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

We have people that build experiences on our platform. We have people who build tools for other creators that work on our platform. We have people who build assets. It’s a very complex creator ecosystem that we’ve spent the last 15 years building.

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

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

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.

GamesBeat: What are some big numbers when it comes to Roblox, milestones you’ve hit? Donato: Our creator community earned about half a billion dollars last year. We have about 50 million people a day on the platform. The average time people spend is two to two and a half hours a day. It’s about 100 million hours a day across everyone on the platfor... See more

The metaverse is always about shared experience, about doing things with other people in the digital space. You need context. If you just put people in a blank room they’ll stand there and stare at each other. You need some sort of context to do something together. The most common way that happens today is in the gaming space. A lot of games on Rob... See more

Roblox is not an overnight success. We’ve been around for about 15 years. The vision of our founder was something he called human co-experience: people doing things together in synchronous 3D spaces. I think people call that the metaverse now, but it’s always been what we focus on. A lot of people called us a game company, for years. We kind of bri... 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

Our fastest-growing age cohort is 17 to 24. That segment is growing the fastest. Roblox doesn’t really do traditional marketing. We grew entirely through organic network effects. One network effect is the UGC network effect. The more creators we have producing content, the more audience that attracts.

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