NOTE: No generative AI has been used in the creation of this blogpost.
In yet another sign of what I am calling the “metaverse winter,” the popular social VR platform for kids, Rec Room, will be shutting down. In a website update posted yesterday, March 30th, 2026, there is a press release:
Rec Room will be closing down on June 1st 2026 at noon Pacific time.
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.
This is a breaking story, and I will be updating this blog post as I get more details. While I was expecting smaller metaverse platforms to close during the current metaverse winter, I was not expecting Rec Room to be among them! I do expect that there will be much commentary about this decision among its userbase. You can see all my previous blogposts about Rec Room here.
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