How Gorilla Tag is weathering the VR winter

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

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.”

A transition moment that arguably caught Meta itself by surprise. For years, the company bet on gaming, fitness, and social VR to take headsets mainstream. Some of those efforts arguably worked: Meta sold millions of headsets. The Meta-owned VR rhythm game Beat Saber surpassed $250 million in revenue in 2022, and several other VR games, including Gorilla Tag, have since seen their revenue numbers top $100 million (“We’re significantly beyond that,” Zim tells me without providing further details).

But Meta’s bet on its Horizon Worlds metaverse arguably fell flat, and many AAA VR games have seen their audiences dwindle, leading Meta to close several internal VR studios. Instead, VR has seen a massive influx of younger players who prefer chaotic free-to-play titles over polished and more expensive single-player games. And while many of these younger players have picked up Meta’s entry-level Quest 3S headset, overall audience growth has happened “less quickly than we had hoped,” as Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth recently told Alex Heath.

All of this has led to significant changes even beyond last month’s layoffs. Meta is shifting some of its massive Reality Labs spending toward AR and wearables and has reportedly delayed a lightweight headset optimized for video viewing. Third-party headsets from Lenovo and Asus have been canceled, and Horizon Worlds development resources are being redirected toward mobile gaming.

Zim would still like to believe that there is a silver lining to all of this. “Pulling back on [Horizon Worlds] and allowing what essentially is an indie, third-party app market to exist is a good thing,” he says. At the same time, he knows that a lack of cash infusion from Meta could lead to a talent drain. And if the company decided to not release any subsidized, affordable headsets in the future, it could further hamper the VR industry.

“2026 is this bridge year,” Zim tells me. “It’s not just [about] surviving, but figuring out how to speak directly to your audience, and put your audience into places that make sense for a business.”

For Another Axiom, that also means looking beyond the headset. The company hired former Scopely executive Austin Ashcraft as its GM of mobile last year, with Zim telling me that “getting onto platforms that are not VR is a massively strategic, important thing for us to do.” Those efforts may not stop at mobile. “We’ve been working on a variety of different, unique versions of the game that really hold the IP and what’s valuable about it sacred, but put it into formats and on media where it’s going to make sense,” he says.

Last summer, Another Axiom also hired Michael Vogel, who previously worked on animated shows like My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake at Hasbro and WildBrain. “We will make a TV show,” Zim confirms. “We are working on that.” He declined to share further details, but added that the company has been producing its own in-house web shows for YouTube for some time. “We’re getting tens of millions of views on our owned-and-operated channel,” he says.

Another Axiom is also experimenting with new business models, and launched a subscription for superfans this month. And finally, the company is going ahead with plans to hold its own real-world event dubbed Gorillacon — something Zim cheekily teased as a possibility on LinkedIn a few days ago.

“We knew the fans wanted it,” he says. “It’s going to happen.”

Zim again declined to share additional details — but if you’ve ever spent any time inside the chaotic world of Gorilla Tag, you’ll know that it’s probably going to be bananas.