New World Notes

Backstory on Frontlines: Roblox's Viral, AAA-Quality FPS Not a Huge Hit (Yet)

Above: Frontlines' Daily Active User rate via RoMonitor Stats

Last week I described Frontlines, a Roblox game experience with newly updated AAA-level graphics and gameplay, as an amazing breakthrough in metaverse platform technology; I even said it showed how Roblox could be a competitor against Steam itself. That's still true, but here's a somewhat important qualifier to that:

Frontlines doesn't seem to be making much money, and it's definitely not a hit by Roblox standards. Not yet, at least.

According to RoMonitor stats, Frontlines is regularly attracting Daily Active Users in the mid-six figures, with concurrency levels in the low-to-mid four figures. If we're comparing it to a Steam game, that's quite good! Easily placing it among the Top 200 most popular games on Steam out of thousands of available titles.

By Roblox standards, however, Frontlines is not a huge hit; on Roblox, the top games have concurrency levels in the mid-five figures to the mid-six figures. Brookhaven, a mini-MMO that's usually the #1 Roblox experience, has DAU rates between 30-60 million.

Frontlines' monetization rates have not yet been officially reported, but the developer is selling IAPs -- mostly weapon expansions, ranging from 50 cents to $5.00.

But how many players are actually buying those?

I talked on background with a Roblox creator who's behind some of the top experiences on the platform, and they made some rough estimates' of Frontlines' revenue:

Interview with Frontlines' Lead Creator, the Game Which Proves Roblox is a Viable Competitor to Steam -- Seriously.

A key question I tangle with in my upcoming book is what I call the Metaverse Age Cliff. It's very impressive that a metaverse platform like Roblox has 250 million+ active users, but will those users go away when they're no longer impressionable pre-teens and teens, in search of platforms with better graphics and functionality?

Frontlines, a new game experience on Roblox, is a pretty impressive answer to that question. Watch:

Yes, this is on Roblox. I played it last night. It's on par in terms of graphics quality and gameplay with just about any FPS on Steam. And it was made on Roblox. Play here.

"Took millions of iterations and over 4-5 years of work to get it to where it is right now," lead developer Clarence Maximillian tells me. But he and his team did so through a "combination of perseverance, focus, and obsession."

But why do this on Roblox, when a game like this is usually published to Steam?

"It’s mainly about reach. You can get your game in the hands of millions of people with 0 marketing. This especially great for developers who may not have the largest resources and need a place to start. And for those who have resources, it’s also a cost effective way to get your game out there."

Maximillian tells me he created Frontlines with a 5 person team, none of who have a background in professional game development.

 

"We have one guy doing maps, one guy doing audio, one guy programming, one guy making all 3D content and renders, and one guy making the whole vision come to life." (That would be him.)

Alongside Tunneler, the Roblox experience inspired by the Portal games, Frontlines is an example of how the platform can evolve, and eventually compete directly with Steam. (Which already trails Roblox in terms of users.)

And, Maximillian tells me, it's only the beginning for he and his team:

Despite Widespread Tech Layoffs, Metaverse Platforms Currently Have 800+ Job Openings

With news that Microsoft is shutting down its VR metaverse platform AltspaceVR, along with widespread layoffs across most of the major tech companies, you might assume the Metaverse as an industry is also feeling the string.

Not so much.

On a quick tally of leading metaverse platforms in terms of active users, along with promising metaverse startups I've written about recently, I'm seeing nearly 800 current job openings at minimum. (And by the way, Microsoft and Minecraft developer Mojang still currently have 6 Minecraft-related job openings.) 

Here's links to these job openings available as of today, January 24, 2023:

Roblox, the market leader among metaverse platforms in terms of users, currently has 194 job openings.

Epic Games, developer of Fortnite/Fortnite Creative, currently has 368 job openings.

Rec Room, the most popular metaverse platform among Quest 2 users, currently has 45 job openings.

VRChat, the best next gen metaverse platform, currently has 19 job openings.

Naver Z, developer of mobile metaverse platform Zepeto, currently has 14 job openings.

