Building a Roblox Studio

[Music] welcome to the navi gaming podcast where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games we bring together the industry's brightest Builders investors and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events dissect emerging Trends and games share Lessons Learned and have a great time this podcast is also part of novic growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to Consulting and advice services for more information visit [Music] www.nic.edu overwolf is the guild for in-game creators whether you're a gamer Creator or game studio overwolf is the ultimate destination for integrating ugc in games

for Game Studios overwolf offers curse Forge for Studios a white label solution that lets game makers and Publishers easily integrate mods safely and seamlessly into their games both existing and new at zero cost it's battle tested by AAA Studios and games including Maxis with the Sims 4 Studio wildcard with Arc take to interactive and others for creators overwolf is the all-in-one platform that enables creators to build distribute and monetize in-game apps mods and Game servers in 2022 overwolf paid over $160 million to in-game creators proving that they truly value the talents and contributions of The Gaming Community you can check out everything over wolf has to offer at overwolf docomo everyone and welcome to the novic gaming podcast I'm your host Alex teay and this is the interview and inside segment

today I have two guests uh both the founders of something I find pretty interesting and pretty important not only because of where they are building but also because of the what um today I'm joined by the founders of tiny Comet Ana Agapi and Emily Tierney they're the founders of a studio dedicated to building on the Roblox platform and are coming at gaming from the lens of education and special needs in my mind there could be no better place to start than where over 200 million monthly active users with ages ranging from 8 to 20 uh are at we're talking about the challenge of committing to building on a new platform finding developers to hire in this space AKA literally Staffing a studio where the oldest Dev might be 22 years old what angle is being taken on uh when you say you're building an education game and some of the economics of building on the platform as a studio from what I remember the Creator take is like 5050 so wondering whether or not that's different for dedicated Studios and most importantly how are you building a game that will defeat the Roblox algorithm so this is a major

double prong Roblox is a generational shift in how we play and build video games and education is the Bedrock of how we as humans grow so I'm super excited to dive in and welcome to the show Friends yay thanks for having us um it's good to have you here uh and so before we get started I would love for you guys to both give an overview of yourselves um and your backgrounds in games and I also want to hear what your favorite game in Roblox is um and I definitely will not know it so please describe what you actually do I have played like one Roblox game and I was very confused so which which one was that I was in a forest and there were a lot of trees okay and to me remarkably like nothing happened so um I also have seen a game where you're like in a maze and you're trying to like play like a hide and you're trying to hide it's like almost hide and seek so I have played

that one too but that one was a little bit more clear but most of them have been confusing um all right Emily why don't you uh kick us off sure hi everyone my name is Emily I'm the co-founder of tiny Comet my background is in computer science and engineering I spent first half my career at Google and then the last seven years at supercell as a tag lead uh my favorite Roblox game is Rainbow friends I love how easy to jump into the game play and I always get a good laugh of it in just a short 10 minutes play session um I love all the horror games on Roblox because they're not very scary but then it's like a mix of like funny and scary so it's like going to like a Halloween event at a theme park um I spent majority of my career in Mobile gaming so going to Roblox was really exciting feels like uh the ugc platform reminds me of the early day of mobile gaming like why would anyone build games on Roblox and I remember people saying saying why would

anyone build games on mobile so I happy to be here to share a story with you nice all right and Ana yeah and um my name is Ana I'm Emily's better half um I have a background in in business and marketing and that's where I spent most of my career um in different companies and I also spent several years working in education uh for an NGO but also for a university back in Finland and I'm bringing the educational side uh to our to our company um favorite game in Roblox I feel like I have many games that I enjoyed um but I think one that I love the most is restaurant Tycoon and the reason why I like it is because I'm a foodie and I love food I like cooking food and I feel like it goes back to the aspiration of owning a restaurant so that's my retirement plan

so in you know when um when I'm old and um have nothing else to do I want to open a restaurant somewhere on the beach so I feel like the restaurant Tycoon is kind of resonating to that aspiration those um management Sim games are recently quite popular um I was actually reading about it's like a eating Venture ad eating Venture I don't know I can't remember what it was called but I was reading about something that's kind of similar to that man ing a restaurant um my partner is actually playing a game where you manage people's like social media career um and like so it's a the simulation of like real world management um yeah is growing uh but very cool um so thank you for sharing a little bit both about yourself but um I would love to understand how you guys met and then what kind of both compelled you to found the studio together yeah I actually met Ana uh I was say eight years ago so I

worked with Ana's spouse at supercell and we met through many of like the supercell events uh whether it's like the spouse offsite the uh company events and you know you you when you Vibe with someone when someone's kind of on the the same wavelength you kind of keep remembering that person and when we first start um thinking about starting a company I think the thing I keep coming to this uh most important thing about partnership is is this person going to give me the confidence to start this company and make me believe that this is what I can do as a team and I just couldn't think of anyone better than Anka to do that with um and six months later you know we we went through the speed run accelerator uh go through a lot of ups and down whether it's like personal events and Company matter um yeah like she's the person for me

