On March 3rd, 2026, I received advance warning of Rec Room closing down. I was able to confirm it with a second source the following day. Neither source gave a definitive end date. From whom I received the warnings I cannot say, but I was not surprised to hear them. 2 years ago, I wrote about quitting the game, but after hearing about the impending shutdown, I decided to give it another go, at least while I still could. Seeing the game again after all this time reminded me of what I enjoyed so much about it, but it also showed me exactly why I left.

What made Rec Room great

There's clearly a reason I have over 1,700 hours logged playing Rec Room on Steam. It starts with the games. As a new player, you don't know anyone, so you join some RRO games, and through those, you make friends. Maybe it was a particularly funny Paintball teammate, or a gracious GoldenTrophy partner, but some way or another, you find someone who you mesh well with. Games and rooms act as a place where friendships are discovered and made. Then, those friendships turn from "the friend I play paintball with" to "my friend, period."

Sometimes, you and a friend just sit in front of the Rec Center mirror and talk about your day. Other times, you pace around your dorm discussing whatever problems are going on in your life. All of it brings you closer together. The way that directional audio and a physical avatar allows you to turn your head to look at somebody personifies them in a way no flatscreen game ever could. You have a physical presence in one another's space, and there's something incredibly powerful in that.

When returning to the game all this time later, I invited some of my longtime friends to play with me, and we were still able to sit back and chat. That magic still exists in the game to this day, at least in some form.

Still, friendships weren't the only great things about Rec Room. Rec Room NAILED creation tools. There's something about my brain that gets me hooked on games that feel like they have infinite building potential. Minecraft, Factorio, and Cities:Skylines are all games that I have played probably a little too much of. Rec Room is no different. Holding the Maker Pen makes you feel like you could create just about anything you could possibly imagine. If you knew what you were doing, you could create some incredibly complicated systems, even with CV1. Once CV2 released, it only raised the ceiling.

The playerbase took the creation tools and ran with them. There are some incredibly impressive user-created rooms, and the amount of effort and expertise put into them is outstanding. I'm really proud of all that the community was able to accomplish with the Rec Room creation tools.

The true magic of Rec Room came when you combined building with socializing. Getting your friends to build a room together with you was one of the greatest feelings. At the end, you could look at each other and say "we did this, together", and feel like you had stolen the moon. Nothing could beat that.

Another feature, weekly challenges, were a great way to get together with your friends. Once you had completed those, you kept hanging out, even if the original reason to come together was for some item skin. Rec Room did a great job getting friends together, and really, that's the point of a social game– making, and hanging out with, your friends.

Breaking the camel's back

The end of Rec Room is not the product of some single issue. Sure, most longtime players have some decision or another that they disagree with the most, but this wasn't like the time Blockbuster Video turned down the opportunity to acquire Netflix. The downfall of Rec Room is the result of a slow degradation in quality across many fields.

UGC Cosmetic Items

Upon joining a Rec Center when I returned to the game, the most salient difference were the UGC avatars. After adding full-body avatars (FBA), Rec Room created a program where users could sell custom outfit items, of pretty much anything they wanted. The problem with this is that the limited set of outfit items offered by the game are what makes competitive rooms possible. In VRChat, a place where anyone can import whatever avatar they like, a person can make themselves the size of a pea, and never get noticed in PvP games. This is why VRChat doesn't have ^Paintball or ^RecRoyale. While Rec Room didn't go quite that far, users were able to purchase an outfit of a literal tree, so that they could blend into the foliage when playing Rec Royale. Players have also taken to selling knockoffs of real intellectual property, wearable in any room.

The stolen characters make the game feel like some low-quality knockoff game, not a VR title with complex creation tools. You simply feel embarrassed to be in the same room as an unlicensed Duolingo Owl, Roblox figure, or bag of Doritos holding a gun. It goes against every semblance of a cohesive brand image anybody ever had for the game, but apparently Rec Room will do whatever they can to encourage people to spend tokens.

Incentivizing Slop

This is a part of a broader issue stemming from creator compensation. When Rec Room announced that they would begin paying creators real-life cash in exchange for tokens generated by rooms and inventions, they incentivized creators to make as many tokens as possible, at any cost, and boy did they ever. Costume parks, clickbait rooms, ripoffs of Roblox games, AI thumbnails, the works.

Formerly well-made rooms retroactively had in-game item purchases added, using giant buttons in the way of the player (cough cough ^RunnerMadness). This also spawned a wave of so-called "promoters", who creators could pay in exchange for the promoters driving traffic to their rooms, usually by spamming invites to random players, or with spamming events.

Featured Rooms

Instead of incentivizing slop, Rec Room used to care about the quality of the room, through the Featured Rooms section. This was a selection of great rooms, listed at the front of the Play menu, and on the bulletin board of every dorm room. These were hand-picked by staff for being well-made, great experiences, and always gave new users a good place to start.

Then they killed it in all but name. The most critical thing was the removal of Featured Rooms (and the Featured Creator!) from the bulletin board, and from the front page of the Play menu. This absolutely killed any engagement, in favor of whatever slop could game the algorithm. Now all you get is garbage, and the actual featured rooms get very few visits.

Any new users who join will get bombarded with costume parks, low quality IP-stealing rooms, and brainrot. Having your room featured used to be an honor reserved for high-effort rooms. Now, nobody even knows who is featured unless they go looking for it intentionally.

Bugs. Everywhere.

Another thing that hurt the game was the number of bugs. Rec Room was never in some perfect, bug-free state at any point in its lifecycle, and I'm not going to pretend that it was. I vividly remember the update that caused all lighting to stop working for VR players. The difference now is that the bugs players encounter seem to be not only more frequent, but longer-standing. Many features simply don't work anymore, as though they've been completely abandoned by the Rec Room team. Nobody has been able to use ^ARRoom for years. The Desktop Screen? Blank. Early holotars have hats that intersect with the player's head. Old whiteboards are now blank. And so on and so forth. Bugs plague the game and drive away users, new and old. Rec Room often experimented with new features or cool projects, but in recent times, players criticize these as "taking dev time away from fixing bugs". Of course, I know that dev time isn't fungible in that manner, but the players do have a bit of a point. The bugs effectively put a ceiling on how much fun you can have, because you can only go so far before running into one. Plus, all the new features not only create new places for bugs to appear, but are also spreading any bug-fixing efforts across a wider surface area.

The Bow Update

Speaking of bugs, and this may seem quite minor, but Rec Room made a change to the way that their bows can be shot on VR. There were concepts called "doubleshot" and "infinite shot", where bows could be fired at a high rate of speed, assuming the VR player had a trigger finger quick enough. It took skill to master, and made bows incredibly fun to use. In fact, double-shot was endorsed by Rec Room as a former bug that was kept as an intentional feature.

Then, they killed both mechanics, causing bow players to stop playing in large volumes. This led to emptier lobbies, and less fun for even non-bow players. The backlash was so bad, that they had to re-add "doubleshot", though they kept "infinite shot" removed. Both of these were longstanding functions of the bow, and to "fix" these "bugs", when there were so many more bugs that actually broke the game and that players actually disliked, was unpopular to say the least.

Mocha 😋

Continuing on the topic of bugs, people like to exploit them! Rec Room has a serious hacking problem. There is a persistent group of hackers, skids, and doxxers who are rampant in the game. How Rec Room attracted this group of players, I do not know, but I can tell you that they never went away. Rec Room tried quite a few approaches to dealing with them, including lawsuits, but could never truly shake them. Even after adding EasyAntiCheat, their own home-grown anti-cheat, and some more server-side checking, it never made a difference. Skids could still crash your game, spawn random items, and destroy your social event. They'd join your PvP game, delete the room geometry, become invincible, then laugh in your face as they lag-switch killed you over and over. Admittedly, I know some of these players. They do it because they think it's fun, and easy, I guess? I don't actually know. The point is that hackers disrupt social events, and when the community is your product, they are pissing off your customers.

When you are a social game, the community is your product.

That idea is one that Rec Room really failed to understand. You're not selling ^Paintball or ^Dodgeball or the ^RecCenter. You're selling a place where you can make friends, and play games together. You're selling the ability to create whatever rooms you can dream of. You're selling a place where you can dress however you like, and be whoever you want to be. What you're selling is a community, and to do that, you need to be well-connected to it. Your job is to make sure that they have a great experience, and that they feel listened to.

For a time, they did! I remember complaining about scrolling in the 2D UI in Rec Room's social channels. Staff, who were connected to the community, saw my feedback and invited myself, and a few others, to playtest some prototypes of new scrollbars.

That moment really stuck with me. I had my issues with the new UI, but to be able to give direct feedback to staff members made me feel heard. Scrollbars and navigation buttons can seem like such a small thing, but they can make or break your experience. Being given the opportunity to do this really made me enjoy the game more, even if they didn't implement all of my suggestions.

Another experience I remember vividly was the time I posted on social media, asking if I would get some merch if I ran the game on a toaster. It was mostly meant as a joke, but they actually replied saying yes. So I replied with a toaster. A story in 3 pictures.

