New World Notes

Game Dev Creates Amazing, Fully-Playable Tribute to Portal... in ROBLOX!

Update, March 4: Game is now live here.

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:

ROBLOX's Weekend Downtime Caused Rec Room Usage to Spike

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:

ROBLOX Website Usage Has Been Flat Since Its Spring 2021 IPO

Data via SimilarWeb

ROBLOX enjoyed a breakthrough year in 2021, with a spectacular IPO last March and increasing talk that it's the leading metaverse platform, with growth to 43 million daily active users late last year.

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:

ROBLOX YouTuber & Taiwan Supporter Breaks Through Great Firewall to Connect With Players of China's Heavily Censored Version

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:

Watch: Matthew Ball's Metaverse Fireside Chat With WaPo's Gene Park & Myself in Breakroom -- Topic Timecodes in the Post!

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:

ROBLOX Releases New Rules for Its Metaverse: No Politics, Romance, or Cross-Platform Promotion of Its Virtual Currency Allowed

ROBLOX just updated its Terms of Use for customers, and given the many reports describing the massive virtual world platform as a Metaverse, the updates are fairly fascinating. They provoke the blunt question, "Is ROBLOX really making a Metaverse, or is it still making a game for kids?"

Because for starters, ROBLOX's version of the Metaverse forbids any virtual expression of romance or real life politics:

We value friendly debate about issues and topics that matter to Robloxians. However, to maintain a civil and respectful environment, we prohibit the discussion or depiction of: Current candidates running for public office, including their slogans, campaign material, rallies, or events... [s]itting real-world elected officials.

Roblox is a safe space for meeting online friends, chatting, and collaborating on creative projects, but we prohibit content that seeks or portrays romantic relationships, including: Animations of kissing, hand holding, or other romantic gestures... [e]xperiences that depict romantic events, including weddings, dates, and honeymoons

The rules against politics are fairly strict even by contemporary standards. For instance, Joe Biden had an official campaign presence in the new Animal Crossing. And one of the key reasons Second Life was deemed to be a metaverse was because it allowed real life politics. Indeed, the 2006 Second Life appearance of Virginia Governor (now Senator) Mark Warner as he was considering a run for President in 2008 was a milestone for the virtual world.

As for the new rules against romance, according to top ROBLOX YouTuber KreekCraft, they run counter to what the ROBLOX community is already doing in-world now:

Netflix's Ultra-Gory Squid Game Inspires 300+ User-Made Games in ROBLOX, the Metaverse for Kids, Attracting 80+ Million Visits so Far

Above: Top results on ROBLOX when searching for "Squid Game" under Experiences.

Depending on whether you're a parent or a gamer, this is either horrifying or seriously cool. Then again, if you're an executive at Netflix or at the only Metaverse platform listed on the stock exchange, you might feel a combination of both: 

Squid Game, the incredibly popular Netflix series which premiered early this month, has already spawned hundreds of user-created game experiences in ROBLOX, the massively successful Metaverse platform. As I write this today, there are easily 300+ such listed Experiences that have already been visited over 80 million times. 

To put that in perspective, that's likely more visits to Squid Game experiences in ROBLOX than viewers of the actual show on Netflix.

Couple minor potential issues here, though:

ROBLOX Exploiting Young Game Developers According to Startling Exposé

I usually blog Matthew Ball's Metaverse Primer on Thursdays, but this new exposé by freelance UK journalist Quintin Smith (Wired, Edge, Eurogamer, Kotaku) is important viewing now -- and is just as important if not moreso for the future of the Metaverse, and whatever it becomes.

In his report (watch above on his People Make Games YouTube channel), Smith delves deeply into the ways ROBLOX monetizes user creators on its massively popular platform -- many or most of whom are minors -- with mechanics that he deems so exploitative, he compares them at one point to the infamous scrip that abusive companies used to "pay" its workers. 

"For me," as Smith puts it to me, "the most egregious part of the whole story is the platform's minimum withdrawal amount of 100,000 Robux, which equates to $350 US when a developer withdraws it. If you take into account Roblox's cut of 30% of every transaction on the platform, it means a developer needs to have taken 143,000 Robux from its users before they're allowed to withdraw it as actual cash." 

