Room Rewards, “Cash Grabs,” and What’s Changing

Rec Room Official
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Hey, everyone. This is a longer one, but it’s important.

We wanted to continue the conversation around “cash grab” rooms – a topic we know many care deeply about. We’ve shared our internal analysis - these rooms are not making money from Rec Room players. But, we heard the feedback from you that they are making money in other ways. So, as we’ve looked more closely at what’s contributing to the rise of these rooms, one area stood out: Room Rewards. While this program has helped support tons of great creators, it’s also been unintentionally propping up some low-effort content. We’re sharing this post with you all to explain how and why that’s happening and what changes we are making to fix it.

Understanding the Monetization Problem

A common question we hear is: Do these “cash grab” or “low-effort” rooms actually make money? For us or for the creator?

The short answer: not really.

Rooms created in the park – like costume parks and EscapeFrom-style experiences – account for less than 1% of our revenue. And while not all “cash grab” rooms come from the park, the pattern holds. These rooms often attract quick visits but don’t engage players deeply, and they rarely lead to monetization.

However, some of these rooms still earn significant payouts from Room Rewards. In February, 60% of Room Rewards rooms that the community would likely consider “low-effort” or “cash grabs” earned fewer than 1,000 tokens from actual players. Despite this, they still received hundreds of thousands of tokens through the program.

Room Rewards: What It’s Supposed to Do

The Room Rewards program should do one thing - provide a temporary boost to creators who are making great content that doesn’t sustain itself yet. You might need that boost because you’re an up-and-coming creator, or not enough people are seeing your content yet or you’re trying something really novel with our creation tools. Rewards are not meant to be guaranteed or permanent.

Unfortunately, the current system has gaps. It’s been too easy for low-effort rooms to meet the basic threshold of 63 players spending 120 minutes in a room across a month, even if the average visit is short, engagement is low, and monetization is near zero.

We need to change that.

Changes to Room Rewards

We will be excluding at least two rooms from being paid out in April for March who were patently abusing the Room Reward program. As we find more, we will exclude them.

The changes below go into effect for April Room Rewards that are paid out in May.

To better align Room Rewards with the content we want to celebrate and support, we’re adding some simple requirements for rooms to qualify for Room Rewards.

These filters are designed to make sure rewards go to rooms that are either engaging or monetizing well. In the long term, rooms eligible for tokens should be doing both. These changes are currently focused only on the Engagement track of Room Rewards. We’re not adding these pre-requirements to the Commerce track at this time. But, we will update that track as needed based on what we’re seeing in the future.

New baseline requirement:

  • Rooms must have an average time spent per visit of at least 10 minutes

If the average visit is under 15 minutes, rooms must also meet both of the following:

  • At least 2% of visitors spend tokens in the room

  • Earn an average of more than 1 token per visit

Automatic qualification:

  • Rooms that earn 10+ tokens per visitor on average will qualify regardless of time-spent metrics

These stats can be checked on rec.net via your room’s stats page. These requirements are in addition to the tier thresholds (meaning rooms still need at least 63 players spending 120+ minutes per month to qualify for Tier C).

What This Means for Creators

We know Room Rewards is an important program for many of you. That’s why we want to be as clear and transparent about what’s changing and why. We’re shifting incentives to better reward the kind of creativity and effort we all want to see doing well in Rec Room.

Room Rewards was always intended to act as a subsidy, not a salary. It should not be the dominant source of income for rooms that aren’t engaging players or monetizing meaningfully. If a room is earning significantly more from Room Rewards than from actual players, that’s a signal that the incentives aren’t working as intended.

Our goal is that these changes:

  • Cut off the incentive to create low-effort rooms that don’t engage or monetize

  • Refocus rewards on rooms that offer players great experiences

  • Support creators who are already doing the right things

We will continue refining Room Rewards to ensure it serves its intended purpose. Currently, we are transitioning from the old system to the progressive system. We previously announced these changes here. The updated requirements will apply to April rewards, which will be paid out in May. If we make further changes to May rewards, we will aim to announce them by the end of April.

We realize some of you may still have concerns about these changes, and we welcome your feedback or questions in the comments.

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well, there be something to ban the creators for making a low-effort room, because reporting rooms is not working

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Rec room is goated for this, sorry for asking for my tokens back

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at least for R2 can there be inventions limit

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That doesn’t really make sense. For people who need systems they don’t know how to make, they could only use 5 inventions for those or so, and have to figure the rest out on their own.

What WOULD be better is an invention to OG content ratio, where if the ratio for inventions is at a certain point, then it wouldn’t qualify.

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I overall believe this is a positive change however won’t people find ways around this? I feel like a lot of people are willing to spend 50 tokens on the right thing, even 100 if it’s a good deal and if it’s true that these creators really couldn’t careless about the token their rooms actually earn other than room rewards, they will just provide something that is a “NO BRAINER” to buy just to qualify for room rewards?

