Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Gorilla Tag’s media ambitions beyond VR.

Gorilla Tag breaks VR records, plans TV show, mobile app and Gorillacon

The VR industry has been on edge since Meta’s massive job cuts earlier this year: One exec called the layoff announcements “one of VR’s darkest weeks.” There's talk of a VR winter, and multiple VR studios have conducted significant layoffs of their own.

For Gorilla Tag maker Another Axiom, however, it’s monkey — or monke, as they'd say — business as usual. The most popular game on Meta’s Quest VR headset reached a new audience high this past weekend, when 119,000 players joined its five-year anniversary event in-game at the same time.

“We broke the world record, as we understand it, of concurrent players in VR,” says Another Axiom chief marketing officer Jake Zim. (Social VR app VRChat boasted 150,000 concurrent users over New Year’s, but that number included people who accessed its 3D worlds on flat screens).

It’s not just special events: Gorilla Tag attracts up to a million VR users every day. Most of them are Gen Alpha, and they all battle each other in chaotic games of tag, powered by its unique style of arm-swinging locomotion. The free-to-play game frequently leads the bestseller charts of Meta’s Quest store. The game’s characters, known as monkes, have become so popular that Another Axiom regularly sells out of plush toys; total merch sales have reached close to $10 million, according to Zim.

“The fandom is bigger than just VR,” Zim tells me. 

That’s why Another Axiom now has plans to expand beyond headsets: The company is working on a mobile game, a live event, and even a TV show. “We believe that the lore and the world of Gorilla Tag can tell so many stories,” Zim says.

Of course, there is a flip side to those planned expansion moves: Five years in, and with no bigger titles to catch up to, execs at Another Axiom are acutely aware that there may be a ceiling to VR, and that Meta’s cutbacks are clouding the medium’s future. “VR as an ecosystem is very challenged,” Zim admits. “With all the changes at Meta, this is a transition moment at best for VR.”

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.