Rec Room will be shutting down on June 1st

Developer Rec Room has announced that it will be shutting down its social and gaming title Rec Room, where players could hang out, create games, and make things in both standard and VR modes. The game will be shutting down on June 1st, which is also Rec Room’s 10th anniversary since launch. After that date, players will no longer be able to access the game or the website. From today, no new accounts can be created, friends cannot be added, RR+ membership sign ups are closed, Room Rewards program has been ended, and monetised items cannot be created.

In a statement the development team wrote, “Over the past decade, Rec Room grew into something amazing, reaching over 150 million players and creators along the way. Players made over half a billion friends on the platform. In total, people all around the world spent a cumulative 68 thousand years in Rec Room. The top UGC rooms saw over 500 years of play time each. That’s a lot of people having a lot of fun. What this community built together is incredible, and something we’ll always be proud of. Even today, millions of people are showing up to spend time in this fun and welcoming place every month.

Despite this popularity, we never quite figured out how to make Rec Room a sustainably profitable business. 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. We’re making this decision now, while we still have the ability to wind things down thoughtfully and do right by the people who built this with us.”

As a thank you to players the Rec Room team all first party content is being discounted by 80%, and some of the Rec Room+ items will be available to all players. Players will also be able to download their photos and final report cards. To download photos from the game Rec Room has provided instructions here. To get your final report card you can follow the instructions here. Creators will be able to download their room and invention data through formats that can then be opened using other tools like Unity, but this can only be done through Steam and the function will go live next week. Working copies of rooms cannot be downloaded as it will not be possible to run them without the Rec Room servers.

Source: Rec Room