VR Just Took Another Massive Body Blow

There’s no denying it: things are bad in the VR world right now. Between Meta shuttering several of the biggest VR game studios and gutting its own metaverse efforts, combined with the company’s general pullback in the space investment-wise, oxygen is rapidly leaving what was formerly a surprisingly breathable room. But hey, just because things are bad doesn’t mean they can’t get worse, right? Unfortunately, that’s exactly what seems to be transpiring.

This week, Rec Room, a popular VR meeting place and metaverse of sorts, announced that it would be shutting down on June 1. The reason? Business, of course. Here’s what the developers had to say:

“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.”

While Rec Room might not be a major commodity for most folks who are into tech or gaming, for the VR gaming community, it was a fixture. Such a fixture, in fact, that Meta decided to essentially rip the whole meeting place/game off to create its own, vastly less popular, metaverse, Horizon Worlds (a metaverse that was also recently shuttered, for context). The developer, Rec Room Inc., says that, starting June 1, users will no longer be able to log in to Rec Room, and the whole rec.net website will go offline. Any online services related to Rec Room will also no longer be available.

Fans of VR are decidedly shook following the news, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s another big name biting the dust, and if even the most popular platforms like Rec Room are in danger of shuttering, it begs the question: who’s next? Gorilla Tag? Beat Saber? VRChat?! Tensions are so high that the former platform, VRChat, even bothered to make a statement after Rec Room’s closure, stating that “VRChat is not going anywhere.”

The wild part is that while the VR industry suffers as a whole, hardware feels better than ever. Headsets like Pimax’s Dream Air are light, performant, and great for gaming, and despite Meta gutting spending on VR gaming, its Quest headsets like the Quest 3S are as accessible as ever—not to mention they’re a surprisingly functional and affordable way to dip your toes into VR.

Without an ecosystem to, you know, make the fun experiences, VR hardware feels like it’s in limbo, too. It sounds apocalyptic, and maybe it is, but maybe it was always a matter of time. As I’ve written before, I’m not convinced that VR really needs Meta. Sure, it would have been nice to see the VR industry blossom into the mega market that Meta wanted it to be, but it’s also okay for VR to be niche. In the short term, that could mean a lot of pain, and there’s no guarantee that independent VR studios will weather the storm, but there are still millions of Quest headsets in the world already, and if VR were really meant to be, it might stand on its own two legs without Meta propping things up with its giant pile of incendiary cash.

Only time will tell, and in the meantime, VR fans can count on one thing for sure: a very real non-VR rollercoaster.