Rec Room Creation Community & Development Features More Powerful & Robust Than Many Assume, Argues Rec Room Creator

In response to my post on VRChat's impressive creative community, a Rec Room creator recently sent me this strong case for their own platform of choice, and included the videos featuring great user-created contest in Rec Room seen here.

"There is amazing work and talent there, and it was all built in game. ALL of it. All of the modeling, texturing, animations, programming, costumes, etc. To me that's the magic of Rec Room," they told me.

This and Rec Room's multi-user collaboration aspect, they argue, is in sharp contrast to worlds with tool sets that are tightly integrated with a 3D engine and require a lot of offline, solo creativity:

"For most other things like VRChat," as they put it, "you'll be in Unity for days doing all of that stuff. In Rec Room, you're doing it with up to 40 people across almost any platform, voice chatting and co-building and hanging out the entire time. You don't have the friction of needing to go download Unity or ROBLOX Studio and learn all of this dev tool stuff on your own. Plus other Rec Room users will teach you how to build in real time."

As evidence of all that, this Rec Room creator pointed me to the world's highly active Discord channel for creators, then went on:

"Another point to make about a robust platform is you should be able to make a living from your creativity there. Rec Room's economy is miles ahead of a lot of other apps in the space. They've been paying out creators since the beginning of the year, and talking with some of them, it's definitely salary-level earnings..."

Finally: "There's also the point that for VRChat and ROBLOX, all of the creators are on PCs. That's a big limitation. I know Rec Room creators on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Oculus, iPhone, iPad, and I know people looking forward to building on Android once that comes out."

That's a solid defense of the platform! I will note that VRChat's community definitely seems to be more active and independent on social media when sharing their various creative projects; whereas with Rec Room, I generally only come across an impressive user-driven project if it's featured on the company's own official social channels. Then again, that could just be because Rec Room's user base probably skews a bit younger than VRChat's, and just isn't as active on Twitter/YouTube/etc.

I'll also note that any platform that can support user-made, multiplayer vehicle-based FPS combat ala Fury Road is fucking fine by me!

Comments

[Martin Kraus]

Oh, I noticed that the first VRChat World Jam is going on currently. See here: https://itch.io/jam/vrchat-sketchbook-jam

It will be interesting to compare the submitted worlds of that jam with just the winning worlds of Rec Room's latest creator contest: https://recroom.com/hiddenworlds , which will be announced this weekend. (There are so many submissions to Rec Room's creator contests that trying to visit all of them would be a serious time committment.)

But maybe that's not a fair comparison because these creator contests in Rec Room offer more time for development and are now highly competitive contests where many of the best creators in Rec Room show off what they can do, while VRChat just started with their World Jams.

Maybe a better comparison is between the VRChat World Jam and Rec Room's game jam in March: https://recroom.com/gamejam . The submissions to the latter can be found by going to rec.net and searching for #gamejam2021 .

[Martin Kraus]

For anyone who is interested in learning more about the submissions to the latest creator contest in Rec Room (see https://recroom.com/hiddenworlds ), here are the top 10 rooms in each category from the first round of judging (you can look them up on rec.net or with the Play menu inside Rec Room):

Entries are alphabetical and not in scored order.

#Art
Falling_From_Above
HiddenMinecraftRealms
HiddenWorldsTours
HollowEarth
KONG-SkullIsland
OmegaMart
ProjectFinalFrontier
PT_Silent_Hill_2
The_UnFOreSEEN
Vestige

#Game
DeepSeaDiscovery
GraveyardRiddler
MiningMadness
Olivanders.wandshop
RetroRealms
RollingRoulette
SlideSurfer
TheCashCanalCasino
Unseen.
WhenSirensScream

#Hangout
ChallengersDeep
CozyMysticPortraits
Creative
GodsDomain
MOULIN_REC
Nebesa
RyuguTemple
Starfall
SurrealStudies
ToyboxTown

#PVP
ArmyAntz
BermudaSkies.
GroundedPvP_
Hiddenwar
KONG-SkullIslandPvP
PlanetUltramaPVP
PvP.Japanese.Castle
SummonersVill
Trollge_Incident
ZasonsBattlegrounds

#Quest
-The-Lost-worlds-
IntoTheBallPit.
LostWorldCruise
MarioMisadventure
RecCrisis
Seventh-Heaven
The-Dark-Descent
TheBackDoor
TheHeartOfWerahuri
TheLostLandofSkyWorlds