Rec Room, the virtual reality social hub where players mingled in digital lounges and competed in games like Paintball and Dodgeball, will close its servers on June 1. The shutdown marks the end of a 10-year experiment that drew over 150 million players but ultimately failed to achieve financial stability.
Developer Against Gravity attributed the closure to an inability to balance operational costs with revenue streams. "Our costs always ended up overwhelming the revenue we brought in," the team wrote in a statement announcing the decision. "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."
The cumulative time spent in Rec Room across its user base totaled 68,000 years, according to the developers. The platform had positioned itself as a destination for social gaming, allowing users to customize avatars, host virtual gatherings, and create user-generated content alongside official mini-games.
The closure timeline unfolds in stages. New account creation is already suspended. From May 1, partnered content creators will stop accepting new registrations. On the same date, players will lose the ability to purchase tokens or redeem gift cards. Creators have until May 18 to collect any previously earned tokens. When the servers go dark on June 1, all online services will cease, and the website will be taken offline.
All premium memberships have been extended through the final day at no additional charge. Content creators can no longer monetize user-generated items, and Room Reward payments will end after April's distribution.
Against Gravity's optimism appears to have waned rapidly. Last August, after laying off roughly half its workforce, the company projected it could maintain operations until 2029. At that time, executives highlighted July 2025 user-generated content revenue as record-breaking, up 70 percent year-over-year. The revised timeline suggests circumstances deteriorated significantly in the intervening months.
A Struggling Sector
Rec Room's collapse fits a broader pattern of VR industry contraction. Meta, the primary corporate backer of consumer VR, cut 10 percent of its Reality Labs division earlier this year and shut down multiple VR-first studios. Twisted Pixel, developer of Deadpool VR, along with Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR) and Sanzaru Games (Asgard's Wrath) all closed as part of the restructuring.
The social mini-game genre itself remains viable—Roblox continues to thrive as a mainstream platform—but its VR iteration has struggled. Some observers noted that Roblox's addition of VR support may have undermined Rec Room's market position. "The writing was on the wall as soon as Roblox added VR support, as well as the stagnation of that medium in general," one commenter wrote online.
Against Gravity emphasized its decision to wind down operations while solvent, rather than face sudden shutdown. "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," the statement read.
Players have until June 1 to download photos and collect a personalized avatar report card as a keepsake. All first-party content across in-game stores has been discounted 80 percent, and certain premium features like avatar items are now free. Creators can export room and invention data for potential recreation in external tools like Unity, though the rooms themselves cannot function without Rec Room's servers.
The shutdown prompted mixed reactions in the gaming community. Long-time players expressed frustration at losing a platform they had invested time and money into, while others pointed to the inherent fragility of online-only social experiences. "I've had multiple MMOs and online games I enjoyed shut down, so I know how much it sucks," one user wrote. "It's gotta be even worse for a purely social experience like Rec Room."
Against Gravity thanked its community in a final message, crediting players' "boundless creativity and enthusiasm" over the platform's decade of operation. "Your boundless creativity and enthusiasm has been a source of great inspiration and joy. We wish we could have found a way to keep things rolling, but unfortunately this is the end of the road."
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