Creators Outsell Rec Room Avatars

This marks Rec Room becoming more like a marketplace than a traditional game store. The winning avatar items are increasingly being made by creators, not the company, which means player spending is being pulled by a live catalog that updates faster, follows subcultures better, and gives users more reasons to keep checking the shop. That also explains why Rec Room is now concentrating on the small group of creators who reliably make items players actually buy.

• Avatar cosmetics are the clearest proof point because they are simple, repeat purchase digital goods. Players buy Tokens, use them on outfits and accessories, and creators now earn meaningful cash from those sales, topping $1M in quarterly earnings in Q3 2025 after taking all of 2021 to reach $1M for the full year.
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• The tradeoff is margin. Rec Room keeps about $0.70 on each $1 of first party sales, versus about $0.30 on UGC sales after creator payouts and platform fees. That makes a creator led mix shift worse on a per dollar basis, which is why the post August 2025 strategy is not broad creator growth, but steering effort toward top sellers and selective first party hits.
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• The closest comparable is Fortnite, where cosmetics and shared identity across experiences turned digital items into the core revenue engine and helped reuse the same audience across many sub games. Rec Room is applying a smaller scale version of that playbook, but with creators supplying more of the merchandise layer directly inside the world building platform.
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From here, Rec Room is likely to look less like an open ended UGC experiment and more like a managed creator retail network. The important next step is turning top creators into dependable merch producers, so the marketplace keeps feeling fresh while blended take rate improves through a tighter mix of proven creator items, subscriptions, and first party anchor content.