Back in 2022, during Reddit's r/Place event, several members of the community banded together to leave the Rec Room logo on the board. Staff members pitched in, and it felt like a real community effort. Afterward, there was a party for participants, a role in the Discord, and an exclusive invention to put on your wall.

All this was just to connect with the community. To keep them engaged. And it worked. I played Rec Room. A lot of Rec Room. A little too much Rec Room, perhaps.

Plus, not only was I playing, but I was creating. I worked on several rooms, but the one I am most proud of is ^TheStanleyParable. It took an entire year, and the work of many team members, but we managed to recreate the entire game, by hand and faithfully, in CV1 and Maker Pen. Even the Serious Room and the Escape Pod. The game was a huge hit, was featured twice, and now has 1.5 million visits. The creations of players are the lifeblood of Rec Room, and for a long time, they did a lot of work to encourage builders to do their best work.

Pro tip: don't hire quants to make decisions for a social game.

Unfortunately, Rec Room leadership saw their creators as more of a bottleneck or liability than an asset. They noticed that it was just a small number of VR-based players who were making the vast majority of the popular rooms. Instead of working on features that let them do their best work, they tried to make the tools easier to use for screen-based players, because they believed that getting more people creating, no matter how, would make things better. That never caught on. A whole lot of effort was spent on making screen-based creation more accessible, but in doing so, they changed the UI (read: ruin the muscle memory of creators), cast aside bugs, and tried to commoditize building content. Now I must admit, what they did with Rec Room Studio (Unity-based screen editor) was pretty cool, but none of these efforts were enough to fix the issue of creating being just a small percentage of the playerbase. This eventually culminated in the creation of an AI voice assistant who you could speak building instructions to... out loud with your voice. Even I can't believe I just wrote that. Instead of making the tools better for the people who used them the most, they made it worse for them, and "better" for an uninterested audience of screen players.

Most importantly, the issue here was when Rec Room leadership looked more at numbers and less at the game itself, which is simply something you can't do in a social game. Literally anyone could have told them why VR players preferred building, and what the obstacles to screen-mode building were, but instead of asking players, they went entirely on a model of "make changes to try to make line go up", with the line being the number of screen-mode builders.

Split Tests

Another side effect of switching from a community-driven decision-making strategy to a data-driven one was the explosion of split tests. These are an experiment in which a feature or change is only given to some portion of the playerbase, and data is then collected to see if the test improves whatever metric they're watching.

Players are never asked if they want to be a part of a split test, nor do they get an option to opt out of them. It simply happens to them. This is especially problematic if the test isn't the same among friends, so if, for example, the split test has to do with a new watch layout, friends can't help one another navigate to a menu in the watch.

Rec Room claims that "we can't let people opt out of these types of experiments because it skews the data". Clearly whoever is doing the split tests does not play the game. They see players as data points, not people, and are hurting the experience. Personally, I feel like "% of players who opted out after trying the split test" would be a valuable metric, but apparently not.

For a watch layout change, I can see someone dismissing my complaining as minor, but split tests did a lot more than that. Some actually reduced the performance of the game. Every person involved in that split test, who decided not to make it a toggle, is part of the problem I am talking about. It shows a total disconnect between the decision-makers and the players.

The dog food problem

There is a term in product development called "dogfooding". It is the act of regularly using your own product or service. Don't rely on the limited number of suggestions that come through support channels. Use the product yourself, and see where you find flaws. Rec Room leadership, over the years, stopped playing their own game so much. They became disconnected not only from the community, but from the problems that the community faced. They became numb to their own mistakes. I am certain that gribbly has heard quite a bit about how prevalent annoying underage children, racists, homophobes, transphobes, skids, slurs, and general toxicity are in the Rec Center. But I don't think he's truly spent much time in there. The Rec Center used to be a place where you could hang out and meet people. I've had some of my greatest conversations in there. But now, all you get are 12-year-old AdjectiveAnimals dressed as Hitler, screaming about gay people until their lungs give out.

When you own a social game, the community is your product, and when your community is assaulted by toxic underage players, the community leaves. At first, they leave for private rooms with their friends. Places to chat with friends as you build with the maker pen; or to simply hang out together in your dorm. Sure, people did these things before, but now these became the sole activities that many players turned to. Unfortunately, good community members leaving shared social spaces means that new users are immediately overwhelmed by toxicity from the moment they join. If new users are turned off by your game, and existing users slowly leave as they find greener pastures, what you've got is a stagnant, dying playerbase.

