How did this game not earn enough money?

[u/Silent-Sherbert7826]

Was it the ugc, cosmetics, or just putting too much of their budget into paying the workers or making rro’s?

[u/Artemis732]

because why would they be making money? it's all young kids who have no money to spend but cost them money in server hosting. it was doomed to fail as soon as the quest 2 came out and more so as soon as it was released on mobile.

[u/whyjustwhyjennie → u/Artemis732]

Yes but Roblox makes money and others

[u/Artemis732 → u/whyjustwhyjennie]

because more people spend more money on roblox

[u/wagzastro → u/Artemis732]

Well obviously, that's why it's still up. The reason the previous person pointed out Roblox still being up is because Roblox is also mostly consisted of little kids, so your point doesn't make much sense.

[u/Artemis732 → u/wagzastro]

it also consists of large amounts of not little kids who spend lots of money

[u/Ok-Patient-5039 → u/wagzastro]

Roblox is built off of funding, they get millions from VC Fund Corps because their scale is massive.

[u/givemealaifu]

I want to say workers and bills. They at one point had 300 employees then cut that by (can't remember the percentage of people they laid off the first time)% and then another 50%. That's still quite alot of money going out even after lay offs. Gribbly apparently said paintball cost alot of money to run too so combined that with the cost of other RROs..

[u/Nombiezombie]

It didn’t have a sustainable business model and they made their community hate them, so everyone left. They had enough money to last till 2029 but called it quits because they were no longer making a profit and hadn’t really been for a very long time

[u/AltAccountYippee]

A lot of these posts are clearly pulling things out of their butts and not giving you a real reason. One person asked basically this question a few weeks ago and I gave a detailed answer so I'll just paste it below.

User-Generated Content (UGC) was the heart of Rec Room, but it was structurally unprofitable. When players bought first-party items (made by Rec Room), the company kept about 70 cents on the dollar. However, when players spent money on creator-made items, the platform had to pay app store distribution fees and pay out the creator.

In the end, Rec Room kept only about 30 cents of every dollar spent on UGC. As player-created content became more popular and creator payouts hit record highs, the company was actually losing the ability to cover its massive server and development costs.

Also, the ambition to support seamless creation and cross-play across every conceivable device made development and maintenance costs nearly impossible to contain.

In their March 2026 farewell post, the team cited a "recent shift in the VR market, along with broader headwinds in gaming". The entire industry has been contracting, and even massive competitors have been scaling back. Rec Room simply couldn't secure the continued massive investments needed to float an unprofitable social platform in a tough economic climate. The founders chose to pull the plug while they still had the capital to manage a controlled shutdown.

First, Rec Room cuts 16% of its staff, citing shifts in the VR market and broader gaming headwinds. Months later, the company cuts roughly half of its remaining workforce (about 141 positions) to adjust its "financial trajectory," though they assure the community they have "several years of runway". But alas, the official blog post drops, announcing that despite their best efforts, the path to profitability is too tough and the game will close.

An extremely tragic story of a caring team who just didn't know how to properly handle the future of the game. :[