If no one is playing a video game, does the game world still exist, or does it vanish?

An online game server can be active with only a few people, but with the games being worldwide, someone from across the world is bound to also be playing.

@MakeItSo1701, have you been reading George Berkeley?

Nope

I just googled him, no clue who he is.

This is a variation of “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?” but with a virtual world like a VR maybe

Kiri-Kin-Tha’s first law of metaphyiscs states that “nothing unreal exists”.
Video game worlds are not real in the way that a player perceives them. They are nothing but data in dynamic databases, represented visually on the client’s screen.
As such, the video game “world” as perceived by its players only comes into “existence”, if at all, when it is displayed on the screen. When there is no player’s screen depicting it, the world does not exist.
That is unlike sound in the forest, because sound is defined as waves propagating through a medium, like air and water. That is true regardless of the presence or absence of any observer. To note: “observer” does not just mean humans, but also every type of animal. Even plants can perceive and react to sound. Therefore if a tree falls in a forest, the forest itself hears it.

@MakeItSo1701, that is precisely George Berkeley. Or, to be more accurate, that question is commonly attributed to him, although if he did say exactly that, it’s not on the record.

He might as well have, though. From Wikipedia:

Berkeley’s immaterialism argues that “esse est percipi (aut percipere)”, which in English is: to be is to be perceived (or to perceive). That is saying only what is perceived or perceived is real, and without our perception or God’s nothing can be real.

(I think there’s a typo there: most likely should say “what is perceived or perceives”.)

So I read your OP as a clever variation on Berkeley’s assertion about perception.