GoKawiilis a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Rec Room, a Roblox-like social gaming platform that lets users create games and experiences for others to play, is shutting down on June 1st. Despite reaching more than 150 million players and creators and, at one point, being valued at $3.5 billion, the company says in a blog post that “we never quite figured out how to make Rec Room a sustainably profitable business” and that “our costs always ended up overwhelming the revenue we brought in.”
The company also notes that “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.” Rec Room laid off half of its staff in August, and a few days after the cuts were announced, Rec Room CEO and co-founder Nick Fajt said that that doing the layoffs when it did “gave us the ability to take care of people, while still setting up Rec Room for years, not months of funding.”
Rec Room isn’t the only social gaming platform that’s struggled as of late. Starting in June, Meta’s Horizon Worlds won’t get new VR experiences as the company shifts the focus of the platform to mobile. Last week, Epic Games laid off more than 1,000 employees due to a “downturn in Fortnite engagement” that meant the company was “spending significantly more than we’re making,” according to CEO Tim Sweeney.