Venture capitalist and metaverse expert Matthew Ball has a new must-read (and Tolstoy-length) essay on Apple's relationship to the metaverse's future (spoiler: It can totally control it), but this particular passage punched my eyeball:
Roblox’s platform is full of happy users and talented creators. But few of these creators are making money. Although Roblox has $2 billion in revenues, three billion monthly hours of playtime and more than 160 million users, only 29 developers (i.e. companies) netted over $1 million in 2019 and three crossed $10 million. This is bad; more developer revenue means more developer investment and better products. But revenue through Roblox is limited by the company’s paltry payment rates of just 24.5% of every dollar spent on their games, assets, or items. While this makes Apple’s rates 70-85% payout rates seem generous, the reverse is true.
That's much less a split for creators than I inferred from Roblox's IPO filing last year. The fact that Roblox keeps growing suggests most user creators are OK with this revenue split -- for instance, teens just starting out and overjoyed to rake a few hundred dollars, and creators more interested in attracting large groups of visitors (such as with this historical sim in Roblox, featured above). Then again, contrast that company/creator split with Second Life:
Second Life users are earning $60 million from Second Life content, while Linden Lab is earning about $65-70 million from Second Life content. In other words: Second Life users are making nearly as much revenue from Second Life as Second Life's actual corporate owner.
Maybe it's just me, but that's amazing and rare near-equity for an Internet-based content creation platform. By contrast, for example, YouTube earned an estimated $9 billion in revenue in 2015, but only paid out $5 billion to content creators/rights-holders.
We could even go further and estimate that Second Life users are probably making more money than Linden Lab's actual staff:
After all, about 200 Linden Lab staff people are specifically working on Second Life, and they earn an average of $100,000 a year. (Executives earning low six figures, low level support staff making maybe $50-75K.) On that view, they take $20 million total from Second Life, while Second Life users take $40 million more.
Then yet again, this also suggests that the virtual world with the fairest revenue split is not necessarily the largest or most successful one.
I just read the article. Worth the time to read it. Apple is getting scary again. Not gonna lie.
Posted by: Joey1058 | Wednesday, February 03, 2021 at 02:34 PM
First off, had not really seen that build - impressive:) Although the lego dudes in it were a bit jarring even to me but 'orses for courses.
I tried to find out more on the 'creator' side of Roblox but gave up as life is too short to wade through all that so went to wiki (yeah I know) and if the article there is in any way accurate it seems a metric tonne of restrictions on who can actually make content. Compare to SL where anyone, off the bat, can make and flog stuff even in this age of mesh. ( Before anyone starts whinging that it is no longer possible to do it inworld, you ain't trying hard enough =^^= The only external needed is textures and thats not changed in the years I've been in) Until you get to the actual cashing out side, its open and basically restriction free (within TOS natch)
Plus of course there is the whole, erm, service industry within the SL econosphere.
Posted by: sirhc desantis | Friday, February 05, 2021 at 05:17 AM