Today Rec Room revealed another fund raising round, led by current investors Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, to the tune of $100M at a valuation of $1.25B overall.
Popularity continues to rise for Rec Room, the free-to-play social gaming platform that originally got its start in PC VR. Since then it’s launched on every major VR platform, including Quest, Quest 2, and PSVR, and is available outside of VR on PC, PS4, mobile, and Xbox. The number of potential users is pretty astronomical compared to any other social VR application—even if a lot of those users aren’t even in VR.
This year has seen a big boom in investment for social gaming platforms and user-generated content apps, which isn’t surprising given the pandemic. Roblox (which has very limited VR support) just went public at a massive valuation and Rec Room recently pledged to pay more than $1M out to its creators this year.
Rec Room CEO Nick Fajt told VentureBeat:
“We’ve had strong growth over the last 12 months,” Fajt said. “We think that Rec Room can become an enduring large business that fuses games and social. We think this can be one of those things that really impacts culture. We think it can be one of the biggest games in the world. And so we really want to invest in that future.”
Reportedly, VR users make up only around 25% of the Rec Room userbase now following its launches on various non-VR platforms. “VR is still a very important part of what we do,” Fajt said. “We’re probably still a top two or top three VR app.”
In the past year as monetization efforts have finally started to take off in Rec Room, revenue grew 566% by letting users charge other players for their in-game items and by charging for a subscription for users to regularly get more in-game currency. There are now over 5 million rooms to explore, more than 2 million people have made content of some kind, and over 20,000 new rooms per day get added. Currently, over 15 million people have used Rec Room so far.
Rec Room is making big strides and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Do you still play Rec Room? What do you think are some of the best rooms to visit in Rec Room? Let us know down below!