In practice, Smith goes on, this tends to lock ROBLOX creators into the system: "The cost for users to buy 143,000 Robux is around $1430. So your game needs to have raked in $1430 in Robux before you, the developer, receive so much as $1." (Also, a ROBLOX developer can only cash out if they have a $5/month premium subscription.)

As I've noted before, user creators in Second Life earn as much revenue in total from the platform as Linden Lab itself. And Second Life's user base is mostly adults, while ROBLOX's user base is primarily under 18.

"If you accept that we need to treat minors who are doing a job better than we treat adults doing the same job," says Smith, "that's just abhorrent. Especially when you consider the platform is encouraging kids to come and work for them."

He tells me he reached out to ROBLOX the company about his report, but received no reply.

Then again, even as ROBLOX enjoyed a speculator IPO earlier this year,  few if any reporters have explored the company's monetization policies:

Future of Metaverse May Depend on Whether Court Decides a Virtual World is Not a Game

Pictured: 1867 Historical Role Play, a simulation of 19th century Luxembourg built in ROBLOX

Longtime readers may find this hilarious (or hilariously tedious), but you know the long-running debate about whether Second Life is a game or a virtual world platform with games in it? A variation of that debate is now taking place in a court of law, in the epic Epic vs. Apple lawsuit. At issue is whether Epic's Fortnite is a game and not an open platform metaverse, as Epic would prefer it defined -- even though, as Verge reports, Apple previously defined ROBLOX as not a game:

The Epic v. Apple antitrust trial has produced a weeks-long, frequently hilarious debate over the definition of a video game. Epic wants to prove that its shooter Fortnite is a “metaverse” rather than a game, pushing the trial’s scope to cover Apple’s entire App Store instead of just games. Apple wants to prove that Epic is an almost purely game-related company and that the App Store maintains consistent, user-friendly policies distinguishing “apps” from “games.” It also wants to defend a ban on “stores within a store” on iOS.

Roblox blurs the line between a large social game and a game engine or sales platform. Users don’t enter a single virtual world like Second Life; they launch individual experiences created by users. Developers can sell items within those experiences, and there are full-fledged game studios that build with Roblox instead of, say, the Unity or Unreal engines. But all of this activity happens within a single Roblox app, instead of as a series of separately packaged games.

So basically it's like that famous scene from The Office except it's not Jim and Dwight arguing about whether a virtual world is a game, but top-notch lawyers from two of the largest tech companies, with billions of dollars and the fate of an entire industry at stake. (The distinction of Second Life being a single virtual world has become fairly academic, by the way, since owners of individual sims now have considerable control over the user experience.)

Anyway, as Ars Technica observes: "Those kinds of distinctions are key to Apple's arguments regarding the fees it charges for in-app purchases made on the iOS version of Fortnite and the control it exerts over Epic's game. It also plays into Epic's argument that the company should be allowed to run its own competing game store on iOS."

And now, by total coincidence (except probably not), ROBLOX has replaced any mention of "game" on its website with "experience".

It's nigh impossible for any virtual world platform to thrive without being on Apple's App Store, so how the judge decides on these academic distinctions could alter the future of the metaverse.

As for the question itself, I'm not sure either Apple or Epic would want me as an expert on the case, because I'd tell the judge something like this:

Play in Luxembourg: Authentic 19th Century City Simulation Which Started in SL & Sansar But Moved to ROBLOX

1867 Historical Role Play is a simulation game in ROBLOX with a fascinating virtual world history. It began as a Second Life-based project sponsored by a real life museum, and then expanded to Sansar... but then hit some cost and platform barriers. As Hauptmann "Cyberpiper" Weyder explained to me last year:

[T]he problem lies in the rather volatile nature of the SL community. You do something new, nice, interesting, and folks will come. In order to keep it up though you have to put in a bug work load, mainly organizing one event after another. But despite our best efforts, traffic waned. Gosh we offered free housing to our 1867 community!! Rare in SL! The contract with the [RL] museum came to an end, and frankly we could not afford to pay 7000.-€ tier to Linden Lab a year out of our own pocket!

Sansar has been a disappointment. We managed to do a whole street eventually, but had to start over because of too much lag, trying to figure out ways of more efficient texturing or building. Also Sansar had promised mobile development, which was then taken off the roadmap, a big disappointment for us.  

Cyberpiper just let me know that he and his team have greatly expanded the simulation in ROBLOX, to the point where it's as geographically large as the original SL sim: