Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Bad news for Rec Room, a metaverse platform with impressive user growth across multiple platforms. (For my book's new afterword, I'm tracking it has having around 40 million monthly active users, mostly on mobile and consoles.) Despite that, the company co-founders announced they were laying off half the staff.

The stated reason in the announcement is quite interesting: Trouble optimizing UGC content across all the compatible platforms, a problem which was made only worse by introducing Maker AI, a prompt-based creation tool:

While we did see creation happening on mobile and consoles, we never got to the point where those devices were good for building stuff that other players engaged with. And some of our efforts to bridge that gap (e.g., Maker AI) just frustrated our more impactful creators.

At the same time, those lower-powered devices still produced millions of pieces of content. This put a huge strain on the team, who had to figure out tools and procedures to review it all. Making all this run across every device was a massive technical challenge and burden.

Emphasis mine, because it echoes a concern I've been raising with the excessive excitement over gen AI: The likelihood that introducing simple prompt-based creation into metaverse platforms would just disincentivize the dedicated, most ambitious content creators in the user community.

You can see that in one of the top voted comments in the YouTube video introducing Rec Room's Maker AI:

The use of AI images clearly shows Rec Room going to more corporate ideals and trying to just make money in any way rather than thinking about the community and how this entire game is about art. Saying that it makes it more accessible is an insult to all the people who try super hard to make anything at any level. It’s a blatant way to just get rid of the real inspiration that comes in humans deciding all the bits and pieces of their craft. I am clearly upset and I hope you all, as a company, can change and prioritize art.

Going forward, Rec Room founders say, they're going to focus "less work" on tools like Maker AI, and "[m]ore support for our top creators. These folks are driving most of the growth and revenue already." Which is a much better focus, and here's hoping Rec Room can grow revenue commensurate with its already huge user base.