Another quarter has concluded and that means we have some commerce to look back on! Hello and welcome back to our third community commerce report of the year. As before, 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 report will include some detail on the types of UGC creations that are selling well, the top grossing price points by category, as well as highlight a particular creator doing cool things in the space! We’ll also provide news about new and upcoming features we are adding to Rec Room in an effort to get you more $$$ while building the things you love. This time ‘round we will be focusing on a very exciting new feature we shipped during the quarter: room currencies!
But we’ll get to that...first let’s take a look at keys and inventions.
Room Keys
As you probably know, room keys are one-time purchases that unlock something in the room forever. 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.
In the last two quarters, we spent a good deal of time going through the most popular types of keys and well...things haven’t changed much at all this quarter. We still see Powers, Weapons and Role Modifiers taking the lion’s share of tokens.. (Feel free to look back at our Q1 and Q2 reports for additional information on the key market)
This quarter, we simply want to highlight the top grossing price points and specific keys that are bringing in lots of tokens for creators. Just like last time, we find that while low priced keys (10-50 tokens) move lots of units, they don’t even rank on the top grossing price points.
Creators that are earning enough tokens to cash out are consistently pricing their keys above 300 tokens, monitoring the market to ensure they are competitive in the space, and above all, ensuring that the keys they offer are well worth the associated price points by unlocking richer, more varied and more FUN social/gaming experiences.
With that said, here are the top grossing key price points and specific keys in the last quarter:
We find here that many of the top keys follow the trends of general popular item types in the space. Many of the keys here are powers that either unlock additional gameplay experiences, costumes/skins in a game (such as the prisoner uniform in Prison Life or Gun Packs in PVP maps) or role modifiers that allow you to fly in the room.
These charts don’t tell the whole story, however. While it’s helpful to understand the top grossing and selling keys, we need to understand how the sales per price point compare against the number of individual keys offered at that price point. Said another way, we need to understand the average gross token sales per key at every price point. This will help creators answer: ‘How many keys are priced at X tokens and how do their sales compare to other price points?’
With that context set let’s dive in.
To begin, it’ll be helpful to answer just how many keys are on offer at each price point. While we won’t provide an exhaustive list, take a look below at the top 10 in the last quarter:
As you can see the keys priced at 10, 100, and 50 see over 2x the number of units in the market compared to the next most represented price point.
Now let’s look at the top average gross token revenue per price point. A note here: given that creators can price in increments of 1 token, there are a vast number of potential price points in the keys market. Thus, for legibility we will be providing ranges of price points in the chart below:
It’s helpful to note here the comparison between the two charts. Even though the 10, 50 and 100 tokens are the most represented in the market, they don’t bring in very much revenue per unit. Really this chart tells a similar story to the first one: To bring in meaningful tokens in service of cashing out real $, pricing higher is ‘key’ (get it...we are talking about keys?).
But of course pricing is just one piece of the puzzle. Pricing higher will help enable you to cash out but it’s also important to ensure that you have an overall quality and varied experience in your rooms that will drive both new and repeat traffic and purchases.
Inventions
How about inventions? As we’ve mentioned previously, Inventions are community-made items that can be anything from furniture or skins for your dorm to (new this quarter) full-body costumes! While there are still more tokens going toward keys, the market for inventions is rapidly growing and we are confident the growth will only continue as we add new features and invention types.
Let’s start by again looking at the highest grossing price points and inventions:
Interestingly, here we find that while the top grossing price point is 100 tokens (our current invention minimum), virtually every single top grossing invention is a Dorm Skin priced around 450 tokens. Dorm skins continue to be by far our biggest category of invention and we can’t wait to unveil some new features in the near future that will take them to the next level!
Next, let’s again take a look at the number of inventions in the market at each price point and the gross average revenue for each price point.
First, here is a look at the top price points by number of inventions on offer:
Interestingly, here we see that the 100 token price point has approximately 571% more inventions in the market compared to 200, the second most represented price point.
This has strong implications for the first chart we showed. If you recall earlier on we saw that the 100 price point was the highest grossing price point in the market by a considerable margin. While that remains true, given there are so many more items at that price point we should again look at average gross sales per individual unit on the market to answer ‘how many tokens on average do inventions priced at X bring in?’
Well let’s take a look:
Well...pricing at 100 tokens doesn’t seem so attractive after all. This chart shows that for items priced at 100 tokens on average only 2,310 tokens are earned per item. On the other hand we see a big jump as low as 250 tokens and a general sweet spot right around 500 tokens (typically what we see successful Dorm Skins priced at).
Full Body Costumes
Before moving on from inventions, we’d like to draw a bit of special attention to a new invention type that debuted this quarter: the Full-Body Skeleton costume. Full-body costumes are a new way for avatar expression in community rooms. They can range from the hilarious (a fully articulated spider performing parkour) to the straight up cool (the aforementioned full body skeleton) and make socializing, cooperating and competing in Rec Room that much richer.
(full body costume by Ranenbauer)
But how to price them?
We thought it’d be helpful here to show the top selling inventions by units sold as a point of comparison:
You’ll notice the most popular inventions chart looks quite different from the top grossing inventions. Looking at popularity, we find more variety in item types such as swords and even more full-body costumes. However, on the gross sales side (aside from one full-body costume) we find exclusively dorm skins.
This is because of the price points for each of these items. While full body costumes and non-dorm inventions tend to sell well, they are by and large, priced at the minimum 100 tokens. The only exception here is the full body skeleton costume which is priced at 200. Interestingly, this is the only costume that appears on both the top grossing and best selling list...something to consider when pricing your full-body invention (or any invention for that matter!)
Continuing on the note of price, we’ve heard from our creators that pricing inventions can be difficult and we are currently looking for ways to make this easier. One tip that we’ll offer is to compare your invention with the prices and tiers of RRO items. Would you consider your inventions a 3-star, 4-star, or maybe a 5-star? Once you have an idea there, look at the various price points for items in that tier and price accordingly. Also, if you want to raise your price but are afraid it may not be worth it, try adding more value (providing a variety of color/textures or adding animations) until you feel it’s worth the token investment.
Room Currencies
Next, we want to highlight an awesome new feature that our economy team shipped last quarter 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.
While this is a new feature, we have seen some really interesting use cases for currencies. Let’s take a look at the room ColorBlockRR made by Reelix_. In this room, the description reads: Try and be the last one standing! One color plate will be chosen, you must get to that plate before all the others fall!
In this room, you earn a room currency called ‘coins’ for completing games and even more for winning them. With those currencies you can purchase full-body costumes, weapon skins and more! Take a look at a couple screenshots below to see how this looks in practice:
Currently, creators don’t have the ability to incentivize repeat plays, game wins etc. with tokens, but this room uses room currency to motivate people to keep playing and to keep winning. Heck, I’ve personally played through the game a number of times trying to get the burger suit but keep falling to my death.
Anyway, this is just one great example of currencies. There are other great rooms out there just waiting to be discovered or created. Maybe YOU will create the next amazing experience using currencies!
Featured Creator - Ranenbauer!
Speaking of room currencies, this quarter we’d like to feature the work of the wonderful creator Ranenbauer! Ranenbauer has not only made consistently cool work in Rec Room, he is the creator of the wonderful Ink Incubator room: OffThePier. Check the room out for another novel use of currencies and read below to hear his thoughts on making content in Rec Room:
‘When it comes to creating in Rec Room, I tend to put enjoyability and humor before visual details. While having super detailed builds is impressive in its own right, that can take up a lot of ink. I’d rather use the ink for more gameplay and features. I really enjoy building characters in Rec Room, and keeping them simple not only saves ink, but it feeds into an iconic cartoon-ish style.
I believe the biggest reason my content performs well in-game is because I built up my following FIRST. A lot of people will try to earn tokens right away with only a few weeks or months of even being a rec room player, let alone having experience with the maker pen. Prior to the launch of player compensation, I had been building for almost 3 years, slowly gaining a following of about 30k subscribers at the time, and my content had ZERO paid content. I didn’t become big overnight. It takes time and dedication to improve. Now that I can earn tokens and money from my content, I prefer to keep the prices low, but not dirt-cheap. Payment should be an option, not a mandate, for a good experience. Having long-term customer loyalty is more important to me than maximizing short-term profits.
Ultimately, my advice to players looking to become successful in Rec Room building would be, Never give up, and don’t rush things. It might be a year or more before you make it big, but it’ll never happen if you just stop trying. If you’re feeling burned out, or can’t think of anything to make, it’s okay to take a short break, but make sure to always come back!’
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Thanks for those tips Ranenbauer! And thanks for all the wonderful and varied items, rooms and characters you bring to Rec Room. We look forward to what you build next!
Conclusion
Well, there you have it! We hope that if you are a creator or a player interested in building in Rec Room, this has been helpful and motivating. If you’d like us to go deeper on any of the topics in the report, comment below and we’ll take that into consideration for future quarters.
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'd like to participate in programs that promote your work (such as the aforementioned Ink Incubator), stay up-to-date on econ features, or learn more about Community Commerce you can join the Ink Inc Discord or visit the Ink Inc Campus in-game!
Thanks and we’ll see you next quarter!
