Why We Are Focused on Enabling Creation for Everyone

Hey everyone,

We’ve been talking a lot lately about our efforts to unlock creation in Rec Room for more people. This includes efforts like the simplified Maker Pen interface, improving inventions in R2, and Maker AI. We’re also working on experiences that will help introduce players to creation in more of a free-form and playful way in social settings.

We see a lot of feedback from the community asking why we’re focusing on these areas and why we aren’t building more RROs or quests instead. To answer that question as directly as possible our CEO Nick wrote up this blog post.

~ Shawn


Why We Are Focused on Enabling Creation for Everyone

Building First Party Content

We’ve heard you — you want more RROs, especially quests and co-op adventures. And we get it. We love making and playing them too.

But we’ve got to prioritize. Our top priority right now is getting Rec Room on stable financial footing. And unfortunately, Quests don’t help us get there. In fact, they usually hurt.


The Numbers

We’ve built a lot of Quests: Golden Trophy, Jumbotron, Crimson Cauldron, Isle of Lost Skulls, Crescendo — each one more polished and ambitious than the last. But each one saw less play than the one before it. Even with more players on the platform, engagement trended down. You can see this from the visit counts on rec.net.

And this isn’t just about quests — the same pattern holds for RROs in general. As the effort went up, the returns went down.

We’ve built 20+ RROs, each with a different business strategy:

  • Rec Royale launched with a battle pass — players didn’t bite and it didn’t come close to covering the cost.

  • Showdown was locked behind Rec Room Plus — no impact.

  • My Little Monsters had direct monetization — it earned about 10% of its dev cost.

  • Run the Block was open-sourced for easy cloning — cloned content has earned little revenue.

Every time, we hoped, “maybe this version will make the model sustainable”. But none of them have cracked it.

We wish this wasn’t the case. But until we’re in a better financial position, big first-party games can’t be our main focus.


What We’ve Learned About Making Games

I doubt we’ll ever give up on first-party content. We still love building worlds. We still love telling stories. And we’re still constantly experimenting with how to make cool stuff sustainable — both for us and for creators.

One thing we have been doing with recent first party content is building them entirely using our UGC tools. Not only does this showcase what’s possible, but it stress-tests our systems. If you look at Run the Block’s circuit graph, you’ll understand what I mean. It’s incredibly complex. It enables gameplay far beyond what you’d see in a typical UGC room. But it’s also incomprehensible to all but the most advanced circuiteers.

Even Rec Room devs had trouble keeping track of what was going on in there.

And that’s a problem — because if we want the ecosystem to be filled with thousands of high-quality, deeply interactive rooms, we can’t rely on just the top 0.001% of creators. We need to lower the barrier and widen the funnel. That’s why we’re so focused on making creating easier for more people to build.


Creation - Lowering the floor AND raising the ceiling

That’s where we see AI-assisted creation fitting in.

Creation is the heart of Rec Room.

In-app, on any device — that’s what makes us unique. And creators — at all levels — are our most engaged, most valuable users.

When we say “Creators” people often think of a small group of highly visible capital “C” Creators. Obviously, our top-tier creators are building the content that keeps the platform fresh, exciting, and full of surprises.

But players who spend time building anything — even unpublished, even just for themselves — are the ones who stick around, bring friends, and buy things on the platform. They’re what keep the business going.

So our goal with AI is simple: help more people become creators, and help great creators do more.

AI can reduce the friction. It can speed up workflows, unlock complexity, and raise the bar for quality — without making the process intimidating. It’s a tool to lower the floor and raise the ceiling.

Our goal isn’t to replace creators. It’s to empower them.

I know some of you will note that, “AI is expensive,” but it’s also a paid feature — one that can offset its own costs and opens up powerful new creative possibilities. If we get this right, we’ll see more engaged players, more amazing rooms, and a stronger Rec Room.


Closing Thoughts

Ultimately, we want to build a Rec Room that can be around for a long time. Sometimes that means leaning into a direction that doesn’t make everyone happy. We don’t like when that happens, but when we have to make tough decisions we try to be as transparent as we can along the way.

We think AI-assisted creation is an important way of improving Rec Room over the long term, but we’re early in that journey and your feedback is critical.

