Does Rec Room Have 30,000-50,000 Monthly Active Users on Steam Alone?

Above: RecRoom's SteamSpy stats for today

I just had an interesting Twitter conversation with Shawn Whiting, community designer at Against Gravity, the company behind Rec Room; he made some interesting points about my post estimating the monthly user numbers for the social VR platform, based on its Steam stats. As I wrote yesterday:

Rec Room had a daily peak concurrency between 300-500 for most of 2018. That probably translates to around 3000-5000 monthly active users logging into Rec Room via Steam. (As a rule of thumb, monthly actives are 10x the peak concurrency.) 

Without reporting Rec Room's actual user numbers, Shawn pointed me to guidelines from live game back end provider Playfab, and suggested I should be calculating my estimate far more upward:

Thanks for the write up! However I think there's a major error w your monthly estimates. Assuming 500 peak concurrents per day you would 10x that to roughly arrive at DAILY active users. And even that arrives at a lower number than is accurate 🙂

— Shawn Whiting (@shawncwhiting) January 9, 2019

"Assuming 500 peak concurrents per day you would 10x that to roughly arrive at DAILY active users," he told me. "And even that arrives at a lower number than is accurate... if you take the monthly projection and revise that to the proper DAU projection, then add a similar multiplier again to get MAU you're at least in a much better ballpark."

Based on those assumptions, and SteamSpy stats, Rec Room has roughly 30,000-50,000 monthly active users on Steam alone. (In addition to users logging in from the Oculus Store and PSVR, which have no public-facing stats, but could easily bring in as many users or more.)

That's certainly quite possible, especially if we're to count monthly active usage by the many people who install Rec Room and --like most other free-to-play games -- look around for a few minutes, shrug, and quit forever. (Rec Room's low "median total playtime" stat above suggests a lot of this one-try-then-bye-bye usage.) I still suspect the numbers are closer to my more conservative guess of 12,000-25,000 monthly active users total -- at least in the sense of returning, highly engaged users.

In any case, judging by Rec Room's usage over 2018, when it got over 1 million installations, it does have a core group of highly active users who remain stable over a long period -- and that's pretty impressive.

Comments

[Dhaval Patel]

Ohh thats great users i think. Really it is very useful as per my view.