yeah and and I think also what what's important is that we really complement each other in we we do have we share the same values we have the same ideas but when it comes to working style she always sees things that I don't see or the other way around and I feel like from from that point of view it feels like we have like a 360 overview of whatever decision we want to make uh because we see like both perspectives so that's that's pretty unique that's awesome it's very serendipitous and get good on supercell for uh creating uh what we in the business World call collisions oh yeah for folks to mingle uh so that that's that's really fun um okay so you know you guys gave me a bit of overview about yourself but at a high level I would love to understand a bit about the game that you're the game that you're building your studio tiny Comet um you know you mentioned that you're building education games but um tell me about a little a little bit about the type of game the platform um the target

audience um we'll dig more into like the specific specifics of the game first but just sort of generally at a high level yeah I can kick off and then uh have have Anka back me up on some of the the points um we really focus on building history based learning games and the reason why we so interested in history because history is just a great IP whether it is US history art history world history I there should be more games about our collected Human Experience and if I think about some of the best learning games for example Assassin's Creed this wall of ours Age of Empire you don't even feel like they are like an educational game you just think that they're great games but while playing these games you learn so much about Egyptian history the war in Poland and the Mayans um and and we were so inspired by those type of games um so the target audience is 10 to 17 um I I think that

you know we want to create these immersive World RPG games and these game mechanic and game Loop are complex so it's not just a very simple Loop you do something and you're done we want to really adapt like some of the best learning from RPG games into our learning games yeah and and also um we we believe that history um can be learned through playing games and through play in general and I feel like when when I was studying history it was all about memorizing dates and because of that I really didn't like history and now I wish I could go back in time and learn history differently because history is a lot about questioning questioning Society understanding Society understanding what happened in the past how is that impacting what we the present how would that impact the future how history repeats itself and you cannot many times you cannot experience

history through a textbook you need to get immersed into it and and what's a better way to immerse yourself in history than playing a game and immerse yourself in that world yeah so that's what we're trying to do immerse uh students in and children in in historical games yeah and I think you're building you're doing something that's actually really quite important I think maybe for those that you guys are obviously quite probably attuned to the broader space of education um and we also all know that in general edtech has like a relatively bad rap um on inves ofal won't generate returns but um I'll just share with you guys and maybe we can talk around this but the tldr is that for at least the United States the humanities in general are in trouble um majors and core subjects like English History foreign languages philosophy and religious Studies have fallen significantly over the past 20 years in 2009 I believe that like 55,000 degrees in English language were earned um Lang

and lit and today it's like 3,300 um sorry 33,000 sorry and the majors in all the other subjects are also down like 40% from their 2010 Peaks um the opposite is happening with stem but who will know what will happen how AI will impact this going further but um also on the testing fronts ACT scores have slid to 30-year lows across all subjects dropping to an average score of 19.5 out of 36 my brother got a 36 and so I'm just like wow like 19.5 is way lower than perfect score and this is obviously likely due to the cascading effects of schooling during the pandemic and generally indicative that people are less ready for the college curriculum um and also you just mentioned like yeah the way that things are taught are not necessarily conducive to the way that they could be learned in the most effective way um but I guess my question to you guys is can you describe to me why you think building education in

games in Roblox specifically is going to work I hear the points around um Age of Empires and stuff like that but why did you pick Roblox specifically and what are players doing there that you think indicates that they'd be attracted to playing a long form educational history game versus the tag game that I was speaking about at the beginning of the episode well I think the trick is that we don't advertise ourself as an educational games to players Roblox that's number one because kids are so smart right if you like if you tell them this is good for them they would absolutely not do it right it's like they can spot a chocolate covered broccoli from Miles Away uh but what I really love about Roblox as a platform it allows players to take a few trip whether is you know going to the space under the sea or some magical fantasy world and when I think about history the best type of history programs or media or whatever that it's allow you to

experience what it's like so we want the players to have this opportunity to take a fut trip in the past um so when we were building the games we tried to like really make the environments mimic that period of time but it doesn't have a very strong uh narrative we want players to actually create their own narrative like these are the harsh environments in that time period This is a survival game uh these bears are going to be fierce and you have to like you know figure out a way to to work as a team and what kind of story are they going to be able to tell and and and and you know create a as a group and on top of that you know like we think about learning right learning and gaming go so well together because grinding is learning every time you play a new game what do you do you have to learn the system you have to learn the environment you have to learn the rules that this world impose and if we can like just mimic those like like objective into the learning games then

history the subject itself just become the IP the background story and now you learn the rules of this virtual world this is the harsh environment during that time you cannot grow crops the winter is very harsh and these animals going to kill you how can you how what you gonna do to survive right so and and when we play test our game with kids right they have so much fun playing the games and we're worried that oh they going not going to be able to retain any informations but to the end of the play testing they can tell us like every single natural threat that was occurring to them during 1600 James toown they remember uh why why it was so hard to survive as a Survivor uh a settler sorry and what is the causal impact in that environment and I think the most important thing about learning history isn't so much about memorizing the fact but really Inspire kids to have that credible thinking skill and thinking about why things happen certain way why people have to make a certain decisions

and we really want to like convey that in our games instead of just trying to make like a interactive history book because you have Netflix for that you don't need us for that you know yeah yeah yeah and maybe um to take a step back why we chose Roblox we want it to be where our audience is and most of the the kids nowadays are in Roblox so you you mentioned at the beginning Roblox has now I think the latest number was like 65 million daily active users yeah um and out of those 67 I think around 70% are under 16 um so they are already in Roblox so why not uh create something where they are already present um Roblox already has the distribution uh they're present in I think it was more than a 100 countries um they cover a lot of

languages uh they cover mobile desktop VR um um consoles and so on um so for us is so so much easier to test what works and what doesn't because they they offer the infrastructure they offer the the distribution and and we can like a at a very low cost we can test the the mechanics that work the games that that work and then um then move forward from from there and to add to Anka's point right we have two development track we have the four to six month the long development track where we're creating this very immersive RPG game but we also have a very short track that is only four to six weeks where we want to test out some of these are popular wbox mechanic right can they be a good mechanic for learning uh you know there's so many of these Obby games in Roblox those takes like no time to make right why not sprinkle some learning element into it and see if kids actually like it and if it doesn't work out it's only like three four weeks that we we we

spend on let's just run another game test another games yeah the time to like the time to creation is so low and the cost to creation is also so low which makes the platform really really fascinating um and I'm super excited to talk about like Roblox platform and building um later on the episode uh but before we go there you know I think you I wanted to draw back to the points that you're saying like hey like sometimes we're not marketing this as an educational game um and you know I personally from my experience used to play edtech games and stuff like Peter Rabbit I don't know if anybody remembers those language learning games um and God knows what else and I absolutely hated that because they were like mostly bad games right they they were definitely like teaching me something but they synthesis between what we're learning and the game mechanics and the game the core game Loop which just completely detached um though there was one platformer where I played as a ghost and you had to jump from uh the synonym of one word onto the

next block and if it wasn't a synon synonym you would just fall through um that was actually kind of fun that's um but you know I think that was well done there was like a matching thing and this it pleed to the platform mechanic which is genuinely still fun and exciting within it and of itself um but you guys are talking about building a history based um game you know maybe similar to like what Civ 6 does and you go through the generations right now you mentioned that your some of your players are playing in Jamestown um and I'm wondering what are the actual mechanics that you are having your um your players do uh to actually like you know grock with you know similar to I said the platform game where you're jumping to get synonyms what are your players actually doing and how long are their sessions and what do you is it chaptered based like you know like day one in Jamestown we are getting wood um to walk me through that and do people play together uh yeah tell me a little bit more about the I guess the game design

yeah yeah I I'll will let Emily take this she's the brain of well well when we first approached the game design uh in roblocks right I realized that my mobile gaming skills became a bit useless uh I actually have to got a lot of help from our developers the the young developers who've been on Roblox for 10 plus years and the funny thing is that when you find someone who is a Roblox developer with 10 plus years skill they're 22 you know like they've been playing robotx since they 10 but what we learned is that the play session has to be short because you you really competing with like kids who are just playing a game between soccer practice so they they don't have time to sit there and play a very long section of games so that's number one yeah the average just as a side note the average um play session I think it was something like seven seven minutes in Roblox for Roblox wow okay it's really short and number two was was that like we we look at like all the very popular categories

of games right and we saw that like games like Tycoon is very popular uh simulation game is also very popular and and and we try to figure out like what type of game that is popular on Roblox that kids already like and understand the mechanic of and how can we apply that into our history based game right so if we just take the learning side aide for second we know that like the game SE have to be short and then players need to be able to experience a big portion of that games in order to feel the progression in that 10 minutes sure so you can't make them grind because if they have to grind they're like I'm not gonna play this because it's so easy to jump from experience to experience right so with all that learning we realize that okay we want to do a survival games because they really fit the storyline of jamest toown and settlers so it's finding the games that fit the story line first then trying to like figure a story line and try to impose into like a what we like to say instead of gamifying something we try to learn toy something how do we learn toy

a survival RPG games um so with that in mind we know that like the game has to be social because roblock is really social and majority the games if it's like an individual player game it doesn't do well so we betting the game to be 90% social you can play the game on your own but it's not going to be very fun uh it's going to be a 10 people sex uh section uh 10 player 10 players in the sessions and for uh game is up to 30 minutes but even if you play 10 minutes you will already feel a huge sense of uh progressions and there will be like different survival wave mechanics so each wave that will be new settlers coming into the settlement that you're building with your friends and then you got to also experience different threats during the the 10 minutes so it's building surviving exploring the settle okay and so I would say is a mix of Minecraft Vine and and a tower defense game so we we're merging a

lot of these popular mechanic into to one body got it and so these are some of the trends that you've seen you're like okay let me take the top three game genres on Roblox Tycoon management Tower Defense and then kind of combine them and wrap that around the story of Jamestown and so ostensibly what I would think is that okay so after someone plays Jamestown a thousand times they might get bored of playing James toown a thousand times and then you might move to another piece of American history or something and those game design would look different for those games or the same so the the goal is that after the players finish experience the Jamestown map they will unlock additional map and those additional map would then become a different part of American history and even just the same map on Jamestown right you're playing from a settler perspective and the Pioneer story line has been told I don't know a thousand times right what about the perspective of Native Americans so you'll be on the

same map but you might be playing from a different perspective different role oh that's really interesting so what we want to do as yeah we've got too much Oregon Trail we had a lot of Oregon Trail we something else so the the the the PO the purpose of the beta is that we want to see how many players experience the entire game to really determine like what do we do next for the content do we expand the map so we cover P Pennsylvania Boston and these regions or do we want to like explore the perspective from other like Native American the animals the Buffalo what was it like when you know uh a bunch of sellers coming what is the impact to the environment um so we want to learn those lessons from the beta and then co-create the games with the community to see what they interested to learn more yeah and I think like this goes um one peculiarity about Roblox as a plat platform is that they themselves don't encourage a very

long cycle of game development you should develop the game in one two months Max put it out there get feedback from the players and then co-create with them um so now we're trying to have this rapid cycle where we put the game together we put it in front of the players we get their feedback and then what what will be next will be pretty much decided by by our players got it okay so there's a strong element also of collaboration of between tiny Comet the studio and Tiny comet's fans yes um and so maybe this is actually like a good way to jump into you know you told me about your founding Journey um and how you you guys met but you know we talked before and you told me that you know two-thirds of the people that are at ROBLOX are under 16 years old and that some of your own developers are actually quite young so tell me a little bit about who you've hired and your relationship with your current

community that you have yeah so hiring was really interesting because it was different than how I used to do hiring at supercell and also at Google um the best Roblox developers are not on Lincoln they're on Twitter right you have to sort of discover down they sh Discord on X oh sorry on X now you need to cut this part cut this um and and they they they Pride them as wbox developer like it's really interesting because like if I think about like um you know hiring for uh engineers in the past they would be like I'm a cop developer I'm a a a a Java developer they very focus on their certain coding skill but roox developer they're like I'm a roox builder or I'm a roox scriptor like they they tie their expertise to that um uh to the platform

right and was really refreshing to me so I know that okay I'm not gonna find I can't type in Roblox and find them on LinkedIn I have to go to Twitter I have to go to the Roblox Talent Hub and I have to find them on Discord so it start with me like sketchily sending some kid that I don't know how old they are a DM on this cour and be like hi I'm this person uh did you have a portfolio that I can check out and what was interesting is that for the first three months after we we hired these um developer first as like a freelance contractor first we don't know what they look like we we would get on these like call and there's no camera I have no idea what they look like and I only hear a voice and a black screen and I think one of the thing like my my friend would be like careful don't be scared I'm like I got to take the risk you know I'm already making the taking the risk of like you know know uh emailing them messing them might might

as well just like go with it and and and they actually was teaching us about this online um stay anonymous online because that is the new generation they they don't like to show their faces they don't like to you know share any real informations and for the longest time we were calling them by their username not even their real name right it was after almost like four months of development together them seeing our face every time we get on call because I I feel like such an idiot I will be you know have my camera on and talking to a black screen for months and finally understand the feeling yeah finally to gain the trust and then once they trust you oh that relationship completely changed like they like I see them you know doing so much extra work and believing in the missions and that's another thing with like young developers is that they are more inspired by missions and impact they're going to make than just purely monetizations um and uh yeah I let Ana

add a bit to that yeah I I I was I was surprised how how strong values they have yes um how they're very Mission driven um they have an amazing K do attitude um and and I feel inspired working with them every day is is just so inspiring and and they make me wonder what was I doing when I was their age um yeah they it's it's amazing to to work with them and not to mention the the expertise they bring from from so many years being in in Roblox and we are learning Roblox ourselves and I can say like we we learned so much in the past months um and maybe I don't know maybe half or more than half wouldn't be possible without them yeah and and I I have to share the story with you Alex

because I remember we were like talking about monetization with the team and you know coming from mobile you know I would say we got to do gotcha boxes you know gotcha is what make money in Mobile and the team correct me immediately it's like we're not gonna do gotcha boxes because that doesn't stand without value and I felt like a bad person I'm like what and welcome to PC welcome but not only easy over here for monetization for us in PC and console and but what they were trying to explain to me is it's not only it doesn't align with the value they're trying to explain to us that it doesn't work in Roblox this generations of players yeah they don't they don't monetize on gcha anymore because they they know it's it's not something they want to spend on and when we talked to other like experts we learned that only 10% like in a lot of game only 10% of the revenue came from gcha on Roblox experience wow which is complete different from what I've learned in Mobile you know like any games I play on

mobile it's hard to not not find a Goa box you know sure so so yeah for sure yeah wow that's really interesting and I think um that's I think that definitely GRS with a lot of um uh people who are in genz are you know identifying they want to support companies that are like for good cause um that abide by a lot of the um like green and climate and social change um values Etc um but you talked about you know I think last time we spoke you actually said that a great phrase you said you hired your customer right um and an 18-year-old person a 16y old person a 12-y old person right is your customer and so therefore you hired them as developers and so you guys have how many people working for you um right how many employees I would say contractors freelance and fulltime together it's like seven seven okay yeah um and I guess like maybe and this is I guess a question that's particular to the fact that they're they're quite young right

you an 18-year-old I mean I remember being 18 and I seemingly had a lot going on in my life um so the first question is you know how are you planning to ensure stability and conviction that features are going to ship on time because if they're going to soccer practice or they're applying for college right they might have bigger things yes on their on their plate and the second is I'm wondering whether or not you're involved in any of the parental situation of kids that are basically working for you guys and how you're navigating kind of like the labor laws of people being so young um and also making sure that parents understand that what they're doing is very legitimate they're being compensated for that and that you guys are not the scammers um which I could see potentially a parent who's very very unfamiliar with Roblox or gaming having um apprehensions about yeah so most of most of the um the kids

we're working with they they're already working as as contractors and they already have different they have many gigs at the same time which sometimes can be you know like a downside for us because they have so many things that they work on and there might be delays as you as you said um and and then the the ones that are working full-time with us they they're actually working full-time they graduate and then they are they're they're looking for a more like um stable job um so it's it's interesting to see how um how they they're managing school and freelance projects at the same time and they they stand up to them so so nicely like at 16 um as I said like I I'm impressed by them um and of course their parents know what they're doing since they are I think Emily you there was something with with a contract that you

had signed with the with the parents yeah well no being Mom ourself you know it's very important that they prioritize school work I think Ana and I would it it's just so none of this is normal Alex none of this is normal okay it's weird when we get on the call like hey guys have you finished your homework yet you know like is everything good at home okay because then this this this can wait and then we have like a seven years old intern right he was going to skip school that day to like do a research for us I was like do not skip school go to school do not do this this can't wait but but like of course I'm like so inspired by their drive and Ambitions and wanting to do good for the world and help us in this project but we always want to prioritize for like you know their school work and I think like us being mom like and us having that relationship with them really help building that trust um maybe like I I think like being M mother ourself we actually play into our advantage because

then in a way they also feel like we're constantly looking after their well-being um one of the challenging thing with young working with a such young team is the schedule is all over the place right gosh I bet uh like a lot of productivity on the weekends but Ana and I are off on the weekend so like they paying me I'm like oh what do you think about this design I'm like H you know I'm I'm not working right now but I have to work but doing week days they have to do homework so they're busy they they can't really work with us so it's like almost the schedule is upside down and and in some of them because um you know we have a a a contractors in Canada and I would I just say like he's one of the best ux UI designer and he's so sort after right after our project he already have three other project line up and kids is only 16 so it's like how do we make sure that the project he's doing that he feel empowered and number two that he felt like he have a say on what he likes and what he wants to do and

more importantly how can we work more flexibly with you know his schedule because in my opinion he really know his players the best because he is the player himself so yeah that's really interesting gosh it's it's it's probably just it's such a I didn't even think about the the flip-flop of the weekends and the and the Monday through Friday that's that's fascinating um and yeah it sounds like they it's like some of these um I listened to an episode with a bunch of Roblox developers um way back uh like two years ago I can't I can't exactly remember it was like um there's like a flower game that's like really popular um but I can't exactly remember what um what what the names of the developers were called again because they weren't going by their names they were going by their like gamertag and that made it just even more confusing to keep track of who was speaking um but yeah it seems like multiple usually Roblox developers have multiple projects multiple things that they're working on and so that actually brings me more to the question about the business model and the platform of Roblox um most of those guys are probably working six gigs because

they split 50/50 on all the things that they're doing um so walk me through how it works for you guys um because you guys are a thirdparty developer that's on Roblox and then you are hiring Roblox creators walk me through the economics for the studio and how that works um we'll talk business model um which I obviously is probably deeply seated inside the robu economy because that's what you guys are kind of stuck with but what does that actually look like and what does the actual sharing of the bottom line look like for tiny Comet your employees and then the people who contract with you are they still splitting 5050 because they're creators um tell me a little bit about that you know when we first approached uh the Roblox creators and developers we're very clear with them that the goal of our game isn't to make money way away is to really drive impact to really break up this uh to really like disrupt this category of games um it's really hard to

make good games already and when you want to make it educational you make your problem exponentially harder so our priority is how can we just break that barrier how can we just inspire a group of developers wanting to work on these project first and have some of these learning experience to be the one on the font page um so we're very transparent with them like you know you it's not going to be that type of game that we're going to monetize the crap out of players we're just not doing that I mean especially we're not even doing gotcha boxes right so so we said that we'll pay you a good you know Contracting fee and it would be a fixed fee and if you want to do web share we happy to do it but just know that that's not the goal so up to you what you decide to do and a lot of them is actually very um I was saying understanding our position and happy to like you know invest their time with us knowing that you know there's not going to be like a huge we share for these

type of experience uh because that's not our go at the moment you know yeah and we we want to focus on building a community that is our our main goal um we want to be the educational game company on on the platform without being straightforward the educational game company um and after after having the the community and after having players that really love our games and after um releasing game after game that is very successful in terms of visits engagement um then monetization will be so much easier to to put in place so this is this is our our strategy yeah because I think how is oh sorry go ahead no and I think advantage of like being a wbox is is that players already know that there's stuff to spend on Roblox uh

roblo whether it's you know you can do these Game Pass you can do like cosmetic uh items in the game and there's one interesting thing thing in wbox that I know this is donations people donate a lot of money to an experience that they find very very uh delightful and so it's it's a bit different of monetization strategy compared to like what I was most familiar with which is mobile gaming it's not so much about extracting as much value of a player it's more about how much how much can we Delight that players when they play this game and if they learn something that's like the bonus right on top of that yeah sure yeah and as I understand it it's like rather an anecdotal evidence um but Roblox is a little bit similar to like hyper casual where instead of doing like live Ops you would just release new mini games over and over and over and over again so when you're talking about being the like the educational Roblox game you're not talking about building

Jamestown game that's called tiny comets game number one that gets updated over time it's tiny comets game number one tiny Comet game number two tiny Comet game number three so your cohorting is very much like segmented by the game not inside one major live service is that correct yes got it and so then in that regard how are you guys thinking about you know retention in those many mini games over time because as I can understand it there's like there's 40 million games on Roblox and like 70 of those games have crossed the billion Play Count um and so how are you going to make sure that like this game this first mini game that has something to do with Jamestown cracks into the top charts in order to basically begin what I suppose is your flywheel for mini game number one to mini game number two to mini game number three well we have this very ambitious go when we start a studio that okay we we learn we're in the learning phase right now but can we push

ourselves to at least have four games in six months for experience because one thing we noticed with other like Studios right especially the the one that have more funding or uh more experience in the education space it does take a longer timeline to push out these games and us you know we we can push faster like I think all we have is speed so four games in six months once we understand the formula can we do eight games in six months can we have more of these mini games like keep coming out and riding the Trends on Roblox right and then in the same time you know for games that actually we felt like there is good traction can it def can it become like the infinite games on Roblox because a lot of Roblox game even though they're very fun they don't really have a very strong narrative they don't have like a very long replayability but then the one that is really successful like the top Dam game whether it's adop me B Haven Blox FR right oh it was adopt me that's the one was it the one of the Garden or yes it

was the girl that does adopt me oh yeah yes that's where the flowers have came come from oh yeah but they have so many updates they have amazing community and and and our ultimate goal is to have that infinite games on Roblox right and we we were gonna find out only by launching as many experience as possible to really understand what stick player what is a good combination of learning and gaming right and and I talked to lots of like other developers like some some random ideas we have is um Cafe management game right someone was telling me cafe management game is good for language learning because what's the first lesson you learned when you learn a new foreign Lang language how to order food in a restaurant so why not make like a cafe simulation game that teach you foreign language so there's just like so many ideas that we want to try with our team and the goal is like how fast can we build those experience and test if they work yeah this is so cool

yeah I and I think also there's so much improvement in some language games um I tried to teach myself Japanese through a Nintendo game along not Nintendo game Sorry a game on the on the Nintendo 3DS and it was just so boring it was it was the worst the only word I Learned was Watashi which means we and that's the only thing I remember wait until we we release our game I'm excited yeah but as as as Emily said at the beginning we we are having two tracks the long-term track and then the short-term track and and that also aligns with roblox's players so Roblox kind of divides its players like in tourists and locals and the tourists are the ones that jump from one experience to to the other and they like this like short games that you play for you know five minutes today and then tomorrow you don't come back and then you have the locals that want to go deeper into an experience and they play the same game

all over again um so by having these two tracks we want to have something for the tourists that come and play something fast and leave but also something for locals where the content can be deeper and they can replay the same game all the time and many times these shorter games will have to Sunset them eventually so we will continue this longer games with longer track so in a way we're trying to feed one game into the other and then see what works and then develop the ones that stick into this long-term games I see yeah it's a really interesting way to break it down um but I like that there's you know there's again this specific attention from you guys as roblock as a Roblox third party Studio to understand specifically the behaviors and the consume consumption habits of Roblox players um which is might be different than you know a typ a different a different gamer on some other genre or whatever um a couple quick questions

there that have keep on popping up that are more just like logistical but like you mentioned that you're going to build four games in six months um how much capital is typically required to build a great thirdparty Roblox game and second how many other Roblox third party Publishers are out there I know there's a lot of creators and those are more like individuals the like the 16-year-old kid that you were alluding to but how many other like Incorporated Studios are there yeah so to build um a game I think just the the scripting can be anything between 40,000 to 100,000 um just to build the game and leaving marketings for Tria yeah yeah um that's why it takes it has to be like you know a month execution and then put it out there um in terms of um other Studios I honestly I I I know there are a lot of creators like millions of creators in in Roblox uh out of them I