One of the ways that I most prominently felt the disconnection between staff and the playerbase was the drop-off of staff participation in building-focused Discord servers. There existed servers for builders to chat about their creations, learn from others, and generally talk about the Rec Room creative process. Often, staff members would chat in these places, because RR general chat was just too crowded. At some point, however, staff members just stopped talking in these groups. They used to be places where players could discuss Maker Pen issues, and get it directly to the people who developed the UGC tools, but now they're just chat rooms for builders to rant among themselves about whatever the latest issue is.

Some of this stemmed from the aforementioned internal pressure to make data-driven decisions, rather than using direct feedback. This is what led to so many split tests. Jay, a former Rec Room employee, explained the issue in this message:

Star, another former Rec Room employee, explained how new hires who hadn't played the game simply never integrated with the community in the first place.

Weekly Challenges

One rather famous blunder of "decisions by data" was the loss of the Weekly Challenge. Every week, Rec Room would give users a set of challenges to complete, after which they would receive an item skin. This was a system that kept players coming back each week, and it was a super easy way to keep the community engaged.

Rec Room, in a moment of data-driven blindness that stunned just about everyone, argued that "Only about 0.2% of our monthly active users complete weekly challenges", but (obvious to us but apparently not them...) that 0.2% wasn't evenly distributed among the player population. This was your most dedicated 0.2%, who were playing in these public rooms every single week. Plus, why even kill it? This seems like the most easily automatable feature to ever exist. It's not like every skin was brand-new for the week. Skins were often re-runs, much to the chagrin of existing skin-holders.

Rec Room died a slow death by a million paper cuts, and this was a big paper cut.

2DUI

The old 3D watch UI felt great to use. The tactile buttons were wonderful on VR, it was responsive, and you could make muscle memory for every single button. The pagination was glorious, and I could use it blindfolded.

It needed an overhaul. Not because of some design flaw in the UI, but because of the code. I write software, so I know exactly what staff members mean when they described the watch as "spaghetti code". It needed to be rewritten from the ground up, and I totally get that. The issue is that the team went in the wrong direction. Instead of trying to mimic the old UI in a cleanly-coded manner, they decided to optimize the UI to favor screen mode players.

I can understand this decision on principle, simply because there are lot more people in the world without a headset, than with. The 3D UI was admittedly not that great on screen mode, especially the floating palette, good lord, but the issue is that the overhaul came at the expense of VR players, and VR players are the lifeblood of the game. They're, alongside PC Studio players and by Rec Room's own admission, the playerbase that builds most of the popular rooms. Their creations draw in everybody else. Without them, you have no games, no community, and no product. They also admitted that "some of our efforts to bridge that gap [...] just frustrated our more impactful creators". No company should be making it less appealing for their most creatively productive player group to create more free content for you, yet that's exactly what Rec Room did.

AI

Apparently no company is immune to shoehorning AI into their product, and Rec Room is no exception. On March 23rd, 2023, Rec Room published a blog post about their experiments with integrating AI into the creator tools. It showcased a couple creators using AI-generated images in their creation process, but also showed gribbly showing off a red spiral of cubes that was created using commands outputted by an LLM, given a prompt.

It took them a couple of years, but they turned it into a public product, "Maker AI". It's a voice assistant for your Maker Pen that creates things on command... poorly. It was literally just a ChatGPT integration, and didn't do any fine-tuning or model creation. It just asked the LLM to return a response in a structured format that the game could parse. This program was a part of their effort to expand the accessibility of the creation tools, which didn't work.

Another absolutely genius AI integration they added was Roomie, an in-game floating wrapper for ChatGPT, because the world needs more of those, apparently. You could buy "Roomie Energy" to cover the cost of the ChatGPT credits you were using, through a monthly subscription of "Roomie Max", at $19.99/mo.

Well, as it turns out, all of this half-baked AI garbage was really just an attempt to bait investors into giving Rec Room more money, because as it turns out, they were running out of it.

The Money Problem

I know that all this yapping is great and all, but what about the bottom line? That's what keeps the staff paid and the lights on. That's why, on the 8th day, God invented Rec Room Plus. The great thing about subscription revenue is that it is consistent. You have much more reliable predictions on future income than you do by selling cosmetics every now and again. The problem, obviously, is that that wasn't enough. You gotta find a way to pay back the investor money somehow. How much investor money did they take... exactly? *checks notes* SEVEN ROUNDS??

Rec Room had a lot of money invested in them, and it seems that that's what kept the lights on for so long. No number of overpriced cosmetic items or Rec Room Plus subscriptions could fund the level of investor money they were spending. Ergo, the layoffs.

