Rec Room will be closing down on June 1st 2026 at noon Pacific time.
Over the past decade, Rec Room grew into something amazing, reaching over 150 million players and creators along the way. Players made over half a billion friends on the platform. In total, people all around the world spent a cumulative 68 thousand years in Rec Room. The top UGC rooms saw over 500 years of play time each. That’s a lot of people having a lot of fun.
What this community built together is incredible, and something we’ll always be proud of. Even today, millions of people are showing up to spend time in this fun and welcoming place every month.
Despite this popularity, we never quite figured out how to make Rec Room a sustainably profitable business. Our costs always ended up overwhelming the revenue we brought in.
We spent a long time trying to find a way to make the numbers work. But with the recent shift in the VR market, along with broader headwinds in gaming, the path to profitability has gotten tough enough that we’ve made the difficult decision to shut things down.
We’re making this decision now, while we still have the ability to wind things down thoughtfully and do right by the people who built this with us.
This is a breaking story, and I will be updating this blog post as I get more details. While I was expecting smaller metaverse platforms to close during the current metaverse winter, I was not expecting Rec Room to be among them! I do expect that there will be much commentary about this decision among its userbase. You can see all my previous blogposts about Rec Room here.
Facebook (which had gone to all the trouble and expense of rebranding as Meta during this ridiculous hype cycle) has dropped literally hundreds of millions of dollars into acquiring Oculus and trying to build a business metaverse platform, and failed to even to entice its own employees into using it (let alone anybody else)…
I predict that we are going to see a “metaverse winter,” much like the previous “AI winters,” when the initial promise and hype of the technology hits what the Gartner Group politely calls “the trough of disillusionment.” And I predict we are going to see a lot more shutdown announcements like this throughout 2026.
Well, guess what? Once again, I am late in reporting this, but Meta has finally shut down its Horizons Workrooms product, a social VR platform intended for business use. According to a Road to VR news report by Scott Hayden, Horizon Workroom’s final day was Feb. 16th, 2026.
This is hardly a surprise. As I said up top, I don’t think anybody was using Workrooms. I wrote about the launch of the open beta of Workrooms in August 2021, at a time when Facebook Horizon (as it was then called) was still in closed, invitation-only beta. One neat feature is that it allowed you to bring your physical keyboard into the virtual space via keyboard tracking (this only worked for certain models of keyboard, though). One month later, they announced a collaboration with Zoom, but I don’t know if that went anywhere.
For existing users, Meta has not announced a direct replacement for Workrooms; the company suggests users look into third-party apps such as Arthur, Microsoft Teams Immersive and Zoom Workplace.
Oh, and Meta has also been shelving projects, and laying off staff in its Reality Labs division, according to Scott’s article and CNBC. So it would appear that our metaverse winter is now in full swing.
But keep in mind that winter is only one season out of four. And winter has its own special beauty, even if it doesn’t seem like there’s very much going on under all that ice and snow.
Yes, we are probably going to see more platforms shut down, like Workrooms, and more companies go out of business (not Meta of course, smaller ones). But those of us who have already been active in the metaverse for many years aren’t going anywhere during these lean, cold times. We’ve found our people, our communities, wherever we happen to meet up, whether it’s a flatscreen virtual world like Second Life or a meetup in social VR like VRChat. We hop from world to world as needed.
Yes, the current marketplace struggles will still impact us all in some way. We can expect moments of panic and chaos (e.g. when Ready Player Me was bought out by Netflix, and thousands of developers had to scramble to replace their avatar systems). But we will hunker down, use the downtime productively, and wait for the next season to arrive.
I first read the news on LinkedIn this morning: MeetinVR, a social VR platform I last wrote about on my blog back in 2022, has announced that it is shutting down its services as of April 30th, 2026:
The technology landscape is characterized by constant change. As we look ahead, we recognize significant shifts occurring in the enterprise sector:
Industry Focus Shift:Key platform providers are strategically re-aligning their enterprise VR initiatives.
Market Maturity:The core VR market is evolving, allowing new forms of spatial computing to emerge.
The Rise of AI-Enabled Glasses:We are seeing an acceleration in the development and focus on AI-enabled glasses and next-generation augmented- and virtual reality, signaling the next generation for workplace collaboration.
In light of these industry dynamics, and to finish strong, we have made the strategic decision to conclude MeetinVR services.
MeetinVR services will officially cease on Thursday, April 30, 2026.
Now, there is enough technojargon in this press release to make me grit my teeth (and we are far, FAR away from “the rise of AI-enabled glasses,” in my opinion). And the “industry focus shift” gobbledygook of “key platform providers are strategically realigning their enterprise VR initiatives” can brutally be summarized as metaverse companies are folding because there’s still not a market for business users.
Let’s face some brutal facts in the harsh and unforgiving light of the inevitable crash of the artificially-heightened expectations of the recent metaverse hype cycle (of which I, being the writer of a popular blog on just that very topic, was actually around for during the beginning, middle, and end.) Still with me? Good.
Facebook (which had gone to all the trouble and expense of rebranding as Meta during this ridiculous hype cycle) has dropped literally hundreds of millions of dollars into acquiring Oculus and trying to build a business metaverse platform, and failed to even to entice its own employees into using it (let alone anybody else). Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life), a much smaller company than Meta, poured millions of dollars into building a shiny new social VR platform called Sansar, which never took off, and now languishes in a near-moribund state, supported only by a passionate cadre of volunteers determined to keep it alive. (Now, Sansar was designed for consumer as opposed to business use, but I’m quite sure the original development team would have been happy to see it take off for corporate use, too. Aside from a few music festivals, that never happened, though.)
And frankly, given the perilous political and economic times in which we now live, people have far greater concerns on their minds than whether they can meet up as avatars to conduct business in a flat-screen virtual world or on a social VR/AR platform accessible via a headset. The learning curve/cost of entry is still too high, compared to alternatives like Microsoft Teams, Cicso WebEx, and Zoom.
The current tsunami of generative AI tools like ChatGPT threatens to lead to massive layoffs among lower- and middle-management white-collar jobs (something that’s not being talked about enough, in my opinion). And if metaverse platforms weren’t able to sell themselves during a pandemic, when everybody was forced to sit at home, they certainly won’t be able to sell themselves now, when businesses are cutting costs, trying to stave off insolvency in some cases, and people are worried about keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads.
I predict that we are going to see a “metaverse winter,” much like the previous “AI winters,” when the initial promise and hype of the technology hits what the Gartner Group politely calls “the trough of disillusionment.” And I predict we are going to see a lot more shutdown announcements like this throughout 2026.
All the PR spin in the world (“to finish strong”? Really? Really??!?) cannot hide the fact that the metaverse business is in a period of retrenchment, possibly a long one. And no, generative AI is not suddenly going to be some sort of magic wand that can make everything all better again. That’s just laughable.
It’s time to go back to the drawing board, for a rethink (that, I can agree with in this press release). And, despite my sarcasm, I do wish the team behind MeetinVR every success in whatever they decide to do next.