I understand you have more data than us so I’m guessing this is what would work for now and you can adjust if not working to plan.

This sounds like it will incentivise the “promoters” who spam invite everyone to rooms to stop though because they could end up with people not liking that type of room :thinking:

Only time will tell though

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Let’s say I make inventions or shirts that I’ve put into the room and people buy those inventions/shirts through a button or storefront in a room or they get the inventions from the “Inventions Used” in this room tab.. does this count towards monetisation my room has made because technically that revenue has come via the room :thinking:

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While this might be a good idea on paper, I think this would bring more downsides. This demotes sales and use of inventions, which will kill off a big part of income for RR and creators. Even if it was only measured on free inventions, it could affect some room creators who would use these certain inventions for convenience (ie circuits, furniture, etc).

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Sorry, had to login real quick.

I’ve been calling this out since 2023. I’ve said over and over that Room Rewards is helping prop up this kind of behavior, and I suppose I must not have done a good job if it took until today for everyone to figure this out.

I feel pretty vindicated.

Having said all of that, good on you all for making this change late, rather than never. I truly hope any programs moving forward only reward rooms that are meaningfully bringing in engagement and converting into some monetization for the company and the players making the rooms.

You have one steep hill to climb, but you guys still got this if you pivot now.

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ban em, ban em ban em ban em, ban promoters, ban cashgrabbers. ban all of em.

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I will say this is a good change, very late but at least it’s being done. Still seems easy to find a bypass with just spending a few tokens in your own room, but as long as y’all listen to reports it should be fine. 2 rooms to start with does seem low when the “new” page and such has so many as soon as you open your watch. First good change in awhile though.

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We do take action against creators who are engaging in practices like spam publishing or republishing rooms under our Three-Strike Creation Policy. On their third strike, we permanently remove them from the platform.

With this change, we’re taking a systemic approach and aiming to remove the incentive to create content which doesn’t engage or monetize well (e.g. costume parks).

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Hey Star,

Would love to hear more of your thoughts here if interested. Feel free to hit me up on Discord. My username is the same in the Creator Hub and Rec Room Discords.

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Completely fair question, and you are correct – time will tell! Until we’ve got it right, we are going to keep a much closer eye on the rooms that are qualifying each month.

If we find new ways people are gaming the system, we will adapt and adjust the program requirements accordingly. Also, if I find anyone intentionally trying to game the system, I will ban them under the Three-Strike Policy (and I may even choose to skip to a higher strike :slight_smile:).

Edit: I also want to clarify that while these costume park rooms look successful, they actually just flood their rooms with tons of low quality traffic. Players are not actually meaningfully engaging or spending in those rooms.

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This is something that is great to hear and I appreciate the response!

I have felt for a long time that the ‘New’ page and Room Rewards are targeted by these low-effort maps and any ways of preventing them is much appreciated.

I have regained the motivation to create rooms and experiment because of how much Rec Room has sped up the updates and pushing things in the right direction!

I have recently put up some feedback/suggestions for Rec Room in both the Creator Hub and Rec Room Discord, if you search up my username Salamungu, you should find it when you get a chance to look :slight_smile:

One is a monetisation idea that I believe aligns with the goals set out the past few days and one of them is just a RecNet idea that may or may not be good :joy:

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Great question! This currently would not count. The commerce stats on rec.net refer to tokens earned through things like room offers, consumables, keys, and currencies.

I believe there was an idea or discussion around creators earning a percentage of tokens from those sales; however, I don’t have too much knowledge in that area.

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To clarify, the two rooms were rooms that qualified for March rewards. Many rooms you see on the “New” page never reach the thresholds needed to qualify (so they are not earning tokens through this program).

If we find ways people are easily bypassing, we will adjust the program. More in this reply.

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Okay, I did think it was just those metric that counted.

I was just thinking if I have an invention and put it in my room and people buy the invention through my room maybe it could count.

However I guess the idea with it being things like room offers, consumables, keys, and currencies plus the recent changes mentioned here is to encourage people to make games with earning tokens through those means in mind, both for their own benefits and obviously the benefit of RR as whole.

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To briefly summarise the monetisation idea I put on Discord. I basically suggested something similar to how Roblox has Premium Payouts and this encourages creators to give benefits to Premium players which are usually small.

This method has got me buying Premium for 5+ months so far because of the incremental simulator game I’ve been enjoying on there.

Free players get 15 mins of shiny boost and 15 mins of gold boost a day whereas premium players get an hour of each, other examples are games may give you like 1.25x luck permanent boost, 1.25x gold permanent boost, etc.

I think a chip to detect if a player has RR+ as well as awarding creators based on how long a RR+ member as a % or perhaps if a RR+ player spends a certain amount of time in your room, the creator could be awarded?

I imagine something like this may have been thought about already though

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