Craig Donato interview: How Roblox navigates brands, UGC, and the metaverse

ultimately how this is going to evolve in a lot of ways for brands is that this is almost going to seem for a lot of them like the next generation of social media.

One of the innovations that Roblox did is there was a relentless focus on removing the barriers to creating content on our platform. Not only did we give the tools away, but we hosted the content for free. We provide customer support. We translate it into five different languages. We automatically port it to all available platforms. It’s everything... See more

What’s fascinating, though, and I alluded to this earlier, is that it’s a fluid community. We have a community where creators come in. We have creators who are designers, artists, musicians, and businesspeople. They dynamically form teams in our community. As studios, they produce an experience and then can reform into other teams. It’s an evolving... See more

if you’re thinking about a game is a place where you’re competing to win, very few Roblox experiences are like that. They’re almost all cooperative, shared experiences.

We want the things we release–we think everybody should have a unique avatar. We want to make sure that all the pieces can be put together in unique ways. We’ve invested a lot into just making not only the faces work but in terms of the characters, really enabling anyone to embody who they are as an individual.

we’re seeing brands try to figure this out. How do they create an interface that allows them to have an interactive experience with their fans or their customers? That will open up all sorts of experiences for retail engagement and other things. We’re just seeing this happen right now. If you read Ad Age and things like that, this is the topic. How... See more

Our head of developer relations, before he became our head of developer relations, he worked at Zynga and ran a development studio. He said, “I’m going to build a game on Roblox and I’m going to crush it, because I know everything about building games.” He showed us his plans, and we said, “Well, you need to have some other things. You need to have... See more

The notion of what community is, it’s starting to expand. Certainly, physical community does matter, but the lines are getting increasingly blurry depending on where people spend their time and where they socialize. For that generation, an increasingly large percentage of their social time is spent online, which is not necessarily bound by physical... See more

I can imagine that in the not-so-distant future, retail will be revolutionized by the metaverse. Sometimes I don’t want to buy something on Amazon. I go to a store because I want to pick it up and I want to see it. I want to find out if it fits me. A lot of that will be things we can do in the metaverse. We can create avatars that have the same pro... See more

The notion of what community is, it’s starting to expand. Certainly, physical community does matter, but the lines are getting increasingly blurry depending on where people spend their time and where they socialize. For that generation, an increasingly large percentage of their social time is spent online, which is not necessarily bound by physical... See more