Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: ROBLOX
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Thanks to Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio, people in tech are belatedly beginning to grasp how huge Roblox is as a metaverse platform — or as she describes it, a "popular gaming platform", which doesn't quire capture why and how Roblox has become so huge, but anyway — yes: Roblox Game-Buying Frenzy Is Turning Teens Into Millionaires.…
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Gamefile has a fascinating story on the rise of Grow a Garden, a simple farm simulation game made in Roblox originally created by a teenager, which is quite literally one of the most popular online games in the world. Seriously: This morning, the game’s official page on Roblox, the platform from which it is launched, stated…
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Originally published on my Patreon Last week's Second Life platform updates were mainly focused on the new Firestorm streaming option, but a long-awaited update to its scripting language might be even more important: SLua stands for Second Life Lua, a language based on Luau (originally developed by Roblox), extended to harness the full power of Second…
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Originally published on my Patreon Linden Lab just publicized a trove of impressive Second Life economic data through a new VentureBeat article which headlines the most impressive stat: Linden Lab has spent $1.3B building Second Life and paid $1.1B to creators. Yes: The company has taken very little profit from Second Life over the course…
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Roblox the company's seriously one-side monetization split for creators on the platform (75/25, in favor of the publicly traded corporation) has been a canker on its truly massive user base for quite some time. So lopsided is it, that more users creators in Second Life still make more revenue from that virtual world's vastly smaller…
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Matt Ball has a must-read post on the paradoxical phenomena of Roblox: In terms of active users, it's both the most popular metaverse platform by far and most popular online game in the world, but somehow continues to be unprofitable. (Second Life, despite a tiny user base compared to Roblox, makes an estimated $20-30 million…
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The timing is probably coincidental but it's hard to miss: Universal Music Group, one of the music industry's major labels, just signed a partnership to put its music in Roblox through a virtual boombox item cleverly called Boombox: “By integrating Boombox, UMG solidifies its position as a vanguard of music innovation within the gaming sector,”…
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This 2024 prediction of mine came true sooner than I expected, as first reported by Matthew Ball this morning: According to leading Roblox analytics service RTrack, Roblox had an estimated 354 million monthly active users in December 2023. That's an addition of 54 million from last June, when RTrack estimated Roblox to have 300 million…
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Above: The home office of full-time VRChat employee (and former community member) "Merlin" Interesting new work policy from leading metaverse platform company Roblox, as reported by Vox's Jay Peters: Roblox — a company that builds a hugely popular virtual experiences platform, recently introduced its own spin on video chat, and even created an in-Roblox career center — is “transitioning…
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Pictured: Intrance and LAGurlz, creators of the hit Roblox experience Starving Artist As Roblox reaches upwards of 300 million monthly active users and continues expanding its feature set, one common reaction is basically: Wait, isn't that just a game platform for kids with blocky, LEGO-like avatars? Yes… and very much no. As I explain in…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 