Try out Maker AI, tell us what’s working (and what’s not), join the monthly Creator AMA to ask questions, and post bugs and requests in the forums (check the Maker AI Bugs and Maker AI Feedback sections). We’re building these tools for you — and with you. Your feedback helps us do that.

~ Nick

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Watch maker ai be a commercial failure too

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The true way to keep creators is to start having a timeline or a roadmap for these bugs your established creators are experiencing. Show us update logs or make a new category on the forum when you guys release a update, make a new post for it that we can comment on in this forum that other developers/creators/and users can leave messages, this bug still a problem, this bug fixed thanks. Sure let new creators dabble in the experience of creating rooms but when bugs exist for 9 months and longer, what’s going to make the established creators stay?

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Maybe something more creative. Stop hurting your creators with ai. Promote actual games creators make and not cashgrab. Do actual good contests. Dont commit updates that are gamebreaking <3

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If you keep focusing on things that the majority of community isn’t interested in you’re gonna keep losing a lot of players, then you’ll make even less revenue, the same thing you say you’re trying to prevent here. :skull:

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AI has a lot of negative connotations, especially within a very creative community. Why push so hard for AI and not Classes, Tutorials, Workshops, or other more interactive learning experiences?

People don’t grow when they are given the answers, they grow through experience and trial. AI may help put circuits or shapes inside a map, but what good does that do for the creator?

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Was this ai generated?

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People learn through experiences. You have to first fail to succeed, action and reaction. You can’t give a contestant the prize then ask them to play the game…

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If you really want revenue, you’d get more by just… focusing on what the community wants. Not the AI, maybe 2 people want AI out of the entire community.

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I think Maker AI is nice, but it’s way too new to make rooms, and the day pass is stupid … I’d rather have another subscription JUST for Maker AI, like… 4.99?? It has to be less than RR+ or people will get SUPER mad.

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Personality I’m a circuiter. I don’t feel like AI is helping, but rather replacing us. Why get a circuiter if AI can do it? Why go to a class to learn circuits if AI is for everyone to use? If everyone can do the same things with AI, then why create or learn?

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I think Recroom forgot about the part where people collaborate to make rooms. It feels like they only see one person creating a room not a team of people.

BUT that’s why maker AI is optional (plus a player is way better then maker AI) at creating circuit

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I think ai should not be made in a game that players want to teach others and others want to learn from players not just listen to ai. Also ai would take creating games away from the players and then no one will wanna play. I think we should try to bring more players back to rec room and not the other way around.

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I should preface this very critical post with that I appreciate the hard work you all do every single day. You’ve gone above and beyond with engaging with the folks who like playing your game.

Rec Royale launched with a battle pass — players didn’t bite and it didn’t come close to covering the cost.

Was this the cost of Rec Royale? I thought the platform gained a lot of players when this was released. This was an RRO that brought me back to the game, anyway.

1k tokens is still basically nothing, though. I feel like the battlepass could be improved. Even by 2018 standard, the unlocks weren’t very exciting. This might’ve gone differently if the RRO had a rotating/updating pass with/without new seasons.

The ability to even buy tokens was only just released when this RRO came out, so I’m really surprised that there was even the intention that this RRO should be “profitable.”

Showdown was locked behind Rec Room Plus — no impact.

Like others have pointed out, a 1 week beta period doesn’t feel that compelling. I think the only push here was a Rec Center door. This data point doesn’t feel super compelling, where I think you could drive RR+ conversions if there weren’t 1-week timed events tied to RROs. Why not RR+ benefits in the RROs themselves that don’t go away, like special golden Showdown skins?
The RRO itself is still unmonetized to this day…

My Little Monsters had direct monetization — it earned about 10% of its dev cost.

The currency you can buy in MLM felt hidden to me. I could not find where to buy “prismatic essence.” This is a huge design issue for a game with a “direct monetization” push.

It feels like mtx was a push here that got buried a little bit.

Run the Block was open-sourced for easy cloning — cloned content has earned little revenue.

There weren’t any community pushes to remix the game, and it’s a difficult RRO to edit since you need Studio to grab any of the RRS objects.
The circuits could be a little more organized. I figured this world was cloneable mostly for nerds like us, but if there was a push to make this as easy to edit as a template room, it isn’t reflected in the circuit presentation.


I think it’s cool that you made an entire RRO cloneable and “hackable” like this, but I’m not sure how clones would’ve worked to earn money easily.

The blog post has nothing to say about MITM, which is notable since I think that had some good monetization potential. The only monetization in that room is an avatar storefront. If the RRO had buyable skins for the killer (or a 2nd, paywalled killer?) I wonder how many people would buy that. I definitely would have…

These examples are a bit confusing when it comes to monetization at least. There’s no doubt that playercounts have gone down. But I also wonder if there was a greater push in the earlier RROs to have something to buy besides avatar cosmetics, what the result of that would be.

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“We’ve built a lot of Quests: Golden Trophy, Jumbotron, Crimson Cauldron, Isle of Lost Skulls, Crescendo — each one more polished and ambitious than the last. But each one saw less play than the one before it.”

Isle and Crescendo weren’t even on Quest or on Mobile when they first released. How is this a fair comparison?

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For future first-party content, PLEASE consider some sort of paywall/possibly giftable paid access to new first-party content. I can guarantee a lot if not most players would not mind paying a fee to be granted access to NEW non-RRS made strictly in Unity Quests or other such big first-party content.

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You fundamentally cannot keep losing players at this pace; every player leaving is a person who could be spending money on the game.

Why hasn’t there ever been a focus on getting more players into Rec Room, especially keeping them on and playing?

We creators need more players, as they help fuel our games. But without players, we cannot achieve success ourselves.

I want to be able to play and create on a stable platform, but if you keep doom-posting, why should I bother spending money on a platform that seems like it’s going to die off sooner rather than later?

Please show that you’re actually making progress with these changes rather than just saying what you’re going to do. Its hard to believe in your goals when you dont have any numbers or data to show that it is working

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this is a nice way to cover up the fact you simply want to look good for investor money

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With all due respect, are you folks actually tone deaf or do you just pretend to be? I have a hard time believing either possibility, considering I spent years talking and working with you all. I know you’re smarter than this. I know you know better.

I have a hard time believing any of the reasoning here, and I really did think about it for a good while before typing this up. You know as well as I do that these are not good examples for why RROs are not sustainable.

Rec Room in 2018 WASN’T EVEN ATTEMPTING TO MONETIZE. Why is this an example? There was no way to spend money in the game when this came out.

Showdown was also a Rec Room Studio tech demo that only had one map and little replay value. Once people figured that out, of course they opted to just wait for it to release for everyone rather than buy a month of RR+ to play it early.

This was a good chance to prove that RR+ could have value, and it was wasted on a very poor RRO entry that was disguised as a RRS tech demo, of which RRS wasn’t even announced yet, so people were just confused as to why it felt so sub-par.

Same issue as Showdown. While I will admit that MLM was a much better and targetted effort than Showdown with its monetization strategy and general presentation, it clearly wasn’t enough to make a fetch-quest game where one of the main goals was to upgrade your camp… that you couldn’t even invite people to.

Why would people feel compelled to spend money? The reason people spend money on gacha games or other similar games is because they can then show their purchases to others. Show their progress to others. MLM just doesn’t reach that threshold due to fundemental issues with its design, even if it was very well made art wise.

Again, you didn’t even try to push monetization here. You should be relying on your own monetization strategies, not just wait for the community to pick up the pieces. This feels like a cop-out.


I’m just so confused by this post and much of your comms recently. Maker AI feels like such a dead end due to how controversial introducing AI into art ventures is, instead of exploring actual monetization strategies to supplement UGC revenue.

Why not try releasing a new Quest, charge $10 for entry mimicking say, Walkabout Minigolf’s revenue model and see how that does?

Why not actually get around to making Rec Royale Season 2 with a premium $10 battle pass and promoting it the best you can?

Actually try with your 1st party monetization. Then you can get back to the community at large and explain why it doesn’t work and go from there. You’re wasting valuable time you could be doing this with dead end AI efforts that are too little too late. What ever happened to “No, we’re not doing any AI gimmicks?” back in 2022? I know I heard Nick say this once.

Something needs to budge. I don’t want to see this game fail. You owe it to your players, your current and former staff, everyone who worked to get Rec Room where it is today.

Everyone who cares enough to reply here or on other socials wants to see you succeed. Please actually do some serious retrospection because we can’t do it for you. People have tried with videos and protests and that doesn’t work. It’s all up to management in the end.

Thanks for reading in advance.

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