16% Layoffs

On March 3rd, 2025, Rec Room announced a 16% layoff. They laid off some of their best, most community-connected staff. These were people who advocated for creators, in a way that really made users feel heard, at least a little bit. This layoff came quite a bit after the enshittification began, and I put it here mostly as a sign of things to come.

50% Layoffs

When a 16% cut didn't do the trick, gribbly thanos-snapped the rest of the staff with a 50% cut of the remaining employees, seemingly indiscriminately. So many of them were people who talked quite a bit with community members. Even if these people weren't in a position to give leadership any feedback, players felt like they had someone to talk to. Now, almost all of that was gone. It was really sad. Still, it seems that no amount of staff cutting was enough to save the game.

More on the death of a social platform

The end of a social platform is more than just a bankruptcy, or a "sunset of operational services", or whatever the fuck they end up calling this thing. It's the severing the only means of communication some people have. There are players who only know their friends by an @ name. People who chat only through the in-game messaging system. People who use the Rec Room Discord as the place to shoot the shit. For these people, there is no way to get in touch after servers go dark.

UNTIL NOW MOTHERFUCKERS

INTRODUCING: A DATA BREACH

Only know your friend by their @ name? NOT ANYMORE! You can now look up their US or Canadian phone number and call them directly! That's right! Over 275,000 Rec Room players recently had their phone numbers stolen, and many players had their emails breached too! If you had a phone number linked to your Rec Room account, and you live in the US or Canada, consider it ✨public information✨.

Did Rec Room inform anyone? No! 😁
Did they send a watch notification, email, or text to affected players? Also No! 😁
Are they covering their asses from bad PR?! Yes! 😁
Does gribbly's phone number end in a three?! Maybe!!!

Back to being serious here, yes the data was breached, and no the "don't let people find me by my phone/email" setting didn't do anything. This happened quite recently, and it is really just salt in the wound of the company going under. A lot of people, including Rec Room, know who the perpetrator is. I just don't think that Rec Room has the resources to sue, so I suspect that they simply won't. It's a little disappointing that nobody will actually be held responsible for this, but the data's already been stolen. All we can do now is protect ourselves as best we can.

So... what happens to my rooms? My art?

For canvas art, I recommend saving your canvasses to RecNet, then downloading them to your device. As for rooms, walk around and screen record everything. After you've done that, DM ME (Discord @9021007). I may be able to help, no promises. Seriously, if there's a room you care about, DM me.

There have been 3rd-party Rec Room instances for quite a few years now, and I expect that quite a few of them will pick up the torch. I'm familiar with the community of people maintaining quite a few of them, and they're passionate Rec Room players, just like me. I expect that we'll see a flood of new players to these platforms, hopefully enough to make them true communities.

That's all folks

On March 24th, 2026, I received a tip with the date of the final 99% layoff, and subsequent new direction of the company. I confirmed it with a second source the same day. What a disaster.

I could only watch as the game slowly collapsed in on itself. By the end of it all, the community sucked, public spaces sucked, the building tools sucked, and in a surprise to nobody, everyone left. My social space, the place where I spent a huge amount of my time, disintegrating under its own weight. I am friends with a lot of people that I initially met through Rec Room, and it was an honor being a member of the Rec Room community. I built so much, talked so much, and learned so much about myself. I grew as a person thanks to all the wonderful people I came across. My best online friend was one who I originally encountered by chance in the Rec Room discord. I was looking to show off a particular feature of my dorm, and they came to visit. I still remember that day, back in March 2021. Times have certainly changed. It was really nice getting to know all these people. I'm an introverted person, and I never would have made all the friends I have today, if it weren't for this stupid game.

Thank you to the following people, in no particular order:

• Rose
• Ciunics
• nulln
• splooty
• Avery
• alizard
• Sarah
• Tay
• CODA
• VentBot
• Dan
• SpoonCat
• Darkmoose
• Sam
• Anything
• Truchhi
• Justin
• Star
• Decoded
• Opa
• RedSnow
• SlippyMcBacon
• Carmen
• Halo
• Spaghetti
• Phil
• Dave
• L
• Gabe
• Survivr
• Pea
• Bee
• Salad
• Beans
• Mister
• Yousef
• Joku
• Jade
• Jake
• Natalie
• Many, many more.
• ..and the very first friend I made in Rec Room, Void.

You all, we all, gave it our Rec Room best.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas (1947)

I'll leave you with a selection of in-game photos that are in some way meaningful to me.

They are in no particular order, I simply have memories associated with each of them.

Thank you for reading. If you have any questions, comments, or just want to share a nice memory you have, I'm on Discord with the handle @9021007.