I owe finding this current Roblox job listingto the sharp eyes of Roblox_RTC, a Roblox-related news source -- the massive metaverse platform is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Web3 to complete tasks including "develop web3 solutions and integrate them with existing Roblox tech stack across Roblox", and "help decide the future of web3 in Roblox and the nature of our web3 solution". Specifically:
This is an opportunity for you to challenge your engineering talents by building something new, sharing expertise, adopting innovations contributed by other engineering teams and improving our bottom line. As a senior engineer you will help Roblox Marketplace to be web3 ready and support billions of items and transactions to happen both on the blockchain and Roblox.
Virtual items registered on the blockchain are more typically called by another name: Non-fungible tokens, i.e. NFTs. But I wouldn't assume Roblox is about to put out NFTs, because the job description strongly suggests "the future of web3 in Roblox" is still being decided.
Whatever the senior engineer does, it's a pretty mysterious move into web3 for Roblox:
Shelf under Could Be Coincidence, Could Be Something Else: Vice News has a fascinating in-depth look at Roblox's attempt to launch in China, including plans to accommodate the Chinese government's expectations around censoring content that suggests, for instance, that Taiwan is independent from China. Last December, however, Roblox abandoned China for mysterious reasons:
[I]n July 2021, Roblox launched LuoBuLeSi, the Chinese version of its platform. Other documents show some of the mechanisms it had in place for complying with Chinese regulations, including a game “whitelist” and moderation features for display names in the country.
Roblox’s time in China was exceptionally short lived. In December 2021, the company closed down LuoBuLeSi without going into detail about why. Soon after it shut down, the company said that it was working to relaunch after making “necessary investments” to its “data architecture” but did not provide any additional information about closing.
The Chinese market for online games is extremely large (as I saw first-hand a decade ago), so it's strange that Roblox would give up on it so quickly.
Remember Chipotle's ROBLOX giveaway last month, offering free real burritos for the first people to play Chipotle's virtual burrito builder game? This one:
Chipotle Burrito Builder on Roblox, a new simulation experience that will challenge players to roll burritos in the metaverse to earn Burrito Bucks, the brand's in-experience currency on Roblox1, starting on April 7, National Burrito Day. The first 100,000 Roblox players to successfully roll a burrito will earn enough Burrito Bucks to exchange them for an entrée code that can be used on the Chipotle app, Chipotle.com, or Chipotle.ca
While the announcement attracted much coverage, few to no reporters followed up about its actual ROI.
So I did! By contacting the folks at RoMonitor Stats, which tracks experience metrics on the metaverse platform for kids.
While I was skeptical at first, the results they sent me seem pretty impressive:
Checking in on Tunnler, the Portal-inspired indie game on ROBLOX I wrote about a couple weeks ago (to play click here), I was impressed to notice it's attracted nearly 1 million plays, attracting 30,000-60,000+ visits per day, with an average session length of over 11 minutes. (Which is quite impressive average, suggesting a large number of players complete much or even most of the entire game.) Very few indie games, even free ones, attract players in the 7 figure range, especially within a month of launch.
Since launching last Friday, it's already been played/visited nearly 350,000 times. Even more notable, it's also attracted many "Let's Play"-type gameplay videos which also have large viewer totals -- this one above is approaching 200,000 views. But this is actually still on the medium end in terms of ROBLOX, where the top user-made games are played more than the top big budget AAA games on Steam.
While Tunneler is an open tribute to Valve's Portal games, it does demonstrate how indie game developers working on ROBLOX can create a high quality game/demo, and start generating a fanbase they can build on. As creator Homemade Meal put it to me:
This really is a triumph. Playable tomorrow on ROBLOX -- follow the creator’s Twitter for updates -- “Tunneler” is a full-fledged, fully functional tribute to Valve’s classic game Portal, including the original’s groundbreaking physics and teleporting mechanic. (Watch above if you don’t believe me, or watch the VR version below.)
While it’s fair to say most people in the game industry tend to dismiss ROBLOX as an amateur platform, I suspect demos like Tunneler may change that bias. For one thing, I first saw it on Twitter being commented on by Chet Faliszek… who was a developer on the original Portal games.
“When people think of Roblox, they typically think of a game where a bunch of kids play with simple basic blocks,” as Tunneler’s creator puts it to me. “[But recently] more and more new and modern features from other game engines have been added onto the platform. Nowadays, the quality of the games on Roblox depend entirely on the developer.”
So the typical Roblox developer (i.e. a kid) could not make a game like Tunneler out of the box. It was created by ROBLOX user “Homemade Meal”, who in his day job, works part-time as an effects artist for a game studio.
“There's a lot of technical things beneath the surface that I had to do for Tunneler,” Mr. Meal explains, “like using tricks with physics to be able to pass through them while maintaining collisions with the rest of the environment.” (More on that below.)
As Mr. Meal already works in the game industry, he didn’t create this to make money from ROBLOX users:
“Tunneler will be 100% free upon release. I’ve always loved to see people enjoy my games and creations. People come together and create a community because they all like the same thing, and I’m very appreciative that I can be the reason such a community exists!”
But then again, Tunneler might also be a message for his game industry colleagues:
“Roblox has the potential to create amazing games, however not enough people are putting the time and effort into trying because of the negative connotations about Roblox developers,” Mr. Meal tells me. “[It] never will until more experienced developers give it a chance.”
As for how Mr. Meal made the Portal teleport effect in Roblox? Very roughly summarized, the Tunneler portals don’t actually connect to the same 3D space, but into copies of the original space. I think. But here’s his highly technical explanation I’ll just quote in full below:
Rec Room's Shawn Whiting tweeted this tantalizing (and teasingly unmarked) concurrency chart as a response to ROBLOX's extended downtime last weekend, saying: "@Roblox goes down, @RecRoom concurrent players goes up." And quite a lot, to judge by that hockey stick!
"Mostly mobile [users] but also console and Steam/PC," Shawn told me today, "not as much of a spike on VR."
I'm somewhat surprised, because experientially, ROBLOX and Rec Room are pretty different, the former featuring LEGO-like avatars and an over-the-shoulder avatar view, the latter with hand-puppet avatars, VR optimization, and a first-person point of view.
This suggests to me that there's a heavy overlap of usage (or interest) of Rec Room among active ROBLOX users. That also suggests to me that many of ROBLOX users are up for grabs by other metaverse platforms, especially during crashy periods.
As for how many more concurrent users this is, I'll make an educated guess just for fun:
According to SimilarWeb, however, there's one thing ROBLOX didn't grow in 2021: Website visits.
Since at least June 21, visits to the official site have remained flat at around 1 billion visits per month, give or take. (Which is, of course, an insane number of visits.) Unlike most other metaverse platforms, the ROBLOX experience is very tightly integrated with the website, with an online shop and a directory of popular/engaging/recommended worlds. So web traffic offers a pretty accurate insight into overall ROBLOX user activity.
And to go by that standard, ROBLOX usage is stable -- but not growing.
Why? The likeliest answer is something I've discussed before:
This is a surreal and zany and ultimately fairly dark video by top ROBLOX YouTuber Ruben Sim. Based in the US but a passionate supporter of Taiwanese independence from China (he was galvanized by the recent Hong Kong democracy protests), Ruben employed a VPN to break through mainland China's "Great Firewall" to engage with Chinese players of Luobu, the country's heavily censored version of ROBLOX.
"Getting over the Firewall from the US is easy because most Chinese websites don't refuse connection to American IPs," as Ruben explains to me now. "It's mostly the other way around where Chinese ISPs refuse to connect their own customers to American servers."
It took Ruben awhile to find English-speaking Chinese players willing to talk with him:
As promised, here's the full video of my recent metaverse fireside chat with metaverse analyst/VC Matthew Ball and The Washington Post's Gene Park in Sine Wave Entertainment's Breakroom. While we chat, Sine Wave founders Rohan Freeman and Adam Frisby (the large bunny) dynamically edited the world's Unity-based environment, which is why an actual bonfire and assorted random objects and effects suddenly appear around us.
Here's the time codes for all the key topics we discuss:
2:35 -- Was there a personal experience for you which led to an “ah ha” moment that inspired your thinking on the Metaverse? (Answered by both Matthew and Gene.)
7:55 -- We discuss the elephant in the virtual room, on why Zuckerberg is reportedly changing Facebook's name to be more metaverse-like -- is it just a cynical PR move, or is it genuine? Matthew then goes into his sense of where Facebook is currently positioned in the wider ecosystem, while I discusses how Facebook brought on the founding CTO of Second Life nearly a decade ago, and he subsequently helped put together the Oculus acquisition.
14:00 -- Social graphs and the metaverse; is social media as we know it coming to an end? And how can its next generation be built to serve the metaverse? Matt discusses that in relation to Epic Games and Tim Sweeney's tweets about its own ambitions around the Metaverse, and the evolution of identity on the Internet.
19:00 -- Is there a metaverse age cliff (as I put it)? The platforms we generally describe as metaverse-like are extremely popular with pre-teens and teens, then usage seems to rapidly drop off once people age out of their 20s.
24:55 -- Interoperability and regulation. How does Matthew see regulation happening? Is he optimistic that we'll create shared open standards?
Coming up: ROBLOX and "scrip" (as documented in this video by Quentin Smith), the Metaverse and NFTs, and a guest appearance by Philip Rosedale:
