Rec Room announced that it is laying off roughly half of its staff in what the company described as necessary and painful cuts. The studio said it had spread developers too thin trying to support content creation across too many device types. The announcement post framed the reductions as a response to the company trajectory and included severance details: affected employees will be allowed to keep their laptop or desktop computers and will continue to receive their salaries and benefits for three and six months, respectively, after being laid off.
Alongside the layoffs Rec Room said it will narrow its development focus to better support PC creators, who make up the bulk of the game´s user-generated content creators. The change means remaining development resources will spend less time on tools for mobile and controller users and will pull back work on maker Artificial Intelligence features. The studio also intends to slow the client release cadence, continuing a previous effort to move more of the game´s key content out of the client and into server-side systems.
Rec Room launched in September 2021 and saw a SteamDB-reported concurrent peak of 7,154 players in February 2022. According to the announcement and public data, concurrent and daily player counts have declined since that peak, with daily player numbers reportedly hovering around 900 to 1,500 on Steam. Despite the reduced player numbers, Rec Room said players spent more on user-generated content in July 2025 than ever before, a detail the studio highlighted while explaining the strategic refocus and staffing cuts.
