Lots to say about this.
Let’s see.
This sounds like Rec Room needs to be doing more to stop the proliferation of these kinds of rooms so those players can be shuffled into experiences where they do spend money, then.
Then why is there little to no curation on the play menu? If you really wanted to make money, you would be investing time in ensuring that people have no issues getting into quality rooms that are monetizing well. You should be doing the most that you can to hide the noise in between.
Any time that users are spending in alleged “low monetization” slop is valuable time not being spent in rooms that have monetization opportunities that are higher quality. This needs to be a higher priority, which yes… does mean that you still need to clean up the play menu.
Yes, I have been saying for a long time that a lot of Rec Room’s issues are purely a messaging problem. Nobody talks to players, and the people that sometimes do talk to players do not do it enough, or they were in the 16% that got laid off recently.
People can be converted from upset players to understanding players by simply talking to them. Explain to them why things can not be, but be factual and be prepared to answer difficult questions. One mistake can light up a lot of goodwill on fire very quickly, and it is very hard to build it up once it is burned down.
Finally, the last thing to mention is perceived player perception. Let me help you understand why people think low effort stuff is a big problem.
You go on rec.net, you see people who own dozens of republished rooms flaunting their token counts, flaunting their gold items, etc. Even if they’re really only getting paid out a few hundred dollars at most every now and then, it creates the illusion that Rec Room is rewarding this behavior.
You go on some of the Rec Room creator discords, you see people freely talking about the best ways to game the system. Set up AFK accounts to friend users en-masse to invite them to their low effort rooms. Being happy about their behavior because this game is allegedly “trending downwards anyway” (not my words), so they’re trying to milk it for all its worth before that.
You go in-game, you open the play menu, and you just see dozens of these rooms recommended to you, all using IPs targeting younger users. The rooms themselves being purely a costume room or an easy gameplay concept that a user can quickly redo and republish within a few hours, if not less.
And for a new player looking to make money, they see all of this and think… “oh, I don’t have to really build anything. I can just adapt these strategies to make some easy tokens and maybe even cash out”.
These are not new problems. They have been around since 2021 and slowly brewing ever since. 4 years later is a long time to simply not address this kind of issue.
I wouldn’t spend this long writing something without some suggestions.
- Address perception first. Have some actual rec.net moderation or change how it works so people tackily flaunting their “wealth” isn’t promoted. (Ideally, change rec.net to only show friend’s posts but that’s just me). Talk with players. Assign someone to talk with players. Whether it is constant blog posts, talking directly on Discord, answering concerns on Reddit or making videos addressing concerns outside of AMAs, anything will do.
- Fix your play menu. Maybe it’s not the “issue” as you claim, but this is still a huge perception issue. I should not have low effort rooms suggested to me in any case. (Simply look at a comparison of Rec Room’s play menu vs. VRchat. Stark difference in quality promoted).
- You already covered this at the end, but yes. Try to do a better job to explain to the community what is actually happening. Ensure both players and creators understand how a room succeeds and not let them create their own wild theories as they have been doing for 4~ years now.
That’s all. Thank you for reading.