Hello and welcome back to the second edition of our Community Commerce Report! These reports will be going out once a quarter to give you, our wonderful creators and community members, a peek into our in-game economy to move you closer toward making a sustainable income building in Rec Room.

Each quarter we’d like to give you insight into the types of keys and inventions that are selling well, the price points that are most profitable by category, as well as highlight a particular creator doing cool things in the space! We’ll also provide news about upcoming features we are adding to Rec Room in an effort to get you more $$$ while building the things you love.

With that said, let’s dive into room keys and inventions!

Room Keys

As you probably know, room keys are special items in community rooms that unlock some functionality within the room. Some keys allow players to fly, other keys unlock special areas, and still others create novel ways to cooperate with other players in your party.

Keys remain the largest category of spend in our community economy and continue to grow and grow, accounting for hundreds of millions of tokens making their way into the hands of creators each quarter. With that said, here is a look at the market over the last quarter (between April 5th and July 5th).

Once again, in breaking this down, please understand that not all users tag or title their keys to accurately reflect the above categories. Thus, while these general findings hold true, there may be a minor variance between actual numbers and those reflected above.

For the most part, things are relatively unchanged from the previous quarter. Powers that unlock special abilities in the room continue to be the largest category, followed by Role Modifiers which allow players to do things like fly in room. However, there are a few changes worth digging into:

Donations, while still a relatively small slice of the umm...pie have doubled as a % this quarter. If you are a creator struggling to or not interested in monetizing your room, consider adding in a donation key or two. Our players love to show support for rooms they and their friends enjoy, and this is a great (and easy) way to do so!
Access keys went from 10% of total spend to 5.5%. These are keys that allow players to enter special paid areas or experiences within rooms.
Toys, virtually absent from last quarter, have grown this quarter to eclipse donations and nearly match Access keys. Toys can range from plushies that you can play with in the room to working RC cars to...uh signs? We aren’t exactly sure what to do with those but hey, they’re toys, the only limit is your imagination! See below for a wonderful assortment of toy keys available within PartyVenue:

While it is great to see so many players cashing in on Power and Role keys, we’d love to encourage our creator base to think of out-of-the-box ways for players to engage with room keys to unlock richer, personalized and more collaborative experiences for individual players and parties alike. Perhaps these keys unlock additional story-based content in rooms, perhaps they can unlock background/making-of content, or perhaps they can be shared with other friends and players in the rooms to create a more socially engaging experience. The only limit is your imagination! Oh wait, did we already say that?

Inventions

How about inventions? Inventions are community-made items that can be anything from furniture or skins for your dorm, to working PCs with playable games! While the invention market is not as robust as that of keys, it has also been steadily growing over the past year. Today, tens of millions are being spent on inventions each month and more and more creators are publishing inventions daily. In fact, we’ve seen some pretty dramatic growth in the quantity and quality of inventions submitted to the store over the past quarter and we can’t wait to see what our creators continue to dream up with Circuits V2.

With that said, here is the market for inventions by tokens spent between April 5th and July 5th 2021:

Just like last quarter, Dorm Skins take a commanding share of all tokens spent on inventions. In fact, the numbers have really not changed at all since the beginning of 2021. The dorm is essentially the player’s virtual home in Rec Room and there is a clear appetite for interior design in that space. During this quarter we saw nearly 40 million tokens spent on dorm skins alone!

Featured Creator - Peanut!

Speaking of dorm skins, this quarter we’d like to feature the work of the wonderful creator ‘Peanut’.

Peanut is very active in the community, creating not just dorm skins but furniture items, outfits, plushies and more. In the last quarter alone, Peanut made over 3 MILLION tokens on just three very popular dorm skins: the Elite Gaming Dorm, the Modern Loft and the Cozy Log 2 Story skins.

But don’t just take it from us, here’s some great tips of the trade direct from Peanut herself:

‘My tips for premium inventions would be to aim for whatever invention creates the most sales. For example, weapon skins and dorm rooms. Then I would recommend looking for references, a place to start before you make something of your own invention. Try to stay original especially from the already created items in the store so your inventions catch the eye of other players and bring something new to the table. Once you've created your invention, pricing is very important when it comes to making a decent profit from your work. Higher prices result in higher profits and usually don't dwindle your sales. Pricings between 200-600 tokens are generally good prices depending on your invention. If your invention is high quality players will purchase it despite high prices.

Once you've set a price, promotion is the next step to making a profit. Either submitting a form in the Ink Inc Recroom discord for a featured invention, or a form for the invention tower themes can help promote your work and significantly increase your sales. Within a week you should begin to see your profits pour in and these tokens could translate into over $400 a month if you use the creator compensation program which translates 1 million tokens into $400 without promotional events. You can cash out well over 1 million tokens a month too with Recroom's creator compensation program. Keep in mind these are benefits exclusively for recroom plus members, but the $8 investment for recroom plus is well worth your potential profits.

Thanks for those tips Peanut! And thanks for all the wonderful and varied items you bring to Rec Room. While there is something to be said for focusing on a particular style or type of content, Peanut shows that branching out and making high quality items for a broad audience can be a valid path toward making a living building in Rec Room.

Speaking of that, you might be wondering what types of dorm skins are most successful in Rec Room. Below is a breakdown of the general types of skins we see in the top 20 skins sold. Together, these 20 dorm skins alone accounted for over 20 million in tokens!

Interestingly, we see about a 60/40 split between those tech/gaming focused dorms (gaming and sci-fi skins) and more interior design oriented dorms (modern/rustic styling). Consider making (or purchasing) your own gamer paradise or modern loft retreat!

Top Price Points For Keys

Turning our attention back to keys, we’d like to once again display the top price points across all our keys so you can better understand what prices are successful in the marketplace. Below is a look at the most profitable price points for keys this last quarter:

Again, the top price point is 500 tokens, however, notice that nearly 20 million tokens came in from keys priced at 10,000 tokens! These keys included the hacker ninja and bl sword keys from the popular QuestOfNinja room.

It may be tempting to price at the 10-20 token price points and players will certainly buy your wares as evidenced by the chart below (the raw number of transactions by price)

But...if you are a creator looking to cash out consider pricing your keys in the 100-1,000 range. There were less than 1% of total sales events for the 10,000 price point as the 10-20 tokens, yet it was more than TWICE as profitable in terms of tokens spent.

If you are looking to cash out and the quality is there, our players are certainly ready to support you at those higher price points!

Room Currencies

Finally, we’d like to introduce a new feature that’s currently in beta and will be rolling out more widely over the next couple months called Room Currencies.

You know how you can only get that SciFi Bucket Skin by playing Laser Tag and earning Tickets? Well, Room Currencies are a new feature that allows Creators to make their own in-game currencies—similar to Laser Tag Tickets. Creators can give players currency for completing games or challenges and can lock items with keys that can then be purchased with that currency. Separately, Creators can also allow players to spend Rec Room tokens on their currency.

It’s an entirely new way to motivate players to play in your rooms and we can’t wait to see how you all use them!

Conclusion

Well, there you have it! We hope that if you are a creator or a player interested in contributing to Rec Room, this has been a helpful read.

In addition to the stats here, did you know that you can now see some key stats of your own on RecNet? Simply log in and you’ll be able to see things like how many visits, subscriptions and shares are coming from each of your rooms as well as how many tokens you’ve earned through your creations!

Alternately, if you aren’t yet creating in Rec Room and you are interested in learning how, check out the litany of classes we offer over at the Creative Club.

Finally, if you want to submit an invention to be featured feel free to join the Ink Inc Discord or visit the Ink Inc Campus in-game!

Thanks and we’ll see you next quarter!