Some of you may have noticed a new tab pop up in the Play menu this week: the Moods tab. Don’t worry if you’re not seeing it, we’re still experimenting with the idea so you may see it soon! The Moods tab is an early attempt at solving a problem Rec Room players have had for a while now…
So Many Rooms!
Rec Room is all about user-generated rooms. Sure, we put out new official #RRO rooms every once and a while, but the bulk of the creativity in Rec Room shows up in the custom rooms that our extremely talented creators produce – and there are a lot of them. There are over 250k new user created rooms each month and while not all of those are public, it’s still a lot of rooms to sort through! We have a few different tabs in the Play menu including “Hot” and “New” rooms, but these aren’t representative of the huge variety of interesting rooms you can experience.
Something that we often do in the office is share rooms that we’re particularly impressed by. It’s fun to come to work and see that a particularly stunning new room has just been published. In fact, we have a whole Slack channel that’s dedicated to sharing fun rooms. However, there’s no easy way to do the same thing in Rec Room. We’d eventually love to let individual players create their own lists of rooms that they could share and follow. Just as you can become “Rec Room Famous” for being a talented room creator today, we’d love to enable players to do the same by curating really interesting room lists in the future.
The Moods tab is our way of exploring themed content curation in Rec Room.
Pure Moods
The moods tab contains a list of themed playlists that we’ve put together. These are all rooms that we think are interesting in one way or another and that should run on all of the different platforms that Rec Room supports. A lot of these are rooms that we internally recommend to friends who are checking out Rec Room for the first time! This is only a fraction of the many amazing rooms in Rec Room and we hope to build on these lists (and add new ones) if the feature is useful!
As mentioned earlier, the Moods tab is currently part of a split test (along with the Recommended tab). Split tests are ways of trying out new ideas without having to fully commit to them. If players like the ideas, we can easily enable the new features for all players without having to release another client. At this point, roughly 50% of players should see the Moods tab.
What Do You Think?
So what do you think about the idea of browsing through lists of rooms? Do you have ideas for more ways to explore the vast amount of Rec Room content that’s been created? As always, if you have comments or suggestions about either of these new features, we’d love to hear them! Leave a comment below and, as always, give it your Rec Room best!