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Roblox Vice President of Developer Relations Matt Curtis believes the future of gaming is User Generated Content (UGC), and he delved into the gaming world to show why in a talk at our GamesBeat event Summit 2020 this week.
In fact, Curtis said in his speech that this UGC explosion could lead us to the Metaverse, the universe of interconnected virtual worlds, such as in novels like Snow Crash and books and movies like Ready Player One. According to reports, the same goal as Epic Games, maker of Fortnite, is also chasing, just like many other companies that spoke at our event.
It is not an outrageous claim to believe that UGC can grow that big, as Roblox has over 115 million monthly active players enjoying more than 2 billion hours of UGC play per month. Roblox was able to raise $ 150 million in February thanks to its user base in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
“We believe that the Metaverse will become the primary vehicle for engagement,” Curtis said.
UGC has taken video (as evidenced by YouTube’s popularity) by surprise, as well as music. But games lag behind the trend, Curtis said. Roblox is an exception, as it has millions of people creating entertainment for others to enjoy. Successful experiences are unique, social, and intricate.
Above: Roblox wants players to build the Metaverse.
Image Credit: Roblox
Roblox is essentially a social network. But it also has unique content in the form of user-created products that are for sale in a market. Creators can take that and create things that other users can play. Roblox’s focus is to make it easier to create things, and the measure of its success is its hours of engagement, which really reached critical mass around 2016. It’s a living and evolving ecosystem, Curtis said.
Roblox is now over 40% female. 68% are abroad. 51% participate on the desktop, 44% on the PC and 5% on the consoles. 59% of the players are under 13 years old. That is probably one of the reasons why it is doing so well during the pandemic, since children do not go to school and can play more at home. Still, teens and adults are growing dramatically now, Curtis said.
“What is really cool is that we are starting to see creators from different geographies achieving global success,” he said. “It is not just in their home countries.”
16 games have over a billion plays. This means that these games are among the largest in the world. The best games on Roblox have more than 10 million monthly active users. There are 5,000 games with over a million plays.
The Roblox UGC title Adopt me! it snapped 1.6 million concurrent players in April, and has had 5.7 billion plays since its launch in 2017. The developers, many of them children and teens, earned more than $ 110 million in cash in 2019. There are more than 2 million developers on Roblox, and 35,000 of them make money. There are 315,000 monthly active creators who update and publish new worlds.
“We get new creators every day,” said Curtis.
Where does this lead? Curtis believes it is heading toward the Metaverse, first described by author Neal Stephenson in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. To facilitate this, Roblox believes there are eight requirements. First, it has to be a persistent world, or a place where you can visit it over and over again and it is the same world. You need a sense of identity. There has to be an underlying social fabric. It has to be vast and diverse. Experiences have to be immersive, and they have to be frictionless. There must be an integrated economy, and places must function according to rules and order.
To get there, Roblox is working on platform technology, development tools, and developer economics. Platform technology includes mega servers, which allow you to support 200 players at the click of a button in Roblox. It is free and you can create synchronous playback in real time from the first moment. This back-end infrastructure is available to creators on Roblox at no charge, and anyone can take advantage of it immediately.
Above: Roblox experiences are already played billions of times.
Image Credit: Roblox
Curtis said that immersive 3D experiences must be dynamic, where worlds, while persistent, can change. These should run on any platform, like consoles or PC or mobile, he said. Everything you create in these jobs should work perfectly with those platforms. Solving this problem is difficult, but it is key, Curtis said.
Identity is a fundamental element of the Metaverse as well. You should be able to create a hi-fi avatar without much difficulty. That avatar should be able to express real emotions, which is a requirement to be truly immersed in a world. Development tools have to allow players to build worlds quickly and easily. Large teams should be able to work together on things, even if they are in different locations.
With collaborative editing, script creators can encode in real time without interrupting each other. That’s one step in virtual collaboration, and it’s one of the things Roblox is working on. Roblox is also creating a fully automated translation so that a game created in one region can be enjoyed worldwide.
And the developer economy part is making headway with improvements in the UGC market. Creators can share their products with others and allow creators who buy them to move on without reinventing the wheel. Roblox recently revealed earnings based on commitment, or the ability to earn money based on how much your creations are used.
“We provide revenue streams based on commitment,” Curtis said. “New developers can learn what works best” by watching what is used the most.
Brands are already starting to invest in supporting creators on Roblox. As the platform evolves and the UGC matures, Metaverse will come and the brands will be there, Curtis said.
