The final day of the Rec Room: Fans say goodbye as the social media platform ends
It’s the last day of school for the Rec Room, and there’s no next year.
The community gaming platform, the virtual college system where 150 million players have built worlds and friendships over the past decade, will close at noon Pacific today.
The Seattle startup, founded in 2016 by former Microsoft engineers, raised $294 million and reached a $3.5 billion valuation by 2021. But the company could not find the economy. The Rec Room announced in March that it would close due to unprofitability.
Rec Room’s problems, as explained in the past by former CEO Nick Fajt, included thin margins on user-generated content – games and content created by the players themselves, which were part of the platform. Rec Room kept only 30 cents per dollar of player-generated content, after paying app store and creator fees, compared to about 70 cents per dollar for the company’s own original content.
After the announcement, a small internal team developed tools that allow players to export their room data and avatars in standard file formats, in order to preserve the creative work they can do.
The idea was to make Rec Room an example of “a well-executed finish,” wrote Tyler Wolf Leonhardt, chief technical lead for user-generated content, in a post about the project.
“Our players put their heart and soul into the production. They took ideas that only lived in their heads and brought them to life,” wrote Leonhardt in this post. “How can we bring these games to life in a way that makes our players proud?”
Rec Room users, on the other hand, depend on the school theme for the last time. On fan-made sites, players have been uploading “report cards” provided by the platform (summarizing stats like friends they’ve made and rooms they’ve visited) so they can sign them like yearbooks.
The closure comes amid a wider shift away from social virtual reality. Meta has been backing away from a VR version of its Horizon Worlds experience in favor of a mobile version, as Facebook’s parent company looks to AI and smart glasses.
Another platform, VRChat, has been making itself a new home for deleted Rec Room players. Launched in 2014, it’s a public VR platform where people interact with customizable avatars in a user-created world, similar in some ways to the Rec Room experience.
VRChat co-founders Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey wrote in a post after Rec Room’s announcement that VRChat was “not going anywhere,” citing record traffic and the booming creator economy. VRChat has faced its own challenges, admitting problems with fraudulent behavior on the platform, and announcing a series of safeguards to address the problem.
Some of the Rec Room crew arrived elsewhere. After the shutdown announcement, Snap acquired select assets from the company, bringing in some employees from Snapchat’s parent hardware team to work on their own virtual reality glasses that Specs didn’t like.
Fajt, Rec Room’s founder and former CEO, is now listed on LinkedIn as director of product management at Snap.
For some, saying goodbye doubles as a job search. A site called Rec Room Grads lists former employees looking for new roles, including engineers, moderators, and security and trust workers. It also lists others who have found jobs elsewhere across the industry.
@media (max-width: 600px) { aside.callout { float: none !important; max-width:100% !important; margin-left:0 !important; margin-right:0 !important; } aside.callout .callout-img { display:none !important; }}
On the Rec Room subreddit, players spent the last hours saying goodbye.
One person who logged in for the first time in years, only to find he couldn’t get his old account back, wrote that the memories of “playing VR with your home make me want to cry so hard.” Others posted a countdown and asked when the Pacific would arrive in their time zones, planning to meet at the Rec Center one last time.
A parent unfamiliar with the Rec Room has asked the public for tips for a son with autism who is frustrated by its closure and unsure how he will stay in touch with the friends he made there.
Among the tips: save his photos before noon, exchange Discord handles to keep friendships alive, and look at fan-run servers: unofficial projects, recommended by other players, that aim to keep versions of the Rec Room playing after the shutdown.
Others were not ready to be released. “I’m praying to whatever gods there are that this isn’t my last time out,” wrote one Rec Room user, describing the final party at the Rec Center: pouring out their virtual food, handing out gifts, and taking one last group photo before the end.
