It was only a month ago when social VR platform Rec Room reported it crossed the two million annual VR user mark, an important milestone worth celebrating along the app’s five-year journey. Its developers tell Road to VR that Rec Room has seen a significant uptick in users recently, as it now reports over one million monthly active VR users on the platform.

Rec Room’s success comes from a number of factors; it’s free, it benefits from wide distribution VR headsets and traditional monitors, and it includes cross-platform play too. It’s also incredibly fun. Rec Room not only lets you socialize face-to-virtual-face, but it focuses on providing compelling games such as its co-op Quests, a battle royale-style shooter, and a host of minigames. The admittedly slick first-party content sits right alongside stuff created by the community too, which includes anything you can imagine.

In addition to supporting all major VR headsets, Rec Room has broadened the number of compatible non-VR devices since its launch in 2016. It now supports non-VR users across PS4/PS5, Steam, iOS, and Xbox, where it’s currently listed as the number one top free game.

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Rec Room Designer Shawn Whiting told Road to VR that given today’s news, virtual reality users are actually a relatively small percentage of overall users. “That’s the number for VR monthly active usership, but we’re much higher than that once you look across all platforms,” he says.

Although a minority, VR users have been remarkably dedicated, Whiting tells us, and they’re still growing past that one million per-month active rate.

“Our VR daily active users spend an average of 2.7 hours in Rec Room when they visit,” Whiting tells Road to VR. “Quest 2 is about half of our VR users [and] VR growth has been amazing the past few months.”

Still, despite its increased popularity on non-VR devices, Whiting says that creating a thriving VR community is still key to “building the metaverse.”

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And by all accounts, that’s what Rec Room is really after—making a rich virtual environment where not only fun and games can exist, but also someplace where life happens. The studio’s plan to create a functioning in-game economy is only one such step, which one day could make it financially viable to work as a content creator for the game. That’s a good way of mobilizing creators to make cool stuff and retain users who want to spend money on accessories and exclusive content.

Besides bumping past one million monthly active VR users, over the weekend the platform reports it’s hosted 45,000 concurrent players, which at its peak made it more populous than many of Europe’s micronations, such as the Principality of Monaco, Liechtenstein, or San Marino. Ok, that’s a bit of a silly comparison, but no more silly than completely recreating Among Us in VR.

Update (1:45 PM ET): A previous version of this article omitted that the one million figure applies to VR users, and not total usership. We’ve corrected this in the body of the article.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • TechPassion

    Do you like it more or less than VRChat?

    • namekuseijin

      it has actual good games. their paintball and lasertag rooms are already classics of VR, and Rec Royale was there way before Pop1.

      I actually love their co-op quests: The Rise of Jumbotron, Curse of Crimson Cauldron, Isle of Lost Skull, Crescendo of the Blood Moon. it really feels like you’re in an old NES game in VR with coop friends…

      • Kevin White

        I remember playing the Jumbotron one and one with swords and bow & arrow. It’s been a couple of years, but it was some of the most fun I had in VR.

        • And Rec Royale including more laser tag weapons makes it so much more fun

          • Zantetsu

            My son who is 12 plays A LOT of rec room. He is like a supreme master of Rec Royale. His preferred weapon is the paint ball pistol. I watch him hit people from across the map with that thing. He wins at least 50% of the events he enters. He’s a good kid and respectful of others, doesn’t cause any trouble, and doesn’t screech into the mic. I suppose that’s why he gets a lot of adult team mates and friends that play with him regularly.

            I like rec room and sometimes play it with him (I use a Quest 2 which only recently got updated to play rec royale). I found it to be pretty buggy thuough, we were constantly getting bugged in games and having to re-start. He said that it’s worse during non-business hours, I suspect the rec room team has to actively manage problems and when they are not around it tends to be less reliable.

    • Ad

      VRChat seems really cursed, even if it’s creation tools and such seem more advanced.

    • For gaming? Rec Room is far superior.

      For creativity? VRChat is sooooo much easier to use.

  • namekuseijin

    yes, but sadly that’s not VR users. just like “VR” Chat

    • Matthew Lake

      VR Chat also has over 50%+ of its users in VR as well. It’s pretty amazing that 500K in Rec Room are using Quest 2.

      • Dang, at a 50/50 average of buying the 300$ versus the 400$ Quest 2 that’s almost 200 million dollars Facebook has made just on headset sales, manufacturing and advertisements not included 0o0

    • Shawn Whiting

      Hey this is Shawn from Rec Room. The over 1 million monthly active players is ONLY counting VR players. So that stat is entirely VR users. It doesn’t count Xbox, PS4, PS5, iPhone, iPad, and Steam screens players which are actually a larger portion of the community. But the over 1M MAU VR players is still huge!

      To get an idea for the rest of the community size, Rec Room has been the #1 free game on Xbox for a few weeks now ahead of Fortnite, Roblox, COD, Rocket League, and more :) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/top-free/games/xbox

      • namekuseijin

        whoa, man. congrats

        VR definitely growing

        • Shawn Whiting

          Yeah it deff is! Thanks for being part of the community and helping to spread the good word :)

      • Adrian Meredith

        Congrats but seriously are you ever going to fix the performance issues? I have a quest 2 now but played with friends via my quest 1 and it was awful. Yet population one is near perfect…

        • Shawn Whiting

          From what I know Pop One was made from the ground up for the Quest line of headsets. Rec Room has a much larger code base and supports many more players at one time across millions of complicated rooms w player made physics, code, sounds, animations, objects, etc. We also started on PC and PS4 so moving to mobile platforms takes a lot of effort. That said our performance on mobile / lower power platforms is getting better every update. If you want the highest quality experience you will want to plug your Quest into a PC using the link cable though since that unlocks more CPU and GFX horsepower, higher quality textures, etc. Thanks for playing!

          • Ad

            Is there any chance that full body tracking could happen? Those new tundra steamvr VR trackers seem like a great opportunity to add the feature.

            And it’s good to see a VR platform that doesn’t have to be Quest driven/first.

          • how can full body if no feet Ad? WHERES THE FEET AD, WHERE IS IT?!?!?

      • Congrats for everything you’re doing, Shawn! Astonishing work

  • Ad

    This is very interesting, I’m glad in the sense that horizon can eat its heart out. Personally I have a lot of reservations about Rec Room. Mostly because it’s a F2P game with loot boxes aimed at children, and because moderation definitely needs work.

    • the loot boxes aren’t pay-to-win in any way though, and never have been. they do definitely need more active moderators though, I agree with you there.

      • Ad

        You can buy them, can’t you?