Rec Room

» see rec.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i missed rec room. by 2016 i was deep in computer vision work and the social-vr planet looked like a sealed-off room, kids on quest headsets building lobbies i would never log into. the platform lived for a decade and i never opened it once.

rec room launched in april 2016 out of seattle as the first product from a small startup called against gravity. the founders built it for the original vive and rift, then ported to playstation vr, then to flat screens on pc, then to mobile. by 2018 it was on every consumer headset with a meaningful install base. by 2021 it had a $3.5 billion valuation on top of $289 million in venture funding.

the user count looked enormous on paper. 150 million lifetime players by the time it closed, with a creator economy where users built games inside the platform and earned a share of revenue. the problem was the math. for every dollar of revenue from user-made content, after platform fees and creator payouts, the company kept around thirty cents. that number never got better.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

rec room sat in the lineage of social-vr spaces. it leaned toward casual game lobbies rather than open worlds, with paintball arenas and escape rooms instead of free-roam cities. the avatars were stylized and limbless, which let them render cheaply enough to work on hardware tiers that did not all have full-body tracking.

the company built its creator economy on top of the room metaphor. users published their own games inside rec room and earned creator tokens that converted to real money. peak figures showed millions of user-made rooms, with the most popular ones running constant lobbies of strangers around the clock.

~ the funny part ~

rec room outlived altspacevr (microsoft killed it 2023) and outlived horizon worlds on quest (meta wound it down 2025). it was the last big social-vr venture still standing when it announced its own end. the company shipped on every consumer xr platform that ever shipped, made it to ten years, and could not close the unit-economics gap.

the shutdown post was unusually gracious. the founders thanked players, opened a refund window for unused subscriptions, kept rec.net up for nine extra days so people could screenshot the rooms they had built. no fire-sale, no last-minute pivot to crypto. just a write-down.

~ the day it died ~

servers went dark on june 1 2026 at noon pacific time. every platform lost connection at the same moment, from vr headsets down to mobile builds. the rec.net web property hung around until june 9 so creators could export portfolio screenshots of rooms they had built. then that domain too went dark.

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