Wagner James Au / New World Notes

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!