from a friend in VRChat.
Feel free to watch the shorter video if you have less time, or listen to the full audio track below to hear more about Sheru.
Full Audio Track (66 minutes):
ArmaniXR: Are companies interested in social VR? If so, why? What opportunities are there for more companies to get into social VR?
I had an assumption about this for a very long time, and I kind of know that assumptions are not good, but I talked to an American who has lived in Japan for a long time. He told me, when I mentioned my assumption, that no it’s not like that…Japanese companies have a completely different opinion or approach towards promotion. A Western company is very result-driven. For example, if a McDonald’s in America would do a promotional campaign in VRChat, they would launch a campaign, hire people, tell them do this, do that, and launch the program. Then they would measure what kind of impact their campaign has in overall sales. If that campaign worked really well because they’re selling more stuff now, then they will keep doing it. But before that even happens, before they pull the trigger to start this promotion campaign, they already do research asking: Will this hit the targets that we need to?
I kind of realized that on the Japanese side, they don’t think that way. Japanese companies’ approach is: Okay, we want to appeal to our audience, we want to invest in an audience, and maybe in the future, this audience will become loyal customers. For them, every loyal customer is basically a win-win situation, the only question is how much money you throw at it. What I’ve noticed is that Western companies, when they try to promote something in social VR, they usually have this massive campaign, go through with it, realize they’re not getting any result out of it, and pull back. On the Japanese side, I’ve noticed that they usually do a smaller campaign, and make VRChat a part of their campaign. Not entirely leaning on VRChat, but part of a bigger picture.
In a recent example, McDonald’s Japan basically did a collaboration with Hololive to promote one of their songs. It’s basically a VRChat world where the VTuber idol can go into and promote the McDonald’s product, at the same time they use that world to promote the song as well, as a part of Hololive. So you got this whole triangle where if the VRChat part fails, then nothing is lost, because they still have the song, they have the Hololive thing, they can do the same thing on the website, they can do the same thing with YouTube videos. The thing is, the Western community didn’t notice this, because the song was only allowed to be viewed on YouTube in Japan, so you couldn’t see any of the clips, but it was a really interesting concept. I’ve noticed Japanese companies do this all the time. They look at this new VRChat thing, and they go: Yeah, it’s still risky, let’s diversify our total investment into the project. At the same time, they also do this as a gesture towards the Japanese audience saying hey, we’re here with you in VRChat as well. If another popular platform comes up like Cluster, they’re going to try to do it there to say they recognize the audience in other platforms as well.
I’ve really noticed that they are willing to take a little bit of risk to invest in small talent, and that’s a very nice thing about the Japanese side. That’s why you see so many of these Japanese companies—even high-profile Japanese companies—being more active in VRChat. When you look on the Western side, it’s pretty rare to see a big Western company being in VRChat. They usually just ignore it. I initially always thought the CEO looks at VRChat, googles it on YouTube, and goes uh, yeah, let’s not go there. I thought that the Japanese side would be similar, but this whole idea of investing in your audience over a longer term, and then diversifying your investment as well, is what makes them pull the trigger and go let’s just try this. Once one company does it, a lot of other companies quickly copy the behavior, thinking if that company can do it, then we can do it as well.
That’s really interesting to see how the companies navigate, and you know, the opportunities are here, it sounds like it’s just a matter of investing, or, you know, at least looking at it.
Yeah, there’s another thing to it where I was really surprised. I went to a Virtual Market (Vket) world once, and I saw an American entering the Vket world instance with me. The Japanese companies were promoting IRL products like shampoos, and the American looked at it asking why is this here? He’s like, what the f*** is it doing here? It doesn’t appeal to me. I’m like, well, it doesn’t appeal to you, but probably to someone else. What’s the problem? You can just walk past it. I mean, it’s not a pop-up, it’s not forcing you into your face. Why are you concerned about it? When I look at the Japanese side, when their groups go to these venues, they’re like, this company is also in VR? They’re actually paying attention to us? That’s so nice! The mindset is completely different. What they actually think of the company…well, you have to ask in private. The Western side, they immediately are like, why? They usually think that there is no place in VRChat for big marketing campaigns, and they don’t see the company as being nice if they try, even if they get approached by the company in social VR. That’s one thing that I found very clear, like, a distinct difference between the groups of people that react to the same thing.
What would you want to see improve with international community relationships?
