New World Notes

Rise of Roblox: User-Generated Metaverse Platform Now More Valuable Than Traditional Game Companies Like EA & Take 2

Above: Image from ROBLOX's stock filing, data from the first 9 months of 2020

As expected, Roblox's IPO today was massive:

What makes Roblox different from other online game platforms is that it lets users create their own games on the platform. Developers receive 30% of the proceeds generated from a game, such as the sale of virtual outfits and avatars... As trading began Roblox stock shot up 63%, trading near 73.50, during afternoon action on the stock market today. That accelerated its market value to $47 billion.

Explicitly designed to be a metaverse, Roblox's valuation so far proves the market validity of user-generated content where user-made games (often made by teens still living at home!) are often more popular than the most popular professional games on Steam. Now with this IPO, you can see the dominance of Roblox and its grassroots content as compared to some of the very top traditional game companies. For instance:

Watch: New Gameplay Tests of Seed MMO Gives Us Glimpses of Building, Fighting, Exploring -- And Unexpected Social Emergence

Here's a new look at the latest gameplay test of Seed, the ambitious planet colonization MMO from Klang Games, featuring resource-gathering, world exploration, combat, and more. I'm somewhat biased but so far I'm admiring the streamlined elegance of the user interface and the art. Klang's Sabrina Seltenreich tells me the team is already seeing some interesting, unplanned player emergence, even in these early play trials: 

"We had put several people into the same world, and asked them all to work towards an individual goal of processing resources and building certain machines for their own progression," she tells me. "Everybody had their own little base and a container, which other players couldn't access or interact with. Still, after a short amount of time, they figured out that they could put items into the Kernel and other people could take them -- so they started to share resources, which wasn't something we had planned for or expected." (That was during a previous test, not the one featured in this new video.)

 Seed's Discord server is also becoming an integral part of players' experience of Seed: 

Core Launches Game Dev Competition With $120,000 in Prizes

Speaking of creating virtual worlds with in-game modeling/scripting tools, behold: The Core Invitational Game Jam, awarding $120,000 in prizes to games created on the platform. (Think Unreal meets ROBLOX.) Details:

Manticore Games, creators of the Core platform for making and playing games, is calling on all indie game devs, creators and modders to apply now for one of only 50 slots in the first-ever Core Invitational, an exclusive game dev competition with $100,000 USD in prizes...

Categories and prizes include:

Despite Amazing Creativity, Why Does PS4's Dreams Have So Few Users?

Dreams, the Playstation 4 exclusive from Media Molecule, is a virtual world creation platform with what look to be some of the most impressive and user-friendly creation tools on the market, incredible user-generated content like this, and has at least nearly 1.4 million user accounts. (According to this Media Molecule account, which new users auto-follow when they create an account on the platform.)

What Dreams doesn't yet have, vexingly, is many active users.  As I write this, there's less than 1,500 concurrent users in-game. (By contrast, there's currently about 15,000 and 2,000 concurrent users in VRChat and RecRoom, respectively, on Steam alone.)

Why? To some extent, the very fact that VRChat and RecRoom have become so popular is likely sucking the air out of other user-generated virtual world platforms like Dreams -- especially when those worlds are free-to-play and Dreams costs $20. This recent-ish feature from Kotaku may have some other hints:

IMVU's Plan to Make VCOIN the Most Used Blockchain-Based Currency in Virtual Worlds -- and the Real One

IMVU just announced the availability of VCOIN, an Ethereum-based digital currency for use in its virtual world with 7 million active users  -- and, by design, for buying and selling goods and services in the real world, too. From the announcement:

Available now for the IMVU desktop, mobile web, and web platforms, VCOIN is seamlessly integrated into the IMVU experience, enabling secure, global peer-to-peer transactions at the click of a button. IMVU’s high-velocity economy currently sees more than 27 million transactions and 13 billion Credits changing hands each month. With the addition of VCOIN, users can now easily and instantly pay for goods and services on the platform -- no complicated crypto wallets, or even bank accounts required -- and then convert their earned VCOIN into cash at an established rate.

This is a major move for at least a couple reasons: While blockchain-based currencies have attracted much hype and speculation, they are not actually used very much to, you know, buy goods and services. (As I never tire of noting, more people use Linden Dollars in Second Life than use Bitcoin every day.) At the same time, while there are other virtual worlds with a cash-out option for virtual currency, they also have small user bases -- and aren't authorized for use in the real world. While Linden Dollars outstrip Bitcoin in usage, for instance, they still only count some 400,000 daily users, and aren't intended for use as a RL currency.

Enter VCOIN, which hits the market with 7 million built-in customers. John Burris, IMVU's Chief Strategy Officer, tells me the company fully intends to encourage VCOIN's use outside IMVU -- and even approached the SEC with that in mind:

Can You Guess Which Screenshots Are From GTA Online or... Second Life?

Quick: At a glance, which of the screenshots above was taken in Grand Theft Auto Online, the massively popular open world MMO launched in 2013, and which was shot in Second Life, the niche sandbox construction MMO launched in 2003? (Click to embiggen!)

Not sure? OK, try this one:  

This should be easier because Grand Theft Auto Online is all about racing and heisting in vehicles on land, air, and sea -- right? So which is from GTA, and which from SL?

