Original title: "Understand the first Roblox in the Metaverse in one article"
Original Author: Chenglin Pua
In March 2021, Metaverse's first Roblox was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and its current market value has reached 77 billion US dollars. Roblox is mainly aimed at children and teenagers, and is currently the most influential sandbox game company in the world.
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Roblox stock price trend
Roblox is an interactive platform integrating game creation and a large community. Players can chat, interact and create with friends through games. The biggest difference between Roblox as a game company is that the company does not engage in the business of making games but provides tools and platforms for Developers have free imagination to create immersive 3D games. In Roblox, everyone has their own digital identity to socialize, and even the Robux currency obtained on the platform can be converted to real currency. In addition, Roblox also supports VR devices to enhance the user's sense of immersion. The above elements are very close to the metaverse. It can be said that Roblox is currently one of the "worlds" closest to the metaverse.
Roblox is a new word combined from Robots and Blocks. It is not a game but a community, a platform where users can be players, playing games developed by others, or creators, developing games for others to play in the community. In Baszuki's words: Roblox is a 3D social platform where you and your friends can pretend to be in different places. You can pretend you're at a fashion show, or you're surviving a tornado, or you're a bird catching bugs to survive. "Like when I was a kid, I would go out and play pirate games. On Roblox, people play in 3D environments created by the community." Baszuki once said in an interview with Forbes magazine that he hopes to build an ultimate platform for imagination. Through construction toys, Baszuki sees where 3D rendering is headed. Create an immersive 3D multiplayer gaming platform in the cloud where people can imagine, create and share their experiences together.
In recent years, Roblox has taken advantage of its powerful user social attributes to add many new product content, including viewing nearby players, online conferences, PartyPlace, virtual concerts, etc., and in October 2020, it cooperated with the animation concert streaming company Wave , produced LilNas X online concert, which further promoted the development of virtual social activities in the game.
The company acquired PacketZoom, a developer of mobile network optimization software, in October 2018. PacketZoom, including its employees and founder and CTO Chetan Ahuja, was merged into Roblox Corporation. Roblox Corporation acquired Loom.ai, a company that creates 3D avatars from photos, in December 2020. In August 2021, Roblox acquired online communication platforms Bash Video and Guilded, paying $90 million in cash and stock for the latter.
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Building a metaverse with social
First of all, the most important thing is that developers and creators use the company's platform and the engines and tools provided by the company to continuously create content, and then players play on the platform and establish platform-based social relationships with other players.
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Source: 01 blockchain organized according to public information
From the table above, we can see that many of Roblox's popular games are inseparable from social attributes. The expansion of Roblox's active promotion of such games will help attract more players to spend time on the platform and help build platform-based social relationships.
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The Economic System of the Roblox World
Since it is a virtual world, it naturally needs its own economic system. The Roblox world also has its own economic system.
Players have their own second identity (virtual image) in the Roblox world. Players can spend Robux (the virtual currency in the Roblox world) to buy beautiful props or clothing to dress themselves up. Players mainly obtain Robux by recharging with real-world currency, and buy skins to pay to developers. After developers get Robux, they can exchange it with the Roblox platform and convert it into cash.
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Apocalypse from Roblox
The competitive core research team summarized some trends seen from Roblox:
The proportion of Gen Z’s virtual life time continues to increase.
Gen Z's need for second identities, or virtual identities, is on the rise.
Under the lifestyle of the virtual world, various applications of digital currency and blockchain will gradually become the main means of replacing real currency. Virtual currency is used as a means of payment, and blockchain technology (especially the recently popular NFT: Non-Fungible Token) is used as the underlying technology of virtual asset ownership.
The social relationship in the virtual world is completely independent of the real society, so the increase in the proportion of virtual life will subvert the existing monopoly social software, and the most likely to be affected are Facebook and WeChat. This is consistent with Fengrui Capital’s previous article on whether social software can be subverted. The process of the new generation becoming the main consumer group may just become the process of social software replacement.
Capturing the consumption and kill time trends of the Z era, compared with station B, future opportunities are more likely to lie in opportunities related to the metaverse, and there are more opportunities to appear ten times or even a hundred times.
Roblox may inspire the future business model of the Metaverse. In the process of development, Roblox tried many different business models, and finally chose to sell the virtual currency Robux (creator transaction plan). Today's facts prove that Roblox is temporarily successful, and it has gradually formed a spontaneous development ecology and maintained a high user stickiness. Creating an open platform allows creators to enjoy dividends, which can inspire creators to create more and more fun games to the greatest extent, and then help Roblox continue to go further and further on the road of the Metaverse.
In nature, it is also a creative virtual world game Minecraft, which was once the most popular sandbox game. Inspired by the free creation of Minecraft, many creators have created many amazing high-quality works, such as making it into a movie "My Three-Body Problem", or adapting Minecraft into another game. The creative ability of Minecraft has also made it an unprecedented success, with hundreds of millions of monthly active users worldwide. In the end, Microsoft acquired Mojang, the developer behind Minecraft, for a sky-high price of 2.5 billion US dollars. Although Minecraft and Roblox seem to have many similarities, due to Roblox's creator trading plan, Roblox has come from behind and gradually widened the gap with Minecraft.
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Roblox Performance
Roblox released its third quarter 2021 earnings report on November 8, 2021. Roblox's revenue for the quarter rose 102% from the third quarter of 2020 to $509.3 million. The net loss for the third quarter of 2021 was $74 million. Free cash flow increased 7% from the third quarter of 2020 to $170.6 million.
The average daily active user (DAU) was 47.3 million, an increase of 31% year-on-year; the number of hours used by users in the quarter was 11.2 billion, an increase of 28% year-on-year.
For full-year 2021 performance, Roblox expects daily active user DAU to be between 34.6 million and 36.4 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 6% to 12%. The number of hours users stayed on the platform ranged from 29.8 billion to 31.4 billion hours, an increase of -3% to 3% year-over-year. The revenue was between US$1.440 billion and US$1.515 billion, a year-on-year increase of 56% to 64%.
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Relationship with Tencent
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Source: Roblox's financial report submitted to the SEC
Roblox China Holdings' primary goal is to work together to build a successful localized version of Roblox in China. Tencent currently intends to publish and operate a localized version of the Roblox platform as a game in China under the "Luobulesi" brand. Roblox will focus on creating opportunities for local Chinese developers to learn Roblox Studio to build and publish experiences and content.
