ENVER at VidCon: When a VR Community Shows Up in Real Life

ENVER’s first VidCon went off with a bang.

Across three days in Anaheim, more than 55,000 creators, fans, brands and industry leaders came together for one of the biggest gatherings in digital culture. For ENVER, it was our first time putting Scary Baboon in front of real people, in real life.

We came to meet the players, creators and families who have helped turn Scary Baboon into one of the most active social communities in VR. We left with no merch, full camera rolls, lost voices, and a much clearer view of what happens when a game community moves from Discord, Quest headsets and creator clips into the real world.

Scary Baboon has always been built around the community. Players have never just logged in and left. They’ve built something real, made friends and helped each other, bringing friends into lobbies and then those moments back out onto YouTube, TikTok, Discord and Instagram.

Giving Back to the Community

When we decided to attend VidCon for the first time, we decided to honor the ethos behind the event: bringing players and creators together.

That’s why we didn’t have a storefront. Or build our booth around transactions. We didn’t charge for merch. Everything we brought was free for players because the point of the weekend was simple: meet the community, thank them properly, and give something back to the people who have helped make Scary Baboon what it is.

The booth became a gathering point for players who already knew each other from Discord, creators who had built audiences around the game, and fans meeting the developers behind the updates they had been playing for months.

That matters because Scary Baboon’s growth has never come from one campaign or one moment. It has come from a constant feedback loop between the game, the players and the creators around it.

Recent coverage has highlighted that momentum. Android Central recently spoke with ENVER CEO Kyle Joyce about how Scary Baboon and other social VR games are reshaping what success looks like on Meta Quest. UploadVR covered the Fight Back update, which introduced one of the community’s most requested mechanics. GameDiscoverCo also pointed to Scary Baboon’s short-form content, creator ecosystem and 200,000+ member Discord as central parts of the game’s growth story.

VidCon made that same story visible in person.

The New Social Playground

Kyle Joyce, CEO of ENVER, also joined Chris Pruett, Director of Games at Meta, and Spencer Cook of Continuum XR for a VidCon panel titled:

The New Social Playground: Where Games Grow Communities and Communities Grow Games

The session focused on one of the biggest shifts happening in VR: the rise of social-first games that become more than individual play sessions.

The biggest social VR games are becoming hangout spaces, creator engines and community platforms. They are places where players form rituals, create content, build social identities and influence development in real time.

That is exactly what we saw with Scary Baboon at VidCon.

The game lives inside the headset, but the community lives everywhere. In Discord. In creator videos. In fan art. In update speculation. In shared jokes. In meetups. In the way players talk about the world as something they belong to, not just something they play.

For ENVER, that is the future of social play.

What VidCon Proved

VidCon gave us a simple but powerful signal: Scary Baboon’s community is not only large, it is active, visible and deeply engaged.

The game now has millions of players, more than 200,000 Discord members, and a growing creator ecosystem around its updates, characters, maps and moments. But numbers only tell part of the story.

At VidCon, the story became real.

It was in the queues, the photos, the players shouting across the booth, the creators filming with the team, families who had travelled to meet the people behind the game, and the feedback players gave us face to face about what they wanted next.

That kind of community cannot be manufactured overnight. It comes from building games people want to spend time in, talk about, share, and help shape.

Scary Baboon is a social horror game, but it has become something bigger than a genre label. It is a place where players meet, perform, create and belong.

Thank You

To every player, creator, parent, fan and friend who came to see ENVER at VidCon: thank you.

Thank you for the energy, the feedback, the photos, the videos, the noise, the patience, and the love for Scary Baboon.

This was ENVER’s first VidCon.

It will not be our last.