Shawn Whiting

After an amazing 8+ years at Rec Room I've left to start something new. Rec Room is the best team I've ever worked with ❤️ I learned an incredible amount from everyone there and made friends for life. It was a wild roller coaster ride and I couldn't be more proud of what we built together. Below is the earliest photo I have of us testing out a new feature :) Get in touch if you want to hear about what's next or catch up!

I had a chat with Ian Hamilton @hmltn about the Rec Room shutdown and the roller coaster ride we went on as a team:

Rec Room fans PSA - If you love Rec Room, I'm not sure how much longer the merch shop we set up years ago will exist: recroom.threadless.com Good time to share this with any RR fans to grab a shirt, mug, or something before you can't anymore. When we made the store years ago we set all of the prices to be as low as Threadless would allow so RR makes nothing here it's purely for ppl who love the game to be able to express that. The RR alumni shirts are especially meaningful now 🥹

@SoulFoxGaming ahaha "and this is the one hiding behind the chair in the corner that most ppl don't notice"

@ShawnCWhiting This would have been the ultimate dorm tour

@GAMERTAGVR it was always fun to put ppl into a headset in my dorm then see their reaction 😂

@ShawnCWhiting This actually looks terrifying

"It's important to be high-agency, never follow the herd, and think independently" - Tyler, 29, Ex-FAANG now at an AI startup, lives in SF, into bouldering + cold plunge, self-optimization & peptides.

@FurkanGozukara @GenXGirl1994 @MaverickDarby Bro has a PhD in engineering but can't read a watermark or spend 10 seconds to properly attribute a creative work to the ppl who created it... "OMG WHO DID THIS!? 😂😂😂" yall have to stop w this

@GenXGirl1994 @MaverickDarby thanks for info

LMAO who made this 😭😂🤣

@MalaPBG looks like it's still working for me

@ShawnCWhiting its already dead.. i was gonna buy a shirt come payday, fuck.

This is the power of VR

I'm being sassy and just reacting to all the Rec Room hot takes I'm seeing on here so apologies if I'm being aggro. but it's also just a fraction of RR UGC sales. since only a small # of creators cash out any given quarter. and of those who do the figure given publicly doesn't account for the token sale vs cash out difference. so it's all % of % of % of revenue in a lot of these situations. RR not having enough revenue to support the ~100 person team also not necessarily true. A recent blog mentioned there was money in the bank until 2029. There are other factors at play here.

@ShawnCWhiting @RealBoethiah @Meta I thought I was clear that it was total revenue for UGC, NOT total revenue for the company I was talking about. Regardless the revenue *total* for the company wasn’t enough to sustain ~100 person company! blog.recroom.com/posts/2025/8/2… blog.recroom.com/posts/2025/8/2…

Yo @Meta y’all should 100% buy Rec Room and bring it back to life. Strip it of all the stuff that’s wasting money and save a community. I’ve heard hundreds of, if not thousands of stories of how Rec Room has changed their life..this isn’t some small game that just didn’t make it

"thats $1.4M total revenue for the entire quarter" Im not sure what 'total revenue' means to you but here's a more accurate funnel for the number you thought was total revenue and compared to being 'less than one Meta salary': 1. Total revenue 2. Now count ONLY UGC revenue (we leave ALL first party revenue streams behind here) 3. Now count ONLY the tokens the creators chose to cash out THAT QUARTER. The vast majority of creators never cash out their tokens. Those that do will sometimes only cash out once a year or wait for cash out promotions to increase their cash out rate so this number is very spikey 4. on top of that - for one stat showing a fraction of creator activity for one quarter - ignore the token purchase to cash out rate difference 5. arrive at 'total revenue' 😂

@ShawnCWhiting @RealBoethiah @Meta The UGC revenue was the canary in the coal mine. I didn’t say they struggled because of it but it became obvious it would be a massive struggle to become sustainable or profitable with the numbers across the economy without a massive boost in user numbers or engagement ($).

I know the founders better than you do :) I know the numbers. Saying "RR struggled because they only paid out X amount to creators in a quarter" overlooks fundamentally how the economy works, token exchange rates, how creator token hoarding and spending behavior shapes the smaller cash out number you're seeing there, and huge chunks of the first party business.

@ShawnCWhiting @RealBoethiah @Meta I know the founders, it’s not bad math. They were candid about the 70/30 split making their already unprofitable approach even worse as they ultimate are selling way less of their own content now that UGC is a large chunk of revenue. Aside from this they’ve been very public.

bad math: 1. the payouts to creators are at a different rec tokens cash out rate than the original token purchases. RR captures a lot of value there to support all of the services the creators are using 2. a lot of creators collect a lot of tokens from their games and never cash them out, they spend them on themselves or their friends or on new projects so looking at a payout number for one quarter only gives you a very rough baseline of activity and tells you nothing about the ceiling / hidden amount of tokens actually being purchased and spent in rooms but never cashed out 3. this figure excludes ALL first party RR revenue via its own avatar item sales, RR+ subscriptions, AI tool charges for the Roomie experiment, etc. This is a huge chunk. 4. there's even more being overlooked here but I think I made my point :) Trying to reverse engineer a private companies revenue when they aren't just straight reporting it like a public company is a very tough exercise. Especially if you don't know the game economy well

RecRoom paid out $1M in Q3 last year creators, thats $1.4M total revenue for the entire quarter (70/30 with 30% going to RecRoom). That $400k is less than a years salary for 1 engineer @ Meta. As far as profitability goes, the math doesn't work. It would have a far better chance at survival @ a small startup with controlled costs.

@SushiPlayzXXX @ReddSkye0 I don't know, if you want to buy something doing it before the shutdown is safest

@ShawnCWhiting @ReddSkye0 Do you know if the merch will still be available after the shutdown?

can we get rec room merch i wanna remember this place in a way that’s immortalized

@TheCourier_07 I'm sure ppl will take them home

From the Rec Room office 😭

@cildracia This is all I've got sry

@ShawnCWhiting Could you post a wider version of this photo? I'd ilke to use it as my Desktop wallpaper for awhile, it goes hard~

not my decision, couldn't tell ya. I do think with the room export tools they announced you'll see a lot of RR games and rooms showing up in @VRChat and other places ppl can import them. I know @grahamgaylor and @JesseJoudrey are big RR supporters and would love to see some of the RR players find a home over there and bring their rooms over. Or ppl will build their own Unity projects around them and host their own RR classic style servers. I'd love to see that.

@ShawnCWhiting sell the game instead of burning everything down why do you have to be selfish

@WhosThatMystery I don't think anything can save RR at this point unfortunately. I believe new accounts aren't even allowed to be created right now, likely to prevent the company from incurring more server and support costs heading into shutdown.

@ShawnCWhiting If there was a sudden insurgence of players, would that prevent the servers from shutting down?