Rec Room is shutting down in June after a decade of service. The free-to-play social game offered both VR and non-VR options and allowed users to create their own spaces and games that others could play. Rec Room was extremely popular in the early days of VR on platforms like PSVR, but is shutting down now as the people behind the game admit they “never quite figured out” how to make it profitable.
On March 30, Rec Room’s developers announced that the game will shut down completely on June 1. In a blog post announcing the news, Rec Room Inc, the studio behind the game, said that over 150 million players have checked out Rec Room since it launched in 2016. And apparently, some user-created rooms received over “500 years of play time.” But unfortunately, the studio was never able to make much money off the free-to-play VR-focused experience. The game later got a non-VR mode, too.
“Despite this popularity, we never quite figured out how to make Rec Room a sustainably profitable business,” said the devs in the post announcing the game’s end. “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 studio says it is shutting down the game now while it can still offer players some heads up and close things down in the best way possible for fans.
Starting today, players will no longer be able to make friends in Rec Room, create new accounts, or subscribe to the game’s premium subscription service. As a thank you to players, many features locked behind the game’s paywall are being unlocked for all. The devs are also offering creators the ability to download some of the assets connected to their user-created rooms to allow them to be ported into other platforms in the future.
Snapchat owner Snap has already purchased some of Rec Room‘s assets, and some employees from the studio will join the Seattle-based tech and social media company.
“On behalf of the team,” said the devs in the 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.”
