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

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

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

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

We’re absolutely game for interoperability. It’s not really the issue right now. It’s figuring out how to get everything to work together. Right now, at least in the immediate future, there will probably be multiple metaverse platforms that will then interoperate. Those boundaries will get increasingly blurry over time.

the metaverse is more generational than a lot of people suspect. I believe that there’s something called the metaverse generation, which is people in business school and younger, approximately. It’s people that grew up with interactive online gaming.

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

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.

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

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.