In 2021, after 15 years of operation, Roblox was finally listed on the New York Stock Exchange and became the first stock in the Metaverse. It also made the concept of the Metaverse popular last year and kicked off the first year of the Metaverse. So what kind of product is Roblox and what characteristics does it represent in the metaverse? Let us analyze Roblox together.
1. Product Overview
Roblox is asandbox game development platform + Steam-like game store.There are already 40 million+ games on the platform. Among the global active users, 54% are primary school students under the age of 12, and 13% are between the ages of 13-16. It is built into a "game + education" model.
1. Number of users and duration
Roblox has approximately 78.75 million daily active users worldwide, mainly 72.67 million on mobile, 41.4 million on Android, and 31.27 million on iOS. Users cover a wide range of countries, including North America, South America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Of course, the largest market at present is still in the United States, with 2680W daily active users on both ends, and the average user time on Android is 105 minutes. (Data from data.ai)
Android daily activity:
Android duration:
iOS Nikkatsu:
iOS duration:
2. Creator ecology
Two key points for the success of the Roblox platform:Open economy and decentralization. After the company opened the platform and decentralized power to game developers, its business operations Data is growing explosively. Creators made about $100 million in 2019 (up from $70 million the year before), making money by selling virtual goods and other in-game upgrades. Roblox defines itself as a co-experience platform, a platform that can share experiences among billions of users. There are two types of content creation, one is to create game experience, the author is called a developer, and the other is to create virtual projects , the author is called the creator, and virtual items can be used to personalize the user's avatar. 24.5% of Roblox’s cost expenditures are given to creators in sharing and incentives, which shows that the platform attaches great importance to the creator ecosystem, which is also one of the important reasons for the prosperity of the platform’s content.
3. Three major elements of the platform
The virtual world of Roblox consists of three major elements:
- Roblox client, oriented to users’ 3D digital world;
- Roblox Studio toolset for developers to create, publish and run various games;
- Roblox cloud service provides users with the infrastructure for real-time response and personalized data analysis.
2. Analysis of the characteristics of the metaverse
When evaluating the metaverse of a product, the following indicators are usually used for evaluation and analysis: virtual identity, open and free creation, economic system, strong sociality, and immersive experience. The maturity of Roblox's metaverse is still very high, and it can get 4 points (out of 5 points) from all dimensions.
1. Virtual identity (4 points)
Design your own Avatar and choose different parts to combine. The design of the characters is very characteristic of Roblox. Although it is rough, it is rich and stylized.
- Characters: Design characters; you can buy them or create them yourself
- Clothing: There are two types: free and paid, including Tops, Outerwear, Bottoms, Classic, Accessories, Body, and Animation
2, Open and free creation (5 points)
Use Roblox studio to create works. Contents that can be created include: Experience (game experience), Places, Models, Decals, Badges, Passes, Audio, Animations, Meshes, User ads, Sponsored experiences, Shirts, T-shirts, Pants, Plugins .
3. Economic system (5 points)
It consists of four parts: creator marketplace, Developer Exchange Program, Premium Payouts, and Premium membership subscription.
3.1 Creator marketplace: There are two types: free and paid. You can choose styles under different categories, including Models, Decals, Audio, Video, Meshes, and Plugins.
3.2 Developer Exchange Program (also called DevEx)
Creators who earn 50,000 robux on the platform can exchange it for legal currency ($175). The specific standards are as follows:
How Creators Earn Robux:
3.3 Premium Payouts: Reward developers based on the degree to which Premium subscribers enter the developer’s experience
3.4 Premium membership subscription: Pay monthly to get corresponding robux and some membership services
You can also recharge directly:
4. Strong sociability (3 points)
Users can join different groups to communicate and make friends, such as fan clubs, help groups, hobbies, corporations, etc.
5. Immersive experience (3 points)
Because the game is a sandbox game, the characters and environment are slightly less realistic, and the immersive experience is average.
3. Summary
The future of the metaverse must belong to the creator economy, where each individual’s creativity is used to jointly build the metaverse world, and each creator can obtain the fruits of their labor in their own small universe, that is, what they build is what they get.