Rec Room, considered one of VR’s most distinguished social platforms, is shutting down in June, with its creators noting they “by no means fairly found out find out how to make Rec Room a sustainably worthwhile enterprise.” In accordance with a GeekWire report (by way of Skarred Ghost), Snap has acquired choose property from Rec Room, which additionally contains expertise transferring to its XR-focused Specs Inc. subsidiary.
The Information
Rec Room is slated to close down servers on June 1st, 2026 at 12:00 PM PT (native time right here), the studio introduced in a weblog put up on Monday evening.
“Over the previous decade, Rec Room grew into one thing superb, reaching over 150 million gamers and creators alongside the best way. Gamers revamped half a billion associates on the platform,” the studio says.
The Seattle-based studio managed to draw over $294 million since its founding in 2016. Its most up-to-date spherical got here in December 2021, bringing to the corporate $145 million and a $3.5 billion valuation.
Cracks started to point out in August 2025 nonetheless, as the corporate laid off round half of its workers, citing prices associated to a surge in low-level content material flooding the platform from customers on cellular and console.
Though Rec Room says “thousands and thousands of individuals” are nonetheless exhibiting as much as spend time in its platform—accessible throughout VR headsets, console, PC, and Android and iOS cellular gadgets—the corporate says the enterprise merely isn’t sustainable.
“Regardless of this recognition, we by no means fairly found out find out how to make Rec Room a sustainably worthwhile enterprise. Our prices all the time ended up overwhelming the income we introduced in. We spent a very long time looking for a technique to make the numbers work.”
A few of this comes all the way down to troublesome market circumstances within the gaming trade, Rec Room says, compounded by Meta signaling a monumental shift in its priorities as a supporter of VR gaming.
“However with the latest shift within the VR market, together with broader headwinds in gaming, the trail to profitability has gotten robust sufficient that we’ve made the troublesome determination to close issues down.”
Notably, earlier this month Meta introduced it’s permitting Quest customers to make use of a legacy model of Horizon Worlds, though the corporate is shifting focus to develop the digital social platform “virtually solely” for cellular.
This comes amid a GeekWire report that Snap has acquired choose property from Rec Room along with hiring quite a lot of its workers to work within the firm’s Specs Inc subsidiary, which is engaged on the corporate’s upcoming XR glasses. The report suggests neither firm has signaled that Rec Room will dwell in any capability at Snap nonetheless.
As a final goodbye, Rec Room launched a video recapping the final decade (seen beneath), together with particular occasions, video games, and its evolution as a user-generated content material platform.
My Take
Whereas unhappy, Rec Room is being wound down in in all probability essentially the most accountable method potential, as the corporate is ensuring its third-party creatives will likely be paid out whereas it offers everybody at the least two months for everybody to determine subsequent steps. This even contains the power to obtain room and invention information for anybody who desires to recreate their very own room in a sport engine, corresponding to Unity.
And adore it or hate it, it additionally means VR headset-owning children now have one much less place to go to hang around. Over time, Rec Room primarily turned VR’s de facto family-friendly platform, because the studio pioneered the area as one of many first user-generated VR platforms to incorporate built-in youngster security layers.
I’m removed from the correct individual to level mother and father to different platforms, though I can safely say VRChat is not the correct place, because it lacks a devoted child mode, and infrequently performs host to grownup content material that’s usually poorly regulated.
Extra importantly although, the lack of Rec Room marks the demise of some of the precious VR firms outdoors of Meta—one which notably pioneered a VR creator economic system which the corporate stated final yr was paying out greater than one million {dollars} per quarter to creators.
This could not solely give VR sport builders pause, but additionally the investor class, who can now level to not solely the failure of Horizon Worlds on VR headsets, however one of many earliest, most constant, and most accessible platforms too.
The put up Digital Hangout ‘Rec Room’ is Completely Closing in June, Belongings Reportedly Acquired by Snap appeared first on Street to VR.