In terms of communities, it could be better. To be fair, from my perspective, the current status quo is the Japanese community slightly hiding in the shadows, and the Western side being more public. I think I’m ok with the status quo right now. The only issue I have is that I really wish the Japanese community would be more out in the limelight, more outwards. That is kind of happening now. On Twitter or social media, you can see more of what’s happening in the Japanese community. When I started five years ago, it was really difficult to find anything about the Japanese community. These days it’s easier to find, relatively. If you don’t know where to look, you can still get lost. The reason for that on the Japanese side is because they usually hide out in private instances, and they don’t record a lot. It’s kind of similar on the Western side but the only difference is that the Western community also goes to public instances. So sometimes when you’re a new user, and you move around in a public world, you might be lucky to encounter that one person that you talk to, and have the same interests. That friend pulls you out of public instance and shows you what’s happening behind the curtains, basically the actual VRChat. Regardless of what people say, the first stuff you see when you enter VRChat is not VRChat, not my VRChat, at least. I never go to public instances. You can see these crazy videos of publics on YouTube. I never interact with those people in there. They’re insane, and I don’t want to talk to them. I would love to see the public perception of VRChat in general to improve. I think that would be a good thing.
And then…this is a wish, not from me, but I would say, representing the Japanese community. There are a few Japanese people, I think about 50% of them, who would love to just go to public instance and have a normal conversation with a person. I think that’s something that’s severely desired from them, and it’s very difficult to maintain. When they do it, they actually get a lot of flak for it, because they then make worlds where you have to do this little test in the beginning, with a Japanese question and you have to answer it in such a way that only a native speaker of Japanese would be able to answer. But that’s how they can have a public instance, because then only the people with the right mindset enter into the lobby, where you can actually have a conversation. On the Western side, a screening process like that usually just doesn’t happen at all.
When you do have a system like that in the West, it’s just a friend group. I’ve seen some friend groups on the American side that have this whole intake process where they spend some time with a new user. Then as soon as they leave, you can see them all in a circle talking about them, asking what do you think about him? Yeah, yeah, he was rude about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, should we unfriend him? Yes or no? The first time I saw that behavior, my mind was like, whoa, that happens? This sometimes happens on the Japanese side, but it’s usually when a person chimes in like, hey, this person, I’ve seen him do this and this and this in that world, like, he might be a problem. And then they have this conversation. I’ve literally never seen a new guy leave and then they’re all sitting in a circle talking about that guy. But maybe that happens on both sides, I’m not entirely sure. Overall, I really hope the public perception of VRChat gets better. That would benefit all communities, in my opinion. So the right people get attracted.
Oh, yeah, that makes sense. What's your advice to anyone who is, you know, brand new to social VR? They've only played, you know, Beat Saber, single player mode…they've only played single player experiences, and they interact with VRChat for the first time. What's your advice to them?
That’s really difficult because, like I mentioned initially, for the first four months of VRChat, I struggled. I almost gave up. I just couldn’t find the Japanese community that I was looking for. I also saw how people behaved in public that made me go, No, thank you. The thing with VRChat is…you need friends. I usually joke that the end game of VRChat is getting contacts and the right contacts…good contacts…people that are reliable and are not having an ulterior motive that is not good. My advice for beginners would be to basically approach VRChat as a platform that you have to think, what can I get out of it? What do I want to experience? If the answer to that is just, I want to talk to people, yeah, I don’t think you’re going to have a lot of fun time in VRChat, unless you find the right group where you can have conversations. Before you go in here, look up groups that have the conversation topics that you want to talk about.
For example, if you want to chat about STEM research, go search for STEM research in the VRChat groups and you’ll find a group that is about that. If you want to get into space stuff, go search for that and you’ll find something that’s related to that. I think that would be the approach. If you’re more interested in what creativity you can find in VRChat, then I would recommend to just ignore publics and just open private instances of worlds and go explore that way. Look up hub worlds where they have multiple world portals. If you can, pay close attention to new worlds. What I often see is, when a new world is launched, the creator will usually monitor what happens in their world to get feedback. That way you can easily get in contact with someone who made a world or people who have this mindset of being interested in what other people do. In those worlds, usually you’ll find people that have a similar mindset that could be up your alley. For the rest, yeah, just find events. If you want to experience music in VRChat, like DJ events, there are plenty of options. There are whole Discord servers, whole websites with all kinds of links and information about that. But also remember that you can have a hard time getting in there sometimes as full instances of 80 people happens. If you’re in there on a laptop…yeah that can be tough. I’m sorry in advance about that. The problem with VRChat is the public instances. The new user experience in VRChat is not great. I would say be prepared to see a lot of weird stuff initially.
