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

GamesBeat: David Baszucki has also said that you’re creating a platform. You’re creating the infrastructure, but it’s your users that are creating the metaverse.Donato: Fair enough. None of the content on our platform is produced by Roblox. All the experiences, all the gear, all the avatars, anything that you can buy is produced by the people, our ... See more

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.

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

There are two facets to a metaverse experience. One is that it’s highly immersive. Your mind’s eye goes into the experience. It feels like you’re inside it. And there’s a tremendous amount in the press today about how we’ll make it more immersive with VR. But I would say that’s not gating the adoption of the metaverse. The second aspect of met... 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

We think of brands as creators on our platform. They have the same roles as everyone else. Ultimately we’re focused on a number of different verticals: fashion, music and video entertainment, sports, and education. A number of verticals. Part of the work there was trying to figure out how experiences in those verticals become transformational in th... See more

Philosophically, taking blockchain as an implementation detail out of the picture, we believe in decentralized creator communities. Ultimately we believe the metaverse as a phenomenon will be a community-driven phenomenon, a bottom-up phenomenon. We want to do whatever we can to enable that. In the future, do I expect us to be enabling things like ... See more

Kids that grew up with interactive online gaming, based on our research, view reality differently than we do. I think of myself as a colonist of the metaverse, one of the old people. We see digital and physical reality as distinct from each other, and we see digital as less than physical. But this younger generation sees them as not only equal but ... See more

Education is one that’s near and dear to my heart. We work with a company called First Robotics that does robot competitions. Robot kits cost about a thousand bucks. They’re in the most affluent school districts. But they’re creating a virtual version of these robot kits that’s free. Any kid anywhere can learn to program a robot. Or how do we ... See more