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We hear people saying that the metaverse is obsolete.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.