#3 Power Lunch: Exploring Roblox – The Future of Brand Engagement with Gen Z and Alpha

[on-hold music] Welcome everyone to the next Power Launch episode today with Steven. Hi, Steven. Hey, Marc. Nice to see you.

Hey, Steven. Great to see you. Um, we're gonna talk today all about Roblox. We're gonna unpack why Roblox is or is not the next metaverse of choice for brands.

Uh, welcome everyone in the audience on Twitter/X, on LinkedIn, on YouTube. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. Uh, this is an interactive session, live session, so please feel free to ask questions. We'll see them.

We'll have a Q&A at the end. We'll try to answer all of those questions. Yeah, please feel free to participate and engage and comment. Yeah, let's, let's kick it off. Steven, thanks for joining again.

You're the Roblox expert, and first question is what brought you to Roblox? What makes it tick? And also maybe, you know, how did you start that journey? Yeah.

So for me, Roblox has been on my radar for probably five, six years, uh, because I have children and, and they've grown up playing Roblox with their friends, being on there, hanging out, playing different games while socializing with their friends, especially during the pandemic.

Roblox was a place where they were spending a lot of time, uh, being able to play with their friends, um, while still at home.

And so it was on my radar, and a couple years ago I realized that there was brands that were starting to build games, experiences, UGC virtual clothing items on the platform, and it really reminded me of YouTube like 12 years ago.

So I used to be a YouTuber, and 12 years ago, brands were trying to get onto the platform. They were trying to understand it, but the only ones who really understood how the platform worked were the native creators.

And so I realized, wow, if there's brands coming here and they don't understand the platform, uh, let me start to get deeper into the platform, let me understand it, and let me help brands, uh, enter the platform by learning how it works and what it takes to succeed there.

And, and just to make this point again, I think, Steven, you're one of the experts out there when it comes to Roblox with your company Metaverse Marcom.

I don't know any other person who's solely and very, very deeply focused on, on that ecosystem, so that's makes it very interesting to have you here today.

Um, and for the listeners who don't know that ecosystem that well yet, can you paint us a little bit of a picture, you know, where does Roblox come from? Like when, when did it all start with that? Yeah.

I believe the company, uh, started something very early, like 2006, so quite a long time ago. Its roots are in education, and it has certainly become a really dominant force in the world of gaming.

And some people who are unfamiliar with Roblox think Roblox is just one game. But it's not one game, it's a platform that has millions of games.

So think of it like YouTube, but instead of people creating and uploading videos, it's people uploading, creating full video games.

And so the, you know, the platform really took off, started to take off, I would say, in like 2018, 2019, and then just really accelerated with the pandemic to the point where now, uh, you have

79.5 million daily active users on the platform. And so it is really like quite large. It's really popular with younger people, so think Gen Z, Gen Alpha.

And because it's so popular with this younger audience, brands are starting to pay attention and realize, oh, wow, if I wanna reach these younger audiences, then Roblox is a place that I really need to pay attention to.

And you just mentioned some numbers, and I just wanna highlight that again because it's, it's insane how many users Roblox has.

They have about 200 million monthly active users, half of them are, are Gen Z, and the average user is spending about 2.6 hours a day on that platform. Yeah.

And that, that's the-- That engagement time is what really, I think, is eye-popping to me, right? There's only so much time in the day.

[chuckles] And so the fact that, that, that, that people are coming and spending that much time on the platform is really incredible, and I think it's really

because Roblox brings together not just gaming, but again, this social activity, right? So sign up for Roblox, I create an avatar, and then I can jump into a game.

Well, I can go play with my friends. I can see their avatars. We can go play games together.

And right when I was growing up, it's like, oh, if I wanna play a game with my friend, right, I'll have to go to their house, [chuckles] they'll have to come over to my house.

But here it's just like instantaneously you can go. And because it's a platform that has millions of games, right, it can be like, "Oh, we're kinda bored with this game.

All right, well, we'll just jump into the next one and keep going." And so I've heard people talking about how it's like feels almost like going to the mall.

Instead of going to the mall and walking around, we can go into Roblox and jump around at different games and, oh, if we wanna do shopping, [chuckles] we can do that too.

We can dress up our avatars and buy different hats and different clothing. So that, that really combination of gaming plus social- Is I believe what really leads to that really long engagement time.

