Just wanted to start this off by saying I really appreciate the current level of transparency from the developer team at Rec Room. It is very rare that we see this much in the industry at all. So, thank you Rec Room.
A response from Gribbly in last night’s AMA really stuck out to me.
“People are calling these rooms cash grabs assuming they rake in lots of money when that isn’t true.”
I think there is a valid point to be made here. It could be very true that these cash grab rooms are not making lots of money individually. When you add up these rooms, the profit I’m sure is very large. This would not be a problem if these rooms weren’t so abundant. I would appreciate some actual data here, but I don’t know how keen Rec Room is on sharing financial data.
So, what is a “Cash Grab Room” then?
I’ve seen the argument floating around that people don’t actually know what they mean when they call a room a “cash grab”. People have made the argument that people call rooms cash grabs just because they don’t like them, rooms that aren’t visually appealing or are bug-ridden, etc.
When I hear the phrase “cash grab”, I think of something that is purely profit-driven and sacrifices quality for a quick buck, or uses popular IPs/trends to garner clicks because those are familiar to players, whether or not the room actually makes any profit.
I do agree that rooms containing other IPs/trends are an entirely different problem… when those rooms aren’t predatorily designed to siphon money. A good example of this separate problem would be if a room was made to allow people to watch pirated movies without any monetization. When this problem is so deeply rooted in how these creators exploit the system, it’s hard to not bring it into the conversation.
How could this be solved?
There is no doubt that these rooms, despite their quality, still have an audience of players who really like them. So, how can we fix the cash grab problem while still creating an ecosystem with content for all audiences? Here’s a few of my suggestions:
Improving the recommendations system.
This is a big one. An option to “never show me this room” in recommendations could be very useful data and very beneficial to the recommendations systems. Also just improving the algorithm in general to favor rooms with similar titles and tags to rooms you have lots of time in.
Room cheers and jeers.
Allowing players to also dislike rooms and have those dislikes be publicly available could reinforce the idea that the community dictates the content, as suggested in last night’s AMA. This like to dislike ratio should also have an effect on the room’s placement in the algorithm rather than purely player engagement, as also suggested in last night’s AMA.
Encourage creators to make higher quality rooms and regularly update them.
Regularly updated rooms could bring in fresh content to rooms and boost player engagement in said rooms. Perhaps limiting the amount of rooms players can publish to just a few a month or even rewarding rooms for having long-lasting engagement or a high like to dislike ratio could reinforce this.
Holding more room contests more often could also help with quality, encouraging creators to create high quality experiences to win prizes.
Anything that could make creating high quality rooms more appealing to creators than creating a minimum viable product with the sole intent to make cash.
Conclusion.
I’ve been playing Rec Room for a long time, I was here to see player count peak in the early 2020s and I’ve been here to see the player count dwindle since then.
I truly believe Rec Room can change for the better and bounce back from this bad situation we’re all in. However, something has to change for the better if you want to succeed as a company. Doing the same thing you’ve been doing to get to this point and doubling down on it will not help.
We can make it through this, all you need is to take initiative.
