Pictured: Today's top played games on Steam via SteamDB; inset is today's top played game on ROBLOX, Adopt Me
I get the impression many virtual world enthusiasts don't quite grasp how massive ROBLOX is, so here's a comparison:
- Adopt Me, a user-made roleplay pet care game on ROBLOX, created by a small team of grassroots-level prosumer developers, has been visited over 10 billion times, and today at this writing, is being played by nearly 700,000 concurrent users.
- Which means Adopt Me is being played today by more people playing games on Steam like Grand Theft Auto V and PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS, created by international companies worth billions which employ hundreds of developers and staffers to make and serve these games.
See the data above. While ROBLOX is generally pigeon-holed as a "kids game", the company behind it very much has building the metaverse as its ultimate goal, and are paying its user creators fairly well to make that happen:
By sharing its proceeds with its developers, Roblox can grow its platform and move ahead on its big goals. CEO David Baszucki wants the company and its users to collectively build the Metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. One of the requirements for that is to build a robust economy that benefits both developers and players alike, and Roblox believes user-generated content (UGC) is the answer.
… As mentioned, Roblox’s developers are on pace to earn $250 million in 2020, up from the $110 million they earned in 2019. In June 2020, Roblox developers earned $2 million as part of the Premium Payouts program, which pays developers based on the engagement time of Premium subscribers in-game.
And while ROBLOX's userbase is primarily teens and has a decidedly cartoon-ish look, it could evolve its graphics and offerings so that it matures with its audience.
Because when it comes to the metaverse, perhaps the best question is not, Which platform has the best features to make a metaverse? But which would-be metaverse already has the most millions of people to make a metaverse worth the name possible?
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