Another skill that’s really…we should have a list of like S-tier class skills that you need to have to enjoy VRChat the most. Being multi-lingual, bilingual and trilingual, there are worlds built for multiple languages. But being able to speak multiple languages is a huge boon in VRChat. It’s going to save you so much trouble, specifically English and Japanese. There are good tutorial worlds and even groups for learning languages, especially on the Japanese side. The idea behind the tutorial worlds was to help Japanese users deal with the English interface. There were lots of Japanese people who saw what their Japanese friends were doing and they were like, I want to do this well. They logged into VRChat and the entire interface is English. They’re like, huh? They had a hard time understanding the interface. The Japanese tutorial world was basically just a translation of the entire interface and explains some basic concepts. On that part, the Japanese tutorials are extremely important, especially during a time that the interface was not translated. Thank God almost one and a half years ago, they pushed the Japanese translated version and that immediately resulted in a huge boom of new users. The Japanese side has grown dramatically. It’s really tough to keep up with what’s going on there now. It’s growing so fast that these days, the amount of active Japanese users on normal weekdays is high, at least in PC worlds. The users that use a PC, the active user base of PC users in VRChat on the Japanese side is higher during peak times than in the American time zone. Only in the weekends, the Americans are way more active. The weekends are really, those are the U.S.A. prime times and the numbers double. You can’t compete with that.
Speaking of numbers too, what you would like to say to the platform specifically, like VRChat, the staff and the people who run VRChat and Resonite and Cluster and so on. What would you like to say to them about the international communities that are in their space?
Yeah, it’s kind of difficult. VRChat is the best example because you’ve got the most active users. There are other platforms like Resonite. They have a small Japanese community. I think on average about 50 to 100 Japanese are active on a given day in those platforms. I would advise them to listen closely to people with different cultural backgrounds, even if possible. I would highly recommend companies to set up little test groups. Just have a different person from each culture in a test group and then just chuck ideas in that group and say, hey, we want to try this. Then each person can then give feedback based on their cultural background on that idea and then put feedback next to it. I think a lot of companies, they rely on information solely based on the staff members they have on staff. They’re basically dogfooding new updates to their staff. It’s a good thing to do it amongst your staff, but you should also do this with small interest groups from different regions and then clearly ask them, hey, this is an idea we have. Is this a good idea? A prime example of this was during the major Japanese influx of new users last summer. We had a huge spike increase in user counts and it happened over the summer. It’s a very popular Japanese streamer and VRChat tried to capitalize on that a little bit by introducing a new category in the world list that only Japanese users could see. No Western users could see it. Only Japanese users could see it. There was a button that the Japanese could click and see what other Japanese people like to go. It was basically a sort of recommendation for this new group of users in VRChat to diversify the user base a bit over like different worlds.
In that button, when you clicked on it, it was showing a couple of examples of worlds that the Japanese actually hated. But from the Western perspective, those worlds seemed to be what Japanese people liked. To me it’s like, hold on a second. If you would have just asked a couple of random Japanese people, is this a good idea? Then they would have all en masse screamed: No, don’t do that! So I was really confused why they did that. It was really tone deaf. Companies really need to listen to their audience on things like promoting something in their worlds or in their interface. Is this message correct towards the audience? I think you should not blindly chuck in items or features. And I think VRChat likes that way too much, they blindly chuck in things and then not checking if it’s a good idea. Other platforms, they have less users, so it’s less problematic if like a small group of users get exposed to an idea. To address the backlash VRChat needs to be watching their feed. They have too many users on the platform to just haphazardly chuck in something and not initially check if it’s a good idea. That’s advice I would give to these companies.
Lastly, can you tell our audience about any upcoming community events you’re working on and where can our audience follow you to stay updated on that?
Hmm, I don’t have a lot coming up. I’m working on stuff but not in the foreseeable future. Nothing that I can talk about. If you want to know what I’m doing, I randomly do stuff on Twitter/X so feel free to follow me there if you want to. In terms of stuff that’s happening in VRChat, I do look very forward to Summer Vket. I’ll probably sign up for the beta testing again to help out Vket. If you just want to see what Japanese companies do in VRChat, just search up Vket, Summer Vket 2025. Just look at the dates and when it will be available. That’s usually very informative if you look around to get a basic idea of what an event could be, like a long-term event in social VR. Another thing I would recommend is Raindance Immersive. I highly recommend going to at least one or two events just to get into it and look around. The opening and closing ceremony is fun to see anyway. It’s a great place to also meet people so I would definitely recommend to try that. Sanrio is probably up to something but I don’t know what. For the rest, yeah, me just follow me on Twitter and maybe one day we’ll see each other in VRChat. That could happen, I don’t know.