Before we jump into what brands are doing on the platform, I wanna take a step back and also take the ones with you, you might, might not be familiar with, with Roblox yet. How would you

pitch Roblox to a brand leader, a marketer of a consumer brand, and explain them what this is and why they should pay attention? Yeah, look, I think that to me, when I think about, when I think about Roblox

and why brands need to pay attention, I think that to sort of paint a, a broader picture first, it's just the size of sort of gaming in general, right?

Gaming is really the dominant form of, like, entertainment for young people today, right?

They're spending more time, more money on gaming than they would on things like going to the movies, buying music, things like that.

And so gaming is so dominant, and if you really wanna stay relevant with younger audiences, [chuckles] which for most companies they want to, right?

Uh, they, they need to stay relevant and think about future customer growth, then certainly Roblox is a really easy platform to show up and connect with younger generation at scale.

It used to be if you want a brand to integrate into a video game, then it would take years. Game-- the, the game development cycles are super lengthy and, you know, it's very difficult to just show up in a video game.

But with Roblox, which is again, like a user-generated content platform, it can-- you can see a brand create something two, three months, and that shortening of the cycle just allows brands to jump in very quickly, uh, sort of more cost-effectively than probably would've seen in the past, and can really get

a brand in front of an audience tied to summer marketing campaign, a holiday marketing campaign really quickly and effectively. So I think the barriers to entry

for brands to enter gaming and connect with players in that via, via gaming is just like the barriers have gone way down. And you mentioned several times now user-generated content. What do you mean by that?

How does this work? So right. So there's, I would say sort of two ways of thinking about user-generated content, and sort of UGC is, you know, the acronym for that. So one hand, Roblox is a platform.

Roblox does not necessarily build its own games, right? It creates the tools, the platform that allows individuals, teams to make their own content, which in th-this case is video games.

And so Roblox has a program called Roblox Studio, where developers can go and build their own, build their own games. So that approach, right?

That's just like it's user-generated content, and I would say, "Hey, that's, that's different than like Activision and EA, and like, you know, all of these professional big video game companies," right?

So you have kids who have grown up playing Roblox,

who have learned how to build their own games, and maybe they have a successful game studio, and they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, or maybe even millions of dollars a year, and they are eighteen years old, nineteen years old.

They're not professional, like professionals, uh, but they've gone and become turned into professionals by just being fans, enthusiasts. So that's one... On one hand, that's what Roblox is.

It's a, it's a platform that's totally, like user-generated. Now, when we talk about UGC specifically on Roblox, that's the term used for virtual clothing items.

And so if somebody's talking about, "Oh, there's free UGC available in this game," well, what they're talking about is virtual item that your avatar can wear, whether it's a hat, whether it's a shoulder pet, whether it's a sweater,

and you can buy those items. Sometimes a brand will show up, and they'll give those items away for free in their experience to attract players. So UGC

has like a very specific meaning within the Roblox community, but then broadly that the platform itself is just user-generated content. You already touched upon a couple of things those brands do.

You said they are creating items for players. If you look at those brand activations, can you paint us a picture? What are these brands doing in Roblox? How do they connect to users? Yeah.

So I would say that the sort of what a lot of brands have done, which is sort of gets the most press, most attention, is building a standalone game or standalone experience.

And so I use the word game and experience interchangeably. So this could be Walmart, this could be Lamborghini, this could be Netflix. They're building the standalone experience, the standalone game from scratch.

And so you can imagine that building a game is not, you know, it's not impossible, but it's not super easy. So there's a fair amount of, "Hey, what is the game? What is it gonna look like? How is it gonna work? How...

You know, what are the assets that we're gonna create? What is the game economy gonna look like?" So building a g- a standalone game, that's, um, you know, one way that brands are showing up.

Another way is integrating into existing games.

So as I said, there's millions of games on the platform, and there's games that are very popular that will have a million visits a day, in some cases two, three million visits a day.

Other cases are smaller, but they might still have 5 million visits a month, 10 million visits a month.

And so what a brand might do is do a pop-up experience, just show up within that game for a short period of time, maybe two weeks, maybe four weeks, maybe two months, and have like a little display or do take over a level.

So it might be an obstacle course and, you know, "Hey, we're partnered with a tennis tournament," and so one level is gonna be all tennis balls and, you know, have signs for the tennis tournament.

So there's been integrations for years on YouTube, on Instagram. A brand wants to work with an influencer, and they integrate into that influencer's content. So similar here, right?