don't know how many studios and I think a lots of the uh I think the really big one is some of them are brand experience those are very popular on Roblox yeah and the brand experience would work with like other agency that create brand experience so do you consider them as in corporate Studio when they are more like work for higher so it's really hard to like categorize like uh Studios that just you know building on Roblox I think like you know the the the uh uplift game the the the studio that did like adopt me right they are in corporate Studio have like 15 people for example but then you know once you get out outside the top 10 even top 20 it become very like a mix of like creators or maybe working for agency or like part of like a brand experience yeah and many times creators become become Studios um just because the the games get very popular and then they they turn they start hiring or

partnering with other creators and then they become a studio got it got it and then there's also this like whole secondary markets of like you know um Studio acquiring experiences like they might not make games themselves but they will acquire like experience on Roblox that have potential to become the infinite games on Roblox right so so those Studio doesn't necessarily like make games from scratch but then they uh a purpose of just growing the games uh so there's actually a lot of different business model in Roblox that people might not be like highly aware of and we would we didn't know until we just thought that oh Roblox is kids making games but that's so far from the truth fascinating yeah yeah um and then okay so but again there might be a limited number a smaller obviously a smaller number of third party Studios some branded experience I saw that Roblox had a big like marketplace update as well um still going back towards that profitability question right you've told your employees like hey we'll pay you a

fixed fee um maybe there's a REV share in the future but as for you guys as the thirdparty studio um what sort of business model or an economy are you guys looking to build on the robox system whether or not that's involved in the marketplace or having brand partners and relationships with I don't know maybe you sell a Jamestown Gucci bag for an an inornate amount of money um because extensively you guys incorpor a studio also to potentially build profitability over time obviously you're starting with the community first but what does that look like you know maybe let's just say you know 12 games from now which for you would only be like in a year um given your pace what does that look like in the future we are we are still testing yes on on ways to to monetize um we had a lot of discussion internally about um um who who is our Customer because we know who our users

are but who is our customer um are we selling to parents are we selling to Children um and we decided we made this executive decision we're going to focus on the players and we want to create the best experience for them um and then as parents and also us talking to parents we realize that when it com to Roblox parents don't have a very good visibility into what games kids play um and they choose the experiences themselves um so if we were to sell to parents they wouldn't have the the um they wouldn't have so much of a say into what games their child plays especially at the age that we're targeting um so that's why we we decided we're going to focus on on our users and and when it comes to monetization we will we will have um in-game monetization um maybe

we're going to look into subscription I know that Roblox introduced U or will introduce a subscription model also um something that you know for us to to think if it makes sense in the future I don't see it uh relevant at this point uh just because we want to offer to as many kids as possible the possibility to learn and a subscription model will kind of hinder yeah from from that I I also like you know to take a step back right you know most attat are either selling to school selling to government or selling directly to parents and you know maybe that what happened is that you end up making games what parents or adults want kids to play not what kids actually want to play right so by switching and and and to be honest like uh selling into schools is really challenging it's very gated um gated institutions right you

you you have to have like a 200 300 people sales team just to even start that process and what we are like a studio of like what four full-time employees like three other contractors we we can't be like spending our capital on that so with that like we we're taking approach of like who do we want who who do we care about the most is players getting values out of our games players appreciating what we're building so player first then parents will come then school will come then the teachers will come so that's our idea and then in the same time like of course we're talking to other folks in terms of partnership like can we do like a collaborations of like back to school maybe we can do an education game for back to school um can we like we talking to different like brand to see if they interested into partnering and also talk talking to um the Roblox team to see what they're thinking about Roblox

education in the future especially after they announced that $15 million investment so their leaderships also believe that there is Potentials in robox educations but what that look like I think that's a billion doll question you know yeah yeah yeah and maybe as also a a relatively final business model question I have another billion doll question tell me all you know about how to defeat the Roblox algorithm them um because as I've understood it it's one of those it's very similar to Tik Tok it's um and and and any other basically when you're I guess tied to the platform and you're building directly for the platform you've put all your eggs in this Roblox basket you know you similar and also YouTube like you have to basically find a way to make sure you're hitting the three things that they have publicly stated are there a big factors in their algorithm which is engagement monetization and retention to hit and get surface visibility in the charts so walk me through how you guys are

thinking about that obviously like you know you've mentioned very openly you're not marketing this as an educational game um so what are you marketing it as and how do you guys hope to maybe Ascend to being like one of those like top 10 top 15 Roblox games yeah so uh we were working with a um uh well I wasn't say that they're marketing agency I would just say that this one kid well they they are a marketing agency they are marke agency well couple kids now but but we we like we were very like transparent with like what we know and what we don't know right we we don't know what it's like to Market in Tik Tok uh like uh uh in in Roblox and we have to kind of go after the expert who has been doing this for a long time how do they get like a Tik Tok video vial and lead to people coming to Roblox lead to people coming to building the Discord channel right and then we we learned that there are a few things and I'm overly simplifying it and Ana please correct me is number one icons what kind

of icons are we making to attract players to at least even click the game first number two it's like the text in your game description right like how you writing those text are you hitting all these keywords you know like a player comes in do they even click to play the game right are they going to uplo the experience and then finally it's like um you know ugc like are we creating ugc items that we can give away to players that is exciting for them to actually collect so there's a lot of things that we are learning and working with our you know JY and J alha marketers to really understand like what makes you click a game and open that experience what makes you stay if we do a bunch of these like ugc give away every week would you stay so there's just a lots of research that we are still do doing to figure out what stick but it it comes on to you know do

they even want to open this first can we even can we solve that problem first then we're trying to like kind of take this tiny step one step at a time at what point did they turn did they like leave the game was a tutorial too boring should we even have a tutorial should then give should we give them a puppy so that they can collect a puppy should would we give them a cool backpack so they can use the afri items in other games you know so so so yeah it's it's like relearning the whole gaming ecosystem in this platform yeah and I I think we're we're also we're we're betting a lot on roblox's virality just because it's so easy to get well it's slightly easier than on other platforms to to get games viral uh just because the community is so so um large but also so close in they they know all the new games uh all you need is um uh an influencer to post

about your game and then that's how you get your your engagement so as Emily said like we're trying to do like one step at a time now we're focusing we're going to launch our Tik Tok campaign uh in November um in order to get some traction to get some users to to our Discord community and then later to the game um then once we launch the game we will check for retention we're going to check the numbers all the time and see how we can improve retention and then after that we're going to add the monetization um so I think to be to be very honest from what I'm reading on all the the you know roadblocks de forums nobody understands the algorithm and everyone is complaining that they always make changes to algorithm to the algorithm that you know impacts their game in a positive or in a negative way um so I I don't think there is you know any uh secret recipe for for that uh but

if we find it out we can have another episode and we can share it yeah yeah yeah absolutely but it's like this whole thing about adoption right how how fast can you like switch cars and change things so you can like play well with the algorithms and I think like for any like startup studio all we have is speed how fast can we change our course how fast can we pivot how fast can we like build along with the community and and even though like it's not exactly easy to manage a team of developers that have crazy different schedule and work very differently one thing they have is that this generation of new developers they're fast they're damn fast like they they so brave and they they cope with such bravery they're like oh there's a new package gonna use it I'm like wait wait wait should we like at least test it out do some QA no just got to use it g put it in game and and and I'm just so inspired by their bravery and I felt like Roblox is so Innovative in this way

because they also have a group of developers that's so willing to try new things and I'm like learning every day from them how to become a better like team Le for them you know yeah that's awesome yeah um I think this is this is so important and I think it's it's a like it's also the beginning of so many potentially illustrious game development careers for a lot of really young kids which to me is obvious like just awesome and beautiful and um I think it's something that we should encourage a lot of people of diverse backgrounds of um at a younger at a much younger age than by the time they get to college or something like that to be involved in things like game development um so we're running up on time um but as a final question for both of you guys I would love to know what's the most important thing you've learned from a video game and also we usually conclude by asking you guys to share um ways to follow what you're doing or how to get in touch so maybe Ana you can you can start us off uh the most important thing I feel like

I always loved strategy in management games um I'm a very organized person by by Nature so I think that's that's something that kind of um maybe it helped me to be who who I am now um so I feel like every like strategy and managing and organizing everything um that's that's one thing that I always take away from from the games that I played um Emily yeah I think the thing I learned the most from gaming it is is it's kind of crazy because like I met my spouse through gaming and and and it's really that interpersonal relationship management you don't think about that because you think like you you play a games but you actually learn lots of people's skills playing games cuz the person who you play against on the other side of the virtual world is also a person so how do you communicate

with them how do you make sure they do the things that you tell them to do how do you lead a raid in like world Warcraft you know right it's just so much like interpersonal skills and I learned a lot from that when since I was a kid playing games uh so yeah that's awesome and how can anybody get in touch with you if they're looking the studio or um they uh they can check our website we have also a newsletter that we publish every quarter our website is Tiny Comet studios.com and we're also having a Blog and we just um we just wrote I think the past two days uh a post about what what are the key ingredients for a successful Roblox game um just based on our own research by us as a team playing the game every playing different games every week um so please check it out on on our web site on our blog um our our post perfect that's awesome thank you guys and I

think this is such a remarkable effort I'm so inspired by what you guys are doing I think that the the amount of time that people are spending in the generations in our generation and in the generations below us um this is absolutely I think one of the best things a gaming studio can be doing for the future of education and in addition to all of the other incredibly interesting things that you guys are doing on Roblox as a platform I think this is one that's an especially important to call out because um it's something somewhat of a of a crisis in the in the US at least um so on that note uh though we'll be concluding big thank you Emily and Ana for coming on air um thank you to our listeners uh I will be back in two weeks and as always hit me up at Alexandra nvic.org yeah thank you Alex thank you if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app

make sure to like subscribe comment or give a five-star review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what novic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.navicamls.net us to learn about our wide-ranging Consulting and advisory Services again that is www.nic.edu [Music]