← lumanesence

IMPORTANT: The outage has been extended

Due to the fact that I am going on hoiday between June 5th and 8th 2026, and the fact that I need to sleep a lot for that day since I also need to take a GCSE exam before I go to my holidayplace, I have been left with no other choice but to extend this outage to June 10th 2026, as wasting my health to restore a website is not worth it in the slightest. Sorry for the inconvenience

rec room · 2016 – 2026

why i'm going dark.

on june 1st 2026 at noon pacific time, rec room shuts down for good. i've been playing it, on and off, since 2020 — and even if i wasn't on it every single day, it was always just... there. a place to exist in. so i wanted to mark that.

150M+ players ever
68,000 years spent in-game
500M+ friendships made
10 years running

what was rec room?

rec room launched in 2016 as one of the earliest social VR platforms — a place where you could hang out, play mini-games, build your own rooms, and just exist in virtual space with other people. it wasn't just a game. it was a platform. a community. a weird little world where millions of people showed up and made something together.

over its decade of life, it reached over 150 million players. people made more than half a billion friends on it. collectively, humanity spent 68,000 years inside rec room. that's not nothing. that's genuinely remarkable.

my time in it

i picked it up in 2020. we all know what 2020 was like. having a virtual space to just exist in — even a silly one with paintball and escape rooms — meant something. i came and went over the years, but there was always a comfort in knowing it was still there if i wanted it.

it wasn't my main thing, but it was part of a bigger picture of what the internet felt like for a few years. and now that's going away. permanently.

how it ended

rec room never figured out how to turn 150 million players into a sustainable business. costs outran revenue. they laid off 16% of staff in march 2025, then cut roughly half the remaining team in august. on march 30th 2026 — they announced the shutdown. june 1st. that's it.

their own words: "despite this popularity, we never quite figured out how to make rec room a sustainably profitable business." which is one of the saddest sentences you can say about something people genuinely loved.

a rough timeline

2016 rec room founded by nick fajt, cameron brown and others under the name against gravity
2020 pandemic-era boom. millions flock to virtual hangouts. luma joins, sporadically.
dec 2021 series F values rec room at $3.5 billion. one of seattle's biggest unicorns.
mar 2025 first round of layoffs — 16% of staff cut.
aug 2025 roughly half the remaining workforce let go. 141 positions eliminated.
30 mar 2026 shutdown announced. new accounts, friend requests, and subscriptions immediately blocked.
1 jun 2026 servers go dark at noon pacific. rec room ends.

why go dark?

i'm not doing this because i was a die-hard rec room player. i'm doing it because i think it matters to acknowledge when something that was genuinely part of people's lives disappears. rec room was that for a lot of people — kids, adults, people stuck at home in 2020, vr enthusiasts, creators who built worlds inside it.

taking my site offline for four days feels like the right-sized gesture. a small, quiet acknowledgement. not dramatic, just — respectful.

it'll be back june 10th. :)