You can, you can integrate into an in- content. So building your own experience, integrating, and then a couple other options are just creating these virtual items, making those available for sale.

So this could be, "Hey, we wanna... We're a clothing company. We wanna start selling virtual versions of our physical items within Roblox." So you can do that.

And then what's a new way that's still relatively new is video ads. And so a couple months ago at the late spring, Roblox rolled out video ads.

And so video ads don't require anybody to, you know, a brand to have built on Roblox. They can simply run ads directly on the platform.

And so for brands that are like, "Hey, we wanna reach this audience, but we're not yet, you know, ready to build something on the platform," it's a much easier way to go.

But that's still very new, but exciting because so many advertisers already run video ads [chuckles] on other platforms, so now Roblox has a way, you know, is offering a way to, to media buyers to buy media in a way that they're used to.

You now mentioned several strategies, and I'm sure there are dozens of different ways brands can enter that platform. Patterns

or things that stand out where you would see like brands partnering up with existing games or brands are more successful if they target a narrow audience than going broad or- Yeah.

Look, I would say that we're still in the very early days of brands and Roblox coming together.

I would say that momentum is picking up in terms of brand interest as more big brands join the platform than others in their industry see, "Oh, wait. What's going on here? We should really take a look at that."

And so at this point, I would say the market is very fluid. A few years ago, we were seeing custom-built games and less integrations.

It seems like integrations have started to grow, and you're seeing more integrations than we were before. And it just really depends, um, you know, what's right for the brand.

And so for some brands, they just really need a very small sort of marketing push. So it could be a movie release.

The latest Beetlejuice movie had a very successful pop-up, sort of like integrations plus experience together, and that made a lot of noise, and that's just a limited time event.

But a company like Walmart is gonna be on Roblox for quite a long time and is really looking to build over time.

So what's right for one company might be different for another company, and what's trending now and how people are activating now will likely change [chuckles] in the future.

Uh, and if there's one thing that you saw with all those brand activations, and, and by the way, we also, uh, looked at this, and about 80% of Interbrand top 100 global brands are building virtual worlds, not exclusively on Roblox, but could be Roblox, Fortnite.

They're like virtual platforms. Mm-hmm. So out of all those activations, have you seen one thing that always worked or one thing that never worked? So look, I think that when you--

In terms of what, what, what always works, and I'll kind of caveat this, like if you're doing an integration into an existing game, you know going in how much traffic that game gets. So if you say, "We want...

Yeah, we wanna integrate into this game. This game gets 10 million visits a month. We just want the audience who goes into this game to know about our brand,"

it's pretty much guaranteed, yeah, you're gonna reach that audience because that audience, the traffic is consistent. You can know the demographics, the geography, everything in advance before you do that deal.

And so that is more guarantees. But, you know, is the level of connection as strong? Maybe not as strong as if you were building your own game, right?

So if you're, if you're integrating into somebody else's game, is it a deep integration? Is it a light integration?

Is your brand showing up in only a small section of the m- of the game, or is it really all over the place? And so, yes, you can... It works.

You can get in front of people, but that level of engagement is like, depends on what the integration looks like. And then the custom game, right? It's not guaranteed that it's gonna work.

There's been lots of brands that have built something and just haven't been able to find an audience, and that can be a combination of them not really supporting with marketing.

It could be the game wasn't very fun, and so people didn't stick around. And so the Roblox algorithm never, never thought it was worthwhile, worth promoting to a broader audience. And so, yes, integrations are-

You're sort of more guaranteed success, but it's, you know, has some downside in terms of how much is it really making an impact, how deep is that engagement.

And then on the, you know, downside, really building a game, it just depends. And I think there's market overall has gotten smarter and realized, oh, I can't just build a game and expect it to do incredibly, right?

The game has to be fun. And so I think the games are getting better. They're becoming real games versus just a brand shows up and expects y- people to come play.

Can you share some success stories of recent games or activations you saw or clients you worked with that did it very well? Yeah. So, so certainly there's a variety of, of brands out there that are doing a great job.

Um, I had a chance to work on an integration between a band and, um, a game called, uh, Please Donate. So, uh, the band was Glass Animals. They were releasing a new, uh, a new album, uh, this past summer.

And so I worked with, um, with, uh, a company called Barrier 4 and their partner Please Donate, who has a really huge game.

And so we created a, um, sort of section of the map within the game that had the band, their avatars. People could come up, listen to tracks from the new album. They could also earn free UGC virtual items.

They could also go over to Discord and submit artwork for a contest to win, to win Robux, uh, which is the currency within the platform of Roblox. And so it was a really deep integration.

It was just over a weekend, but it really, again, generated like millions of impressions, made a big splash, helped the band during that critical time of launching its new album.

And so what I loved about that was, yeah, it was just like, it was a short burst, but it really was effective in terms of, you know, getting the word out there and, you know, hitting those marketing objectives.

I just asked you about success stories, and that brings me to another question. How do you even define success on Roblox?

Maybe we can get into that a l- a little bit later as well when y- when we talk about monetization. You know, can brands make money there? Can they not? If not, what success? How do they define that? Sure.

So look, I would say that it's, you know, again, it depends on who, you know, who the brand is, what their objectives are.

And so for some brands, for a lot of brands, I would say the majority of brands coming into the platform, it's really about marketing at this point.

Monetization is not typically the number one objective of brands showing up on the platform, and that's because we're so early, and it's not easy to monetize.

So if you were a brand and you said, "Hey, we wanna be on YouTube," great. Like, can you... You know, for some brands, uh, growing a very successful YouTube channel for most brands is very difficult.

And will everybody be able to monetize effectively on YouTube? Like, no. Like, some can. If you're a content brand, if you have great content, yeah, you can, you can monetize effectively on YouTube.

So same thing on Roblox. Not every brand is gonna show up and be able to automatically be able to start generating a lot of revenue from Roblox. It's very difficult to do that.

And so marketing has become really the main priority for brands that are coming onto the platform.

And again, it's, it's brands that, that either are early adopters that are wanting to be on the forefront of innovation, that really care about reaching young audiences, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, or it's brands that are aging up and saying, "Wow, we-- it's, it's critical for us.

We have to be on this platform. We can't ignore this platform because this is where our future customers are."

And so metrics, the KPIs, the way that, that typically brands that are coming at this from a marketing perspective, that what they're looking at is reach. So how many impressions? How many people are we reaching?

How many people came to this game? So how many visits? How many, you know, unique visitors came? How often did they come? So reach, right? Pure reach, that's certainly a key marketing metric.

And then engagement, which is quite interesting. So a typical branded on Roblox will see engagement time between eight to 10 minutes.

And so when you, when, when, when marketers say, "Wow, I can, [chuckles] I can have eight to 10 minutes of engagement," that's incredible.

You know, if I'm on TikTok, I'll be happy with 15 seconds [chuckles] of engagement, and now we're talking about so much more than that. So it's really reach, number one, engagement, number two, typically.

Uh, you know, that's, that's, uh, for some, it's just a, it's a, it's a new way of thinking. It's a new way 'cause it's like, how do I compare eight minutes to 15 seconds?

Different platforms, different user behavior, um, that we're seeing on Roblox versus other platforms. That's a very interesting point.

When I had my conversation with Vincent Benoit, uh, now former, uh, head of innovation at Sephora, and Sephora built the Sephora Universe. It's not on Roblox.

It's like their own platform, but it's also a virtual world where users can spend time. Mm-hmm.

And they specifically wanted to create something that engages users more than- They would spend on the website, so they knew on a website maybe like one to five minutes- Yeah... and in store maybe 30 to 40 minutes. Mm.

And they didn't have a tool or an, an engagement channel that kind of hits, hit the middle, and that's why they created Sephora Universe. Right, and I think that, again, if we, if we think about younger,

younger audiences and how they're spending their time today, it's on platforms like Roblox. It's in 3D virtual spaces with their friends. And so

this is by, by brands showing up on these platforms, they're really meeting young people where they already are, and that's important.

You can imagine that, look, the internet is gonna change, and the internet is gonna evolve over time, and it makes sense to me that the internet will continue to adopt elements from gaming that, that users are used to.

And so if you're a brand that's not paying attention to this space, you have the potential to miss out on

future generations of customers, and really being there and speaking to them in a language they understand and they want to engage in as the internet evolves, as e-commerce evolves.

So the brands that are in now are on the forefront of, of learning and growing with this audience. I wanna shout out again to the audience that tuned in. Thanks a lot for joining us, uh, the ones on LinkedIn and on X.

Um, if you have questions, please comment, please ask. We have a Q&A coming up. We'll look at all of them and just, uh, yeah, engage. Steven,

I wanna take a step back now and look a little bit at what the competition is doing as well.

If you're a brand and you wanna reach a young audience, obviously this young audience is not only spending time on Roblox, they're also using other platforms like Fortnite or Minecraft.

Um, how would you compare Roblox to those competitive platforms? Yeah. And why should a brand build on Roblox, or why not? Sure.

Yeah, and I think it's just gonna depend on, again, the brand, what their, who their audience is, who they're trying to reach.

So I would say that, you know, Minecraft, by and large, has not been as brand friendly, as easy to work with as, as Roblox and Fortnite, so we're seeing more brand activity on Roblox and Fortnite than we are in Minecraft.

Now, when you look at Fortnite, uh, the vast majority of their audience is male, and for those who don't know, Fortnite has... is about, you know, and, you know, very violent.

And so for some brands, they don't want to associate themselves with a platform that is so closely related to, you know, related to guns and violence.

And for some brands, you know, showing up on a platform that's majority male doesn't make sense for them. So if you're Sephora, you know, it probably doesn't make as much sense for you to activate on Fortnite.

If you are the NFL, then, you know, Fortnite makes a lot of sense for, you know, your audience and who you're trying to reach. So Roblox is much closer to evenly split.

It's still slightly more male, but it's just, like, over 40% female. And so you, you know, for those brands that are trying to reach both males and females as well as, um, you know, audiences that, that...

and not have those restrictions around, like, violence and those types of things, then, you know, Roblox is just a much more open platform.

So I would say it really kinda comes down to audience first and foremost for brands when you're deciding, "Hey, which is the right platform for me?"

I wanna come back to a point we touched upon earlier, which is monetization. How does monetization work on Roblox, and how can brands make money? So

monetization, let's go back to a couple ways that brands can show up on the platform. So one is building your own game, so there's monetization opportunities there. Uh, there's also doing...

So integrations, typically there isn't really a monetization opportunity in integration. You're just renting space in somebody else's game. You're getting in front of their audience.

So integrations typically don't have levels of, of monetization. And then you have these UGC virtual items, so those can be sold within, within Roblox. So

when you're talking about selling virtual clothing, virtual items, yes, those are monetizable.

It doesn't cost, like, a huge amount to create a virtual item, a couple hundred bucks, two, three, $400 to create a virtual item. You can then make that for sale in Roblox.

However, the challenge is sort of discovery, right? So how are people finding this? So that's difficult. It can be hard to get the word out because there's so many items that are available for sale on the platform.

And then the, the economics are challenging because each item might sell for, let's say, the equivalent of 50, 50 cents.

And so if you're selling an item for 50 cents, uh, Roblox will take 30% of that sale. Whoever is the seller of that item on the platform, so if it's just selling in the Roblox marketplace, Roblox would be the seller.

That, the seller gets 40%, so that leaves only 30% left for the person who created the item. So if a brand...

You know, I've seen brands- create items and, um, it's like, oh wow, they maybe spent, you know, three, four, $500 to create that item, and they probably made $4 or something. [chuckles] They sold very few of that item.

And so because these are micro transactions, you really need big sales numbers, right? A high volume of sales in order to even break even.

So it is possible, it has been done, but again, it's just very challenging. And then on the game side, in terms of generating revenue, you really need to be making a game that is super successful, that is getting

like sort of millions, tens of millions of visits per month. And right now there's only a few sort of games that have, branded games that have done that, which are largely based on IP.

So Sonic the Hedgehog has a very successful game. It just crossed a billion visits, and so that game is likely doing very well.

And they're selling what you would find in a video game, you know, like mobile games, so like game passes and in-game currency and special in-game items. And so those are possible.

But again, for most brands, they're gonna say, "Hey, we probably can't make the next Sonic. It's gonna be very difficult for us to reach that type of scale."

Again, that's why marketing is leading over monetization at this point. Another successful activation, I think, was Barbie, right? I'm not sure how familiar you are with, with that case.

If you are, can you talk a little bit about what they've done and why did this work so well? Yeah. So certainly Barbie,

especially last year, last summer with the Barbie movie really being this global phenomenon, having, you know, the movie, you know, break a billion dollars at the b- at the box office worldwide.

The Roblox experience, the Roblox game came out in beta around the same time as the movie.

You know, I think that like certainly the, the cultural awareness, um, you know, riding that wave of popularity was helpful for the game.

But then at the end of the game, the ga-- at the end of the day, the game is very, number one, familiar. So the idea is you're building a dream house, which is just part of what Barbie is known for, Barbie's Dream House.

So it's a very sort of familiar concept. It leaned into an existing game genre that's popular on Roblox called Tycoon. And so it's Barbie Dream House Tycoon, and you're...

Every time you move around the map, you can step on a button, and that button creates a new element within the dream house.

And so that game is, that genre is well known and can lead to very strong engagement, retention, which are good signals for the Roblox algorithm. And then lastly, like the game is just very deep.

So instead of one dream house, there's like three dream houses at first, and then there's eventually like four or five dream houses. They're constantly rolling out new content.

So not, again, not all brands are coming to the platform and, and investing that much and being able to create something so deep, so sticky.

You know, that Barbie has been effective at doing, you know, at doing that, and that's led to, yeah, I think it's, has hundreds of millions of visits. It's really quite popular.

It's been the number one branded game on the platform for, for going on, yeah, probably like eight, almost 10 months. I also wanna shift sides a little bit and not only talk about the brands, but also about the users.

Mm. I think an important element on Roblox are, are influencers and creators. Why are they so important? So I think, I think there's a couple things here.

So number one is that, yes, people spend so much time on Roblox, but they also spend [chuckles] time on platforms like YouTube, like TikTok, watching content.

And, you know, often Roblox content is, is very popular on these platforms. I was at the Roblox Developers Conference last week.

I believe they shared a stat that said there's a billion views of Roblox content on other platforms every single day. And so [chuckles] there's a lot of players, right, playing Roblox.

There's a lot of demand for interesting content from those players, uh, whether it's comedy content, whether it's tutorial content.

So there's so much demand out there, and I think that, that, that players want it and, you know, for, for, for creators, it's a way for them, because there's so much demand, to grow their followings, to grow their audience, to build their channels, and it gives them a way to generate content pretty effectively, consistently using Roblox as a way for them to create video content.

And so it's this cycle that kinda keeps going.

It helps both creators grow their platforms, and it gives viewers a chance to, you know, learn more about Roblox, ways to level up, and just gives them what they want, which is more, more Roblox.

A common thing that you usually hear in those discussions about the success of Roblox is parents chiming in and saying- Mm... "This is a money grab.

I have kids that are spending, you know, hours on this platform, and they're getting lured in into purchasing in-games items, and we need to make rules around this. Uh, this is not ethical." What is your opinion on that?

Yeah. It's been interesting. I certainly can understand where those comments and concerns come from. I'm a parent, so I have three children, and as I've said, they've been on Roblox for quite a long time.

Um- Again, it's, uh, it's, it's a platform, and it's one that reach- reaches a lot of people. And, you know, there's certainly gonna be challenges when any platform gets really big.

And so my kids have had Robux from time to time. It's usually been presents, right? So for a birthday or for the holidays, they're given a gift card. What does... Oh, what does your kid want?

Oh, yeah, they're happy with Robux, and so getting a gift card. But what I found is like, yeah, I typically like I'm, I'm, I'm in the majority that does not spend on, on video game items.

The, the people who do are in the minority. There's more people who don't spend and who get sort of full, you know, experiences with just enjoying the free items and, you know, the free play.

And so for me, in my household, it's like, oh yeah, my kids aren't necessarily always looking for Robux. Now, certainly there's parents who have like-- who spend on Roblox and whose kids spend a lot of Robux.

But, you know, to me it's just like, hey, this is, this is what parenting [chuckles] today looks like, which is again, very different, right?

The, the forms of entertainment, the forms of media consumption and spending are vastly different than what it was before, and it's partly driven by the fact that society has changed and how people spend their time and where they place value is very different than before.

And so because people, because players are spending so much time on these platforms, they're saying, "Hey, how I show up, how, how I, my avatar looks matters more to me than how I look in real life."

And why would people say that? They would say that because that's where they hang out with their friends. That's where they spend their free time.

And so, you know, there is a shift that's happening, and it's one that is important to recognize and for each person figure out, hey, what is the right thing for me and my family and how we, you know, how we show up here.

Steven, uh, this has been incredibly insightful so far because before we go to the Q&A, uh, one last question from my side is what advice would you give to brand leaders starting to look into this?

Yeah, look, I would say that the number one thing you can do is just start to educate yourself on the platform. It's create accounts.

If your kids have, uh, accounts already, if you have kids who are playing, you know, spend time playing with them, learning.

