Rec Room to Close After a Decade and 150 Million Players Due to Ongoing Profitability Issues

Rec Room is set to close its doors in June after a decade of bringing players together. This free-to-play social platform offered both VR and non-VR experiences, allowing users to craft their own spaces and games for others to enjoy. Initially, Rec Room thrived during the early VR boom on systems like PSVR, but the developers have now acknowledged that they “never quite figured out” how to turn a profit.

On March 30, the developers announced that the game will officially shut down on June 1. In their blog post, the team revealed that over 150 million players have explored Rec Room since its launch in 2016, with some user-generated rooms racking up over “500 years of play time.” Unfortunately, despite its popularity, the studio struggled to monetize the free-to-play VR experience effectively, which later expanded to include a non-VR mode.

“Despite this popularity, we never quite figured out how to make Rec Room a sustainably profitable business,” the developers stated in their announcement. “Our costs always ended up overwhelming the revenue we brought in. We spent a long time trying to find a way to make the numbers work. But with the recent shift in the VR market, along with broader headwinds in gaming, the path to profitability has gotten tough enough that we’ve made the difficult decision to shut things down.”

The team is choosing to close the game now to provide players with advance notice and to ensure a respectful farewell to the community.

Effective immediately, players will no longer be able to make friends in Rec Room, create new accounts, or subscribe to the premium service. As a gesture of appreciation, many features that were previously behind a paywall are now being unlocked for everyone. Additionally, creators will have the opportunity to download assets from their user-generated rooms, enabling them to transfer their work to other platforms in the future.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, has already acquired some of Rec Room’s assets, and several employees from the studio will be joining the Seattle-based tech and social media firm.

“On behalf of the team,” the developers expressed in their post, “we’d like to thank you for being a part of the Rec Room community and helping us create a fun and welcoming place for players from all walks of life over the past ~10 years. Your boundless creativity and enthusiasm has been a source of great inspiration and joy. We wish we could have found a way to keep things rolling, but unfortunately, this is the end of the road.”