Is ROBLOX the future standard for the metaverse?

What is ROBLOX?

A gaming platform enjoyed by approximately 400 million users worldwide. It is said that 20 to 30 million games are distributed, and these games are developed using a proprietary engine provided by ROBLOX. Anyone can easily create and publish their own games, and it has been praised as a gaming version of YouTube.

The first and foremost requirement for attracting people to the metaverse is content.

We hear people saying that the metaverse is obsolete. Microsoft and Meta have been closing metaverse development studios one after another since around 2023, and the price of land on the sandbox has not stopped falling. Looking at it this way, it certainly seems to have been just a passing fad.

When we think back to more than 20 years ago, when news broke that Second Life, a concept of enjoying a second life in a 3D space, was buying and selling real estate in the online space with real money, we predicted the arrival of a future like the novel Neuromancer.

However, in reality, the specifications at the time were very limited, and Second Life was quietly forgotten without being able to show its potential (as an aside, Second Life is still in service today and is increasing its sales). The reason for the failure of the early Second Life can be summed up in one word: there was no content.

Second Life's concept was that users would create content, but there were not many users who could create content. In the end, we couldn't enjoy it even if we were only provided with a vast web space. In fact, many of the metaverses that have been talked about in the past few years have followed the same path as Second Life.

As machine specifications have improved, the metaverse has become much more realistic than Second Life and can attract large numbers of people, but just taking a walk there is not interesting, and if you just want to buy real products, it is no different from other EC sites. If you just want to talk online, Zoom is enough.

In the end, few people would disagree with the common answer that games are the content that allows you to experience something unique to virtual space. Fortnite, a free competitive TPS, has more than 5 million MAUs and boasts monthly sales of 30 billion yen.

Although the main game mode is shooting guns against each other, a mode called "Creative" in which you can create your own original virtual world is also popular, and a music concert by a world-famous artist in this mode attracted more than 10 million people.

Fortnite has also become established as an e-Sport, with tournaments broadcast and gameplay shown on terrestrial variety shows, making it well-known even among non-gamers. Now, as for ROBLOX, a gaming x metaverse community with an even larger user base and huge amounts of capital in play than Fortnite, it is still not well-known among non-gamers.

ROBLOX is a gaming platform and a game development tool. It comes with presets that allow you to develop games even if you don't know anything about programming. In fact, I was able to create a program for a car to run in a 3D space in about an hour after I started using it.

Games developed with ROBLOX can be distributed within ROBLOX, and users can play them freely and for free. In addition, it is possible to develop skins and items for avatars that are the avatars of users within ROBLOX. Some items can also be bought and sold using the currency "Robux" used within ROBLOX.

Features of ROBLOX

1. Even beginners in programming can create games and metaverses
2. You can sell the games and skins you create
3. You can convert the in-game currency you have earned into cash
4. You can use it to interact with others as a metaverse

The service started in 2006. However, ROBLOX grew rapidly around 2020. The trigger was the spread of the new coronavirus.

Elementary school students, whose classes were held online as a measure against infection, gathered on ROBLOX, which is free to play, and started making friends. Eventually, they became dissatisfied with games made by others, and started making their own games and inviting their friends to their game space.

Thus, without the adults' knowledge, ROBLOX has gone beyond the framework of a simple platform and started to function as a metaverse where children gather and exchange information based on content.

The greatest attraction of ROBLOX is that the main users are overwhelmingly young. ROBLOX currently has 400 million active users worldwide, more than half of whom are under the age of 13.

Children adapt quickly to their environment. They accept interactions through ROBLOX as natural, and live in the metaverse more naturally than we, the adult generation. It is highly likely that children who grow up on ROBLOX will create common sense in the coming metaverse era.

In the past two to three years, an increasing number of companies have noticed the popularity of ROBLOX and started advertising and opening stores on ROBLOX. The advertising methods are very different from previous developments in the metaverse. ROBLOX's main focus is on content that entertains its young users.

One movie did not show a trailer on ROBLOX, but instead developed skins that allowed users to become movie characters and distributed them for free. It has been shown that children who have become interested in movies through skins have purchased movie tickets directly from ROBLOX.

Some major game makers have even developed new games for ROBLOX to promote the animated versions of popular games. Naturally, developing such content requires planning and budgets. For this reason, companies that specialize in developing content within ROBLOX have been established.

According to a survey by Qustodio, a parental control service provider, elementary school children around the world currently spend three hours a day playing ROBLOX. They don't always play games, but rather spend time chatting with friends and coming up with ideas for the next game they will develop.

Isn't this exactly what the metaverse we envisioned would be like? The metaverse culture has firmly taken root and grown its trunk in the earth that adults were completely unaware of.

ROBLOX News

Approximately 79.5 million daily active users

ROBLOX has announced that it has 79.5 million daily active users (DAU). This means that 2.385 billion users access the app monthly, which means that it has nearly 20 times the ability to attract customers than the world's most popular online games and popular metaverses.

Overwhelming popularity and recognition, especially among the alpha generation of Gen Z

ROBLOX is not well known among adults, but for children around the world, it is now recognized as a service that surpasses YouTube and TikTok. If you look closely at convenience stores selling POSA cards such as Amazon, you will see that ROBLOX payment cards are actually being sold and purchased by children.

Annual sales of $800 million! One of the world's most successful metaverses

ROBLOX has continued to grow steadily since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Revenues for the second quarter of 2024 are $893.5 million (approximately 137 billion yen). As most of the main users are elementary school students, the monthly sales amount per person is not that much at about 1,800 yen. However, the number is so high because of the large number of users.

Many famous brands participate! Examples of direct link to real-world sales

In ROBLOX, famous brands have developed many worlds based on their own brand stories. Not only are they able to link this to real-world sales, but they also have a sales system in place for avatar dress-up items, so they are also focusing on developing and selling original content within the metaverse.

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