Lockwood Publishing, the game studio behind Avakin Life, currently has 7 job openings.

Garena, the creator of Freefire, a Fortnite-like metaverse platform that's huge in Asia/South America, currently has 54 job openings.

There's also at least 150 job openings in promising startups featured by New World Notes, including:

Roblox Launches Creator Hub This Week, Rumored Quest Support This Year

First the news, then my commentary:

On the Creator Hub:

Roblox is officially completing its rollout of the Creator Hub, a new hub that gives developers more tools and centralizes things like documentation and a developer forum into one place. Making the information easier to find seems like it could be quite helpful for developers, and that has an important aftereffect for Roblox, too: Roblox makes its money by taking a cut of what its developers earn, so it’s incentivized to make things better for the creators on its platform.

Intrance, co-creator of the popular Roblox game "Starving Artist" (more on that soon) is impressed so far: "I'd say the most noticeable improvements are the faster loading times and user interface. The addition of verified users helped with filtering out lower quality assets. They've also implemented lots of new analytics dashboards displaying all kinds of stats including retention, engagement, and monetization."

On the rumored Quest support:

Second Life User Creators Were Paid Out $86 Million in 2021! That's Decent Growth & Compares Well To Metaverse Leader Roblox

When I blogged about J.P. Morgan investing in Linden Lab payments spinoff Tilia last week, I missed this point from Forbes columnist and longtime Metaverse expert Charlie Fink:

Tilia is easy for developers to implement, and it’s simple and convenient for their customers to use. Transactions are instant and cost pennies, some of which go into the developer’s pocket. At Second Life, those pennies amounted to $86M last year.

Emphasis mine, because wow. I checked this with company spokesman Brett Linden who clarified that this $86 million is "the amount that was paid out to creators in 2021."

Yes: Second Life's content creator community earned $86 million from their virtual content last year.

This is notable for at least a couple reasons:

Roblox Stats: 52M DAU, Down From 54M In Q1' 22; UPDATE: 58.5M DAU in July

Today's quick metaverse platform stat shot from Nasdaq on Roblox:

At the end of the second quarter of 2022, Roblox had 52.2 million Daily Active Users (DAUs) globally, which, however, declined from 54.1 million reported at the end of first-quarter 2022... Roblox is suffering from a reduced engagement level. In second-quarter 2022, hours engaged declined from 11.82 million to 11.29 million sequentially. Moreover, bookings declined 4% year over year to $639.9 million. Daily paying users also decreased from approximately 676K to 667K. Additionally, monetization per daily paying user decreased 3%.

Emphasis mine, because huh? I'm getting the impression that Wall Street doesn't realize metaverse platform use tends to be seasonal, specifically: It generally goes down in the Summer when people are offline and on vacation. I'm actually surprised hourly activity in Roblox went down so little. Update, 4:00pm: Or maybe that was just a temporary dip -- Matt Ball just reminded me that at its developers' convention last weekend, Roblox announced 58.5 million Daily Active Users in July.

Speaking of which,  Roblox is actively getting into ad monetization in the weirdest way possible:

Read My Interview With the Creator of Tunneler, 2022 Roblox Innovation Award Winner!

Congrats to "Homemade Meal", who just won a Roblox Innovation award in the "Best Use of Tech" category for Tunneler, a full-fledged, fully functional game inspired by Valve’s classic game Portal - including the original’s groundbreaking physics and teleporting mechanic. I interviewed Mr. Meal earlier this year, who told me one motivation he had for creating this game is to prove how powerful the platform could be:

Roblox Hiring Web3 Senior Engineer to Put Virtual World Items & Transactions, Possibly NFTs, on the Blockchain

I owe finding this current Roblox job listing to 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:

Flashback: Roblox Abandoned China a Month After a Pro-Taiwan US User Accessed the Chinese Version Through the Great Firewall

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.

As it happens, exactly a month before that (November 2021), a notorious Roblox user and popular YouTuber did pull this pretty cyberpunk stunt off:

Chipotle's Burrito Giveaway in ROBLOX Attracts 5 Million+ Extra Visits -- RoMonitor Stats

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: