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.
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.
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:
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:
