Metaverse Review: Rec Room
Rec Room, founded in 2016 in Seattle, WA, by Rec Room Inc., like many other metaverse entrants, has an integrated game creation system, enabling rapid user-generated game and world development. With 37 million monthly active users across various platforms (3 million in VR alone), Rec Room’s popularity has skyrocketed in the past few years. In this post, we’ll explore what has contributed to Rec Room becoming a leader in the metaverse space.
What is the platform about?
Like most of its competitors, Rec Room is free to play and create within. However, to take full advantage of all the game offers, users must acquire tokens, its in-game currency, by earning them in sponsored leagues, purchasing them or subscribing to Rec Room Plus. As alluded to above, Rec Room enables its users to create digital assets, environments and inventions directly within the game and monetize these creations, which we’ll explore in more detail below.
What makes the platform unique?
Amongst the various metaverses I have explored, Rec Room has one of the most polished experiences and gameplay, which is remarkably consistent across the multiple devices and platforms it supports. With nearly $295 million in investment to date, it is easy to understand why.
Rec Room is a rich world where user-generated content goes beyond simple spaces and digital assets. It delves into bespoke experiences and custom games, setting a high standard for its competitors to follow. According to CEO Nick Fajt, one surprising fact is that while the average session time across all platforms tops out at around 27 minutes, it jumps to more than 2 hours in VR, demonstrating the incredibly high stickiness Rec Room has with its users.
Why should brands consider Rec Room? What makes it relevant for brands to consider? What are the opportunities?
Is Rec Room the place for your brand to set up shop in the metaverse? With past partnerships, including the NBA and Mr. Beast, many have found success when partnering with the platform. Taking the partnership with the NBA as an example, Rec Room has demonstrated a willingness to deeply integrate custom experiences and games into their world, simultaneously elevating the brand’s profile in the metaverse and creating a rich experience for its users. Having said that, Rec Room, first and foremost, is a game and not an advertising platform, so do not expect to see the game plastered with logos and brand sponsorships any time soon.
Engagement
4 — While Rec Room focuses more on activity-type games like Rec Royale — a battle royale game where the last player, or team, left standing is the victor — and laser tag, there are also quest-type games such as Quest for the Golden Trophy. Rec Room falls short of creating gaming experiences that genuinely test a user’s skill and knowledge but achieve a high level of engagement with their gaming options.
Immersiveness
3 — This ranking is highly dependent on where you experience Rec Room. If, for example, you experience Rec Room on desktop or mobile, immersiveness suffers. However, if you enter Rec Room through a VR headset, your experience is far more immersive. Where Rec Room falls short, similar to Horizon Worlds, is that interactivity in Rec Room is limited to what you can see and touch with your “hands” (Rec Room does not currently support hand tracking, requiring controllers when playing in VR).
Social Interactivity
4 — Users can chat and game with each other, while the platform includes tools to protect users from bad actors, such as the ability to mute others or vote to kick a user out for violating the code of conduct.
Centralization
2 — If you’re looking for a decentralized experience, look elsewhere; Rec Room, while allowing you to build and sell assets and experiences within the game, ultimately owns everything on their platform.
User-Generated Content
4 — Rec Room allows users to create and monetize assets, inventions and experiences they create within the game. With over 2 million creators and more than 12 million user-created rooms, this aspect is core to the Rec Room experience, and they acknowledge as much through their various partnership programs. Rec Room demonstrates the importance of UGC through their Video Partner Program, which is available to all content creators with a social following of 5,000+ people (supported platforms include Twitch, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok). Video Partner Program members earn a premium (10% versus 7%) over typical creators for selling assets to “supporters” within their Rec Room store. Rec Room also offers a built-in dashboard for tracking visitors, supporters, sales and the like but does not currently support third-party tracking software integration.
Economics
3 — As of December 2021, Rec Room has paid over $1M+ to creators, according to Tech Crunch. To achieve this number, Rec Room has had to generate close to $14M in sales from creators, given that creators only take home 7¢ on the dollar for each sale. This margin is on the low end for creators compared to other platforms. Rec Room pays a fee of 30% to the platform (Meta, Microsoft, Sony etc.) and keeps 90% of the remaining revenue for themselves.
Partnerability
5 — Rec Room achieves a five in this category because, as mentioned above, they have in the past created custom experiences for a partner (the NBA, in this case) to more deeply integrate the experience in the game. Brand partnerships, however, do not appear to be their primary goal and thus may not apply to other brand partnerships with the platform, ultimately bringing their rating more in line with a four on our scale.
Device Compatibility
Rec Room is available across all major platforms and consoles, with the exception of MacOS.
Want to learn more about other metaverses, find out other reviews in our State of the Metaverse post.
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