VR Platform Rec Room Is Shutting Down After a Decade
Despite reaching over 150 million players and offering a variety of VR games like Paintball, Disc Golf, and more, the VR platform Rec Room is shutting down.
The virtual reality social club allows players to play games, hang out, customize their appearance, and party with friends. But unfortunately, instead of celebrating their 10th anniversary with something exciting, the game is being shut down.
On June 1, 2026, the developer Rec Room will close the game for good. The once valued $3.5 billion Seattle-based startup admitted their struggles with profitability over its decade-long run in an official post on their blog, saying, “We never quite figured out how to make [it] 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.”
According to the post, people have spent a cumulative 68 thousand years in the game, with the top UGC rooms seeing over 500 years of play time each.
While the platform is closing its doors in June, they’re already starting to implement things to slowly wind things down in a thoughtful way. According to the post, they’ve already blocked the ability to create new accounts, new friend requests, and new subscriptions for its Plus membership.
Along with that, creators can no longer publish new monetized content. Token purchases will end on May 1, and creators’ earnings will stop on May 18. The final creator payout will be processed on June 1, the day the game will close its doors.
According to reports by Geek Wire, revenue from user-generated content was growing about 70% year over year as of last September, and creators earned “more than $1 million in a single quarter for the first time.”
However, Rec Room shared their income situation, saying: “When a player buys a UGC item, a significant portion of that money goes to the creator.”
“When we get $1 of revenue from an item we make, 70 cents gets to us (because we pay the platforms 30%). When we get $1 of revenue from UGC, we only get about 30 cents (because we pay the platforms and creators).”
The Rec Room has seen struggles over the years, with the team laying off around half of its team back in August, 2025. At the time, Rec Room said that even if “nothing about the business changed or improved, our runway would probably carry us into 2029.”
A Reddit post sees a lot of disheartened fans, with one saying simply, “This f**king sucks, man.” The comment continues, saying, “I’ve had multiple MMOs and online games I enjoyed shut down, so I know how much it sucks. It’s gotta be even worse for a purely social experience like Rec Room.”
Some comments express their shock at the news, especially after August, when the team believed they could be around until 2029. One replied to this shock, saying, “Maybe they want to take the runway money and do something else with it instead of just spending all the way down to zero and then shuttering the company.”
