All The World's Avatars
A Very Rough Count of How Many of Us Interact With Each Other as Customizable 3D Characters
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Above: Some avatar customization options from Garena Free Fire, a ridiculously popular multiplayer game with metaverse platform potential
Philip Rosedale recently lamented that he no longer believed, as he once did, “that our destiny as humans was to become avatars”. But setting aside “become” as a verb choice, it’s definitely true that quite a lot of us regularly use avatars to interact with other people.
And that’s true even with a fairly narrow definition of avatar, one constrained to: a user-customizable 3D avatar in an immersive multiuser space.
As of late 2025, there are about 6 billion Internet users in the world, according to Statisa.
But how many of them regularly use a 3D avatar in a 3D online world?
Here comes some charts, rough math, qualifiers, and a final estimate:
As reported in the 2025 afterword of Making a Metaverse That Matters, I track about 700 million monthly active users on a metaverse platform (some half of them on ROBLOX) -- see above.
But metaverse platforms are only one category of experience which offers user-customizable avatars in an immersive 3D multiuser space.
Quite a few popular multiplayer combat games also boast those, including:
PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds: 125M MAU (Source)
Garena Free Fire: 120 million MAU (Source)
Valorant: 20 million MAU (Source)
Genshin Impact: 16 million MAU (Source)
Rust: 14 million MAU (Source)
Arc Raiders: 12 million MAU (Source)
Then there’s classic MMOs, online RPGs, and virtual worlds, including:
GTA Online: 20 million MAU (Source)
Sky: Children of the Light: 20 million MAU (Source)
World of Warcraft: 7 million MAU (Source)
That gets us to well over 1 billion people with avatars.
So it’s safe to say that 1 in 6 people of everyone online in the world, regularly uses an avatar in that strictly defined sense.
However, if we’re to expand the definition to include users of any 3D avatar in an immersive multiplayer space, we could include the titles where avatar customization is more limited. Including:
Honor of Kings: 260 million MAU (Source; it’s huge in China and much the rest of Asia)
League of Legends: 130 million MAU (Source)
Call of Duty Mobile: 30 million MAU (Source)
Overwatch: 25 million MAU (Source)
If we count titles like those, we’re well over 1 in 5 Internet users who have a 3D avatar in an immersive multiplayer space.
Then if we included 3D avatars in non-multiplayer games, such as Sims 4 with 85 million MAU (source), or immersive multiplayer non-human/humanoid avatars, including Rocket League, where players are soccer-playing vehicles (source) such as War Thunder, where players are tanks, with some 19 million MAU (source), we’d start approaching 1 in 4 Internet users.
To play things safe, I usually keep my estimate at 1 in 5 with a potential to be “as much as” 1 in 4 of all Internet users.
Also worth noting that 10 years ago, the number was closer to 1 in 14 Internet users**.
Given that growth, how many billions of us in the world will have 3D avatars 10 years from now?
I tend to suspect 1 in 2.
How about you?
*Sourcing most of these user numbers with credible references are savagely frustrating, so take them with some salt grains. Similarly, it’s certainly true that there’s some overlap (i.e. people who play more than one platform/online game), but I believe that flattens out over time.
**Back in 2016, Minecraft had 40 million MAU, and Roblox, just 30 million MAU. Doing a full count from 10 years ago is far more difficult than estimating current numbers, but given that those two were far and way away the leaders, I’m assuming the grand total was under 250 million MAU when the entire global Internet had 3.4 billion users.