Rec Room is shutting down on June 1, bringing an end to one of the biggest user-generated gaming platforms outside of Roblox.
According to The Verge, the company announced that the social gaming service, which once reached more than 150 million players and creators and was valued at $3.5 billion, will go offline after failing to become sustainable.
The Seattle-based company said that it “never quite figured out how to make Rec Room a sustainably profitable business,” explaining that its costs consistently outweighed its revenue.
Rec Room also pointed to broader changes in the gaming industry, including a cooling VR market and weaker growth across the industry following the pandemic-era boom.
The company had already been shrinking for months. In March 2025, it cut 16 percent of its staff, then laid off half of its remaining employees in August.
Launched in 2016, Rec Room built its audience by giving players tools to create their own games and virtual spaces. Much like Roblox, users could design custom rooms, invite friends, and move between thousands of player-made experiences.
The platform first gained traction as a virtual reality title on devices such as Oculus, Meta Quest, SteamVR, and PlayStation VR, but eventually expanded to consoles, PC, mobile devices, and the Nintendo Switch.
Rec Room stood out because of how much control it gave its community. Players could build with the game’s “Maker Pen,” then create more advanced projects using visual programming tools such as Circuits V1 and V2.
In recent years, the company partnered with Unity to launch Rec Room Studio, which enabled experienced creators to build rooms using professional game development tools.
At its peak, players had collectively spent more than 68,000 years inside the platform, made over 500 million in-game friendships, and pushed some of the most popular user-created rooms past 500 years of total playtime.
The shutdown will happen in stages over the next two months. New account creation, friend requests, and new Rec Room+ subscriptions have already been turned off. Token purchases and gift card redemptions will end on May 1, while creators will stop earning money from the platform on May 18.
Rec Room said it will issue a final creator payout on June 1, the same day the game Rec.net and Rec Room Studio are scheduled to go offline. Before then, players will be able to download their in-game photos and save a copy of their avatar, while creators can export room and project data for use in other programs, including Unity.
Rec Room’s closure comes during a difficult period for social gaming and virtual reality. Meta recently announced that Horizon Worlds will no longer receive new VR experiences as the company shifts more focus to mobile users.