Um, I happen to have a blog website that, you know, puts out tons of content educating brands on this space, so check out, uh, metaversemarcom.io.

Um, I have over fifteen hundred people on my newsletter who read it, learning about what other brands are active and what they're doing in the space.

And so, um, you know, my, my content is meant to be an educational tool, but really just getting your hands-on, going into some of these experiences, seeing what Walmart's doing, seeing what Lamborghini's doing.

This is gonna help you understand how to show up and what might make sense for your brand. I can totally confirm that. Yeah. You, you do, you do the deepest content on Roblox out there.

Uh, check it out, Metaverse Marcom, if you haven't so yet. Let's look at a couple of questions from the audience. If you have questions, please comment. We still see that.

The first one is from Gustavo Salami: Why is there no Web3 on Roblox? And, uh, I assume with Web3, he means why there are no digital assets, NFTs, blockchain-based assets. Yeah.

So Roblox to date has, like, created some elements that are maybe similar to sort of m- steps in that direction towards some sort of limited items, sort of validating sort of scarcity, creating those types of dynamics on the platform.

And so when it comes to UDC virtual items, you can create items that are unlimited, or you can create items that are limited and say, "Hey, there's only gonna be five hundred of these or five of these items."

And so there have been some plays that have been, like, not, not on a blockchain, they have not been to that level, but they have approached those types of dynamics.

So Lamborghini created a virtual item, it was a bullhead, and there were only three of these available.

And if you purchased it, the developer, Sawhorse, who I work with, was able to link up, um, and validate that item purchase with a user account and then unlock a, uh, utility, which was a VIP tour of the Lamborghini headquarters in Italy.

So, you know, again, tying a virtual good to, like, an in-person, in real life utility, um, you know, is possible. And so, you know, I think, like, the future of, of the platform is, is hard to predict.

But, you know, some of these elements, some of these ways of tying together the virtual world and the physical world are certainly where things are headed. You just visited the annual developer conference.

Are there any things, features you see that are coming up? Yeah. So a big announcement was made around Shopify e-commerce being-- coming out early next year.

So I think this is gonna mostly impact the developers on the platform who are interested in selling merchandise to their fans.

So if you have a big game and you wanna sell T-shirts or plushies or, or stickers or backpacks, then you can set up a Shopify store and start to sell those items directly in your, in your game.

So that's a big one, and then just more news around, like video ads leveling up, evolving, becoming more integrated into games. Um, certainly that's one thing. And then premium games.

Uh, Roblox is gonna offer the ability for brands to, or for companies, anybody, to sell games at $9.99, $29.99, uh, $49.99 with greater rev share.

So I think this is an opportunity for traditional gaming companies to say, "Oh, wow. We wanna go to Roblox, uh, but now the economics are better.

We can sell at a higher price point than just being this free-to-play platform." And so those were some of the bigger announcements last week. Super interesting.

Another question from Tabossum, "Is there a community for VR developers of Roblox?" So Roblox enabled VR, I believe it was a year ago.

And so there is the ability to create experiences, to create games that are VR-enabled. And, um, and so, you know, I'm sure that there are developers out there that are focused more on VR games, VR experiences.

I'm not part [laughs] of those communities, and so I don't have a ton of experience of like how big that is or, or, you know, or how they're in touch.

But I imagine there's people out there that are interested in doing that. Yeah. All right. That's already it with the bigger questions. I would like to end this with a short lightning round. Yeah.

Very short questions and, uh, very short answers. The first one, what is your favorite game on Roblox? So a Hello Kitty Cafe. You build a cafe. Um, it's just super fun. I've spent a lot of time playing that game.

[laughs] How would you pitch Roblox to a brand leader in one sentence? Your new best way to reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha. What do you think is the future of gaming and virtual worlds for brands in one sentence?

Making fun games that people wanna play over and over again. Will Roblox be still around and relevant in five years from now, yes or no? Yes. Great. So we're staying optimistic. Steven- [laughs]... thanks for joining us.

This was very, very insightful. Also, thanks everyone for tuning in. If you like this, retweet, like it, share it with friends. This helps us keep it going.

Steven, you already mentioned it a couple of times, but again, where can people find more about you? Yeah, so you can check me out. My website is metaversemarcom.io. You can sign up to my newsletter there.

Uh, you can also follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Cool. All right. Thanks, everyone, and Steven, see you soon. All right. Thank you. [upbeat music]