Answers below, and a conversation with the online game explorer who shot them:

Rec Room Passes 10,000 in Peak Daily Concurrency Across All Platforms, Leapfrogs Fortnite on Xbox's Free Games Leaderboard,

Based on Steam user stats, I've assumed Rec Room trailed far behind VRChat. but that's reportedly wrong.  While Rec Room is currently peaking at 1,428 concurrent users on Steam, the world's design lead, Shawn Whiting, tells me via Twitter that Valve's platform is just a small piece of Rec Room's usage pie:  "Steam is our smallest platform by far. iOS, Xbox, PlayStation, and Oculus all higher," as he puts it. When I note this would suggest Rec Room now has over 10,000 total peak daily concurrent users across all platforms, he confirms that that is indeed the case.

This came out after Rec Room hit another milestone: In the Free Games category on Xbox, it's now ranking over Fortnite itself:

Play Season: Magic Realist Adventure Game Where You Explore & Document Mysterious Cultures Before They Fade Away

With visuals evoking a Miyazaki movie you forgot to watch and a story reminiscent of a Haruki Murakami story you forgot to read, the coming-soon indie game Season (for PS5 and PC on Steam) looks utterly gorgeous, an immersive journey that's both nostalgic and otherworldly:

Close your eyes, take a deep breath and let yourself be carried away by the journey of Season, a third-person atmospheric adventure bicycle road trip game. The premise of Season is that you play a traveler recording the last moments of different cultures before they’re washed away. Through the eyes of a young woman leaving a secluded community, you explore the wider world for the first time. Story Document, photograph, draw, and record life. Through a solitary bicycle journey, form your own memories, your own vision of the world around you. Your goal? Protect these treasures from being forgotten. Your quest will lead you to discover a new world; unknown, yet familiar. You will be immersed in different societies that will make you discover the mysteries of the world of Season; a surreal version of the mid-twentieth century, where thousands of years have passed without any progress. Find out what caused the last collapse and what might cause the next one...

It's very much a descendant of the influential masterpiece game Journey. Also the latest entry in a new genre of MMO/adventure game/RPG where the goal is not dominance through combat, but transcendence through art and social engagement. For instance:

Dual Universe Already Has At Least One Embedded Reporter on YouTube

"This month has been great... if you're a shady individual of questionable morality." So begins the latest report from Charlie Traveler, reporter for Dual Universe Stellar Transmissions from the Dark Star Imperium clans... which is also the latest sign that a rich user community and culture is emerging in Dual Universe, the highly-ambitious, single-shard metaverse MMO we write about often here: That's right, since its launch last September, Dual Universe already has at least one embedded journalist. The news stories themselves are full of corporate vs. corporate intrigue reminiscent of Eve Online but on a grander scale.  Of course I personally think an embedded reporter is the best sign of a virtual world's future, but then I'm somewhat biased.

"We were inspired off of a need to catalogue the history of the game," the Dark Star team leader tells me via YouTube, explaining the channel's inspiration and news-gathering approach. "[I]f we did not do this then the interactions and happenings in the community would fade into obscurity, with many people never being able to ever know things had happened. We gather things through a mix of people being able to self report and tip us off on things anonymously, as well as having reporters who crawl and aggregate information throughout the community."

Also interesting to me (and this might be a sign of slow user growth): Mr. Traveler reports the top ten player organizations by user numbers, and they're all in the low four to mid three figures. Which suggests Dual Universe's active userbase is probably in the low mid figures? 

More Dual Universe stories below:

Core Launches Attack on Roblox's 25/75 Revenue Split for Creators

Image via Manticore's blog, comparing Core's creator-company revenue split to Roblox's split

CEO of Manticore Frederic Descamps just announced a new monetization structure for people who develop games on Core, its new Unreal-based, Epic-funded user-generated game development platform, and it reads very much like a direct attack on Roblox. Because while Roblox has shown seriously impressive company revenue and user numbers, creators who publish games on Roblox only take 25% of the games' revenue. (Even though the top Roblox games are played more often than the top games on Steam.) Now the gauntlet has been thrown:

Core isn’t the first UGC games platform — though it is the first full-service one with high-end graphics and multiplayer gameplay — but creators on our leading competitors generally get only a small piece of the pie. Roblox, for instance, has built an extremely impressive ecosystem for kids, with millions of players and 7 million people making and selling content, but it only pays those creators at most 24.5% of the revenue they generate (which includes a 30% marketplace fee upfront). Other gaming UGC and modding platforms pay even less or nothing at all; many were designed without even considering creator monetization.

This needs to change. We think creators should be paid fairly, and that’s why we’re so excited about what the Perks monetization system means for them. Starting today, in addition to keeping half of the revenue they generate, Core creators will also be able to maximize their earnings by integrating whatever economic system they desire in their games.

It will be interesting to see if top Roblox creators begin moving over to Core, or if Roblox quickly attempts to match/beat this revenue split (at least for the top creators on its platform).

Then again, why should indie developers publish their games on Core for a 50% cut when they could instead publish it on Steam and get a 70% cut, or on the App Store and get a 85% cut (on the first $1 million net)? I put that question to Descamps, who answers this way: