Game Publishing on Roblox | Gamefam CEO Joe Ferencz

hello everyone and welcome as many of you in the audience know roblox went public last thursday on march 11th opening at a price of 45 dollars a share an increase by over 50 percent in its opening day and by the end of the week roblox neared a market valuation of almost 40 billion dollars the creator community on roblox to date has consisted of many younger former players that advance from playing to building games on the platform and many have wondered when and if the platform would start bringing in more professional developers and publishers so here with us today to talk about roblox's development platform and opportunity space for developers is joe franks ceo of gamefam gamefam is a recent venture-backed startup specifically targeting roblox and aiming to become the first big gaming company focused on the platform the company was founded in 2019 currently lists 37 full-time employees and 8 live games on roblox including

ultimate driving and hot wheels open world welcome joe thank you long time listener first time caller very excited to be here joe thanks for having me so i thought we could just go ahead and start by just talking about how you got here in terms of like when did you start thinking about starting game fam what did you see about the roblox platform in particular and what's the story behind starting the company yeah so i let's let's take a quick trip back to a pre-roblox era or a pre-mass market awareness roblox era i would say of 2016. i was consulting at mattel leading up game production for hot wheels helping put hot wheels into forza horizon creating the first branded arena in in rocket league of course with an amazing group working on one of the world's best brands mixed life a lot easier and i saw this thing roblox start popping up on our trend reports my job was

what's cool for kids gaming and so i was like what is this roblox thing that's starting to get traction here and i opened up the site and i was like oh my god what what is this this is like nothing i've ever seen and i was immediately fascinated by it and really felt like i needed to understand it and i went up to san mateo and met with roblox's incredible executive team i started playing the games and i was at a point in my career where i had been working in mobile free to play and i loved it and i loved the intellectual challenge of it but i also felt like it was becoming increasingly driven by economy design economy design economy design and i'm i'm more of a creator by background i have an art direction degree i make music and then i just want to do wacky stuff and so i was waiting for the next big platform moment where you could just get wild again the way mobile was in 2010 the way the steam indie revolution was and i said next time that happens i'm

going to throw my hat in the ring and try to start a studio so i started tracking roblox watching it on app annie watching it on these trend trackers watching it on google trends and by 2018 it was pretty clear this was going to be the one to me and so in 2019 i started game fam and we've been putting one foot in front of the other ever since and we're now probably in the top 25 developers on the platform at at this stage and and making traction towards that every day right and joe in terms of like that first step when you say you started game fam how did you sort of start did you start with financing did you kind of bootstrap things did you start with like initially launching your own game or working with other people to develop a game together how did that kind of start yeah when we first started game fam we were really noobs on roblox and that's the only we were bacon hairs as they say

and we had no idea what we knew and what we didn't know and we thought we were just going to walk in with our background and producing kind of aaa caliber games and understanding mobile free-to-play economics and and just start winning and that was was pretty wrong we immediately found that this is a very different platform and so we started realizing we have to learn and the way we decided to learn was just to bootstrap we started making games working on games with other developers getting into this community because this is truly a gaming community as well as a gaming platform as well as a social platform roblox is such a multiverse or dare i say metaverse of experience and creation and so we started by trying to make some of our own small games and then partnering with some really indie devs and when i say indie devs i mean and games that maybe had 10 25 concurrent users just to get our

hands dirty and start to try things because what's so amazing about roblox is you just get this real-time feedback you're watching your metrics through roblox's dev stats through playfab through game analytics and you're seeing everything happening in real time you publish you're getting the feedback you're learning what works what doesn't work and through that over the course of two years we were able to build some best practices and find some tactics to really deliver highly rated games with fantastic monetization and fantastic potential to continue increasing monetization got it and can you talk about so that was the start and so where are you today in terms of traction the kind of games that you guys have launched can you speak to some of the apparently the eight live games that you guys have now yes we actually have nine oh nine games live operating now yeah awesome so what's happened is we you know when we first came onto the platform again thinking hey we're coming in from the gaming industry

and we're working with with native robloxian devs who are oftentimes working out of the bedrooms in in their parents home some of them are still in high school and we thought oh we have these great backgrounds zynga ubisoft mattel and blizzard dna some of our staff we have incredible people from the gaming industry here and we thought oh these young developers are going to be so excited to work with us and they were like get out of here we don't want nothing to what you're selling you don't know nothing about roblox and so you know what we did right is we started very small and started proving that we could add value to games and so what's happened is as that has grown step by step row by row these robloxian developers have started coming to us finally and saying hey we've heard you guys know how to monetize you guys know how to increase retention you guys know how to grow communities

can you help us with our game and so that's why we continually are now adding new games to our portfolio where we're at right now i mean we had 3.5 million visits to our games yesterday on a monday which is the lowest performing day of the week so our portfolio is actually growing so quickly we don't even know where it's going to be you know five days from now 10 days from now we are in the six figures in monthly revenue and we are just growing in terms of the staff and in terms of the games and the quality of the games every week and i think what's really special and what we're really proud of here is that it's not just a group of gaming industry executives coming on to a new platform that is community driven and saying hey we're going to now show you guys how it done it's really the opposite we are half gaming industry veterans half native robloxians and the culture is all about the cross-pollination and collaboration of those two groups and that is what is driving our growth in my opinion and and anytime

we see people come onto the platform they don't have that native robloxian sensibility or that robloxiness we see them really struggling and so that's i think where we are getting so much of the the acceleration and momentum from right now and joe can you talk to about the model so you mentioned that these kind of existing roblox developers are reaching out to you to help them kind of scale up or to improve their performance and then from a game fam sort of business model is it more of an acquisition model or are you publishing in some sense or how do you work with these developers that are reaching out to you guys i think it's it's it's really not an easy question to answer succinctly so let me try let me try okay let me try basically these robloxian developers are incredible young people and they're almost universally under 25 years old i actually often like to say i may be the foremost

roblox expert who doesn't work at roblox over 25 years old in the whole world i have a very plausible claim to that distinction at this point i'm not saying for sure but i'm saying i might i might be okay and what we find is that these young developers these native robloxians who started gaming on roblox when they were eight nine ten started making their own games when they were 14 15 16 are now 18 19 20 22. a lot of them have made a lot of money already these are incredibly self-motivated brilliant young people we are talking about each one of them has a totally different point of view essentially of what they're looking for now what they think they're going to be looking for a year from now and what that means is that we are pretty flexible in terms of how we work with people what's important to us is that we are building a culture and a home that is creator driven in this creator-driven platform and a platform where the developers are the stars

we need to find ways for each of those developers who come to us or who we are connected to through our community to be excited about working with us and create a bigger pie together with the platform growing so quickly and both in users and in revenue per user on average there's so much opportunity and so we really are very flexible and again it's about creating the right home for the right creator and so our deals are really range range the gamut in terms of what makes sense for each individual opportunity got it so flexible deals and then in terms of like i mean obviously you guys wouldn't be focusing on roadblocks unless you thought there was an opportunity for uh for something bigger and we've seen year over year like the roblox development fund the the amount that they pay out to developers has just been growing and growing and growing but crazy i know in terms of how you would characterize the opportunity because it has been to date mainly like you know um

small teams of not necessarily like it's not like the big you know the the big like the electronic arts and the zynga's of the world are jumping in right now but could you characterize the current opportunity and where you think it will get to you like when do you think some of these bigger guys start jumping in i think the bigger guys are gonna start jumping in over the next two years i guess i think that roblox was really in gen zero until the ipo and i think the ipo marks the end of generation zero maybe kind of analogous way the way we rule or smurfs smurfs village marked the end of gen zero of mobile free to play in the beginning of generation one of mobile free to play that's where i think roblox is currently at and we are already getting a lot of inquiries from aaa developers and publishers it's pretty incredible that some of the conversations that that are coming our way and so i think it's going to take

another couple years the economics are very different and so big companies are going to struggle to make sense of that we are of course here howler to help you think it through but that is what i expect is the revenue per user to continue to grow the size of the platform continue to grow the economics of the platform are kind of in proportion to the revenue potential of the platform right now and so we have always believed this is a place that has amazing profitability and over the coming years we're going to see the scale of those profits continue to skyrocket so we're pretty excited to have a foothold here right now got it and in terms of like the developer community itself could you try characterize what does that look like and then in terms of the team composition or sizes of teams how that would differ from other platforms you know one for example one thing that we know is that roblox does take a little bit more of a percentage but they also provide more in

terms of infrastructure and so you don't have you don't have to have a server guy or you know all these other types of infrastructure types of people so how would you characterize the kinds of people in the developer community and then the differences in terms of the teams that are developing relative to other platforms yeah most roblox developers and you know we we are the first professionally managed fully dedicated roblox developer and publisher we know that we've we it's weird it's weird to say but that that is that is who we are we started this business two years ago and i don't even know if there's anyone else quite yet doing it and there are some incredibly successful roblox native studios though and they don't necessarily have kind of a publishing focus the way we do and they are generally between three and maybe up to 15 people some of the biggest ones might top out a little bit bigger than that although i'm not sure how efficiently managed necessarily all of them are

because what you're talking about is groups of friends usually college students and let me just add brilliant college students much much smarter and more motivated than i was when i was in college and they are forming teams to make projects originally for fun and then maybe in the last two three years people started to realize wait a minute there's some real revenue opportunity here for small teams and so they are now trying to evolve themselves into businesses or i think which is a really great opportunity is to come work with us and we can help evolve them into businesses as well and that's that's what we're seeing in terms of team size so yeah it's a lot more it's a lot quicker right now to develop a what we call triple r roblox game necessarily than a triple a free-to-play mobile game where you're competing against gench and impact obviously that's a different scale of team and development process and so that is

what is exciting to us is that we can move very quickly we can try things we can afford to just be more creative let people follow their dreams and visions on this platform right now and that's again the kind of culture and the kind of team setup that we are trying to build here at game fan yeah one interesting thing i noticed when i talked to a roblox developer his name's brezza you're probably familiar with him but one of the things that he mentioned is that on roadblocks the way that some projects come together it's not like if we're trying to build a console game or a mobile game where we have to form a team from a company and do all this kind of stuff but it some of the teams form a little bit more organically around specific leaders or projects and is that to to your point before about when you talk to developers you try and structure kind of flexible deals is that part of the calculus that goes into or

part of the environment that shapes the kinds of deals that are being structured with some of these teams in terms of like you don't you don't have to have or many roblox games may not have a specific like corporation or specific structure for example well that's going to be its own that's going to be its own bag of interesting fun in a few years when when that all when that all shakes out in terms of some of the more formalized aspects of what that means but i think that by the way yeah i met i met baratza a few times and i actually had a chance to speak with everyone who was on your podcast you know a couple whom i've spoken to now multiple times and and that's the thing about roblox is that we all know each other and to me being not of this generation of this robloxian generation right it is really and i want to i want to circle back and and answer your question but it is really an incredible privilege to work with these people and to now be

part of this community and we really did pay our dues over the course of two years of course some people were a little surprised when people with a few gray hairs are are coming onto the platform that was a totally new experience and could be a little even jarring uh to to some of the developers but i think when they saw that we're really here to create amazing experiences for an amazing community that is our call to action that's our mission statement at gamefam and that we have run really an exemplary business and and and been an exemplary community member in my opinion and it's so important to us and to answer your question is that the way we have grown is through word of mouth within the community of people wanting to work on teams that are organized goal oriented and fun to work on and it's and it sounds so simple but it just means to have an incredible stomach for the

whimsy of creation and of game development in a way that really i think free to play mobile can't afford in a lot of ways right now and so it's just a totally different mindset you have to really deprogram 10 years now of mobile free to play orthodoxy to build high performing teams on this platform but what happens is we have met with a lot of people we've had a lot of community members come through game fam especially during the early days we had to meet people try working with them and over time we were able to figure out okay these are the robloxian developers who have the mindset to win these are the ones who want to be part of high performing teams and then they tend to have other friends who have similar mindsets and then we've built a place that is exciting for them to be at and then they bring their friends in and that is how we have gotten to where we are through organic word of mouth and being focused on being a super positive force

in in the community yeah i guess my point was more that it seems that because your question no no no it did you did but i think the point i was trying to make and i'm trying to pay you a compliment actually because to some degree like if you're if you're a big publisher like ea or one of these other big companies coming in and saying hey we want to we want to develop on roadblocks we have our corporation we have our employment contracts we have these rigid structures and you guys need to work with us in the way that we are used to versus you know where you are saying we're a game fam we create flexible relationships in the style of the way that roblox developers organically kind of combine and create projects and you're supportive of these creators that maybe you have a competitive advantage also from not only being on the first to the scene but also in terms of being able to support these flexible types of arrangements i

again i i'm just hypothesizing trying to understand the space but i don't know if you would if you feel that that is an accurate statement or maybe not well i think it's always an advantage to be smaller on a new platform inherently i guess having worked at bigger companies and bigger publishers and been in the indie world now when you're in the indie world we we have a few decision makers and we can evaluate everything on a one-off basis and we can decide what makes sense for this company in terms of continuing to drive growth versus being at a bigger company where there's all kinds of controls and protocols and precedence and of course we're going to be able to move quicker and be more flexible than a bigger company i think that goes you know i think and that is certainly an advantage during this growth phase right now and it's and it's an advantage that a bigger company would be very hard-pressed to create but i think the the other advantage i'd like to think we have is is that we are really a creative driven company i have a

background in the arts since i was a kid i've been drawing painting making music you know looking up to walt disney and shigura miyamoto and saying how can we eventually do work like that and so we really come from a place of authenticity around creation and we want to build a business around authentic creation that's the beauty and i don't mean to get on too big of a soapbox here and forgive me but to me that is the beauty of new platforms new platforms create the opportunity for new ideas and we are dedicated to building a culture here that is going to thrive on new ideas and have the courage to pursue things that are from the minds of the most creative people who understand this unique audience in a way that those of us who didn't grow up here never will we always say it's like coming to roblox

as a professional gaming developer it's like moving to france as someone who's lived in the united states your whole life okay you can move to france you can learn to speak french you can marry a french partner you can get a job at a french firm and you will be french but you'll never be french the way your friends were born in paris or french and that's okay we respect that we are leaning into that that is something that we are comfortable with and we can eat that piece of humble pie and and be excited about it yeah i think there's an interesting notion that that you know speaking about creativity and when you think about like for example i think one of the most exciting things about roblox to me is that if you are to your point somebody who's very creative but maybe you're 16 years old or maybe you're a few people right now if i have a creative vision that i want to manifest into a game like on console well that's going to be 20 million dollars

100 people you got to take care of all these things in your mind in terms of server netcode all this stuff but now roblox has kind of shrunk the sort of vector to manifest a creative idea into something that is a lot more tractable and capable for even somebody who's very young and you got to think these younger kids are much more creative than a bunch of old guys that have access to capital and teams and things like that so i don't know whether you how you feel about that but would you say that that's pretty fair yeah i think that that is why the next genres are gonna come off of roblox roblox is already speaking in a completely new and unique in language of gaming of socialization of interactive entertainment roblox doesn't even call it gaming right roblox

calls it human co-experience because it really defies boundaries and what this means is it's going to call for all kinds of new ideas and when you're talking about ugc gaming that means anything goes and when anything goes in this market in the gaming business where the demand and hunger for novelty is insatiable and where the newest ideas are constantly breaking through roblox is going to launch the next generation of super hit franchises there's no doubt about it and we are hoping to be there supporting those creators in building those franchise franchises out into sustainable scalable businesses that can delight and and entertain and change the world right and maybe we could speak to that like so right now in terms of the types of games and what's what is achieving success on the roblox platform could you talk about what are some of the the types of games or the the secrets to

achieving success on roblox right now well it's funny so i think there's a few there's a few tried and true genres and those genres are in a lot of ways i think driven by fashion and somewhat unpredictable in terms of what games are going to become super hits i mean it's it's one thing to get into you know idle clicker or the roblox parlance simulator is a tried and true genre on roblox and it's not necessarily difficult to make a simulator game that can catch on and make a few thousand dollars but to make a simulator game that will catch on and make a few million dollars is sometimes a bit of a black box i mean we have some insights into it but i think from the outside it would be almost impossible to decipher what why some simulators explode and some don't but the bottom line is that anything goes i mean we just added a game into our portfolio about two weeks ago called little world i mean there's a lot of truisms on roblox one of the truisms on roblox is people want to play as their

avatars in our new game little world which was created by three 19 year old lithuanian family members you play as a bug you start as a ladybug and you level up into being a super powerful scorpion and you go through like a hundred bugs in your leveling process and everyone in the server is a bug and it's all and you can walk around and you can eat leaves and gain xp you can play mini games you can just fight other bugs wherever you kind of want to throw down you just go one on one against one of the other you know 40 players on the server in these little bug fights breaks all the rules of what we think of when we check our boxes of a hit roblox game and yet it blew right up to the top of the charts and is sustaining an incredible audience of you know over a million players per day most days and we have already had a chance to partner

with this team to bring them into the game fan production processes and i'm really proud to say that in the first week of working together we doubled revenue per player and both last saturday and the saturday before were the highest earning days in the games history uh and so that is what's going on on roblox is we open up the platform homepage every morning and every morning i'm face palming saying this is the next super hit i could have never thought of this game i like how how are people coming up with this stuff it would never even occur to me in a million years but that's the power of ugc that's the power of opening up creation to anyone who isn't hamstrung or or boxed in by the creative guard rails that those of us who've grown up in the gaming industry now can't think past and that's not a bad thing right we're we're trained to make games in a certain way and that way works and that

way works for bigger gaming businesses and now you're talking about literally millions of young people who are just waking up and saying i have a cool idea i'm going to get together with my friends and just make it and see what happens and that is creating incredible new hits like like little world for example got it and maybe speaking more to the dev the development environment itself and we kind of talked about one aspect of it which is a lot of the infrastructure back in you know supporting services roblox just kind of takes care of for you but could you speak in terms of for the audience that isn't that familiar with how you develop for roblox could you speak about you know some of the the kind of general development environment itself and how it would differ from developing for pc console mobile things like that yeah so roblox the roblox platform is really an incredible publishing

system and it starts of course in roblox studio so it's a it's a closed loop publishing platform you develop in roblox's own development tool and then you publish onto the roblox platform across mobile xbox and pc depending on which platforms you want to be on that's up to you and roblox studios you were saying has a significant amount of authorship already built into it and especially the multiplayer networking is all taken care of so as you were saying we don't have server side engineers although from time to time especially as the games are getting more sophisticated and more complex which we will see an acceleration of in the coming years and months and years it's going really quickly we are starting to build our own server technology overlaid on top of what roblox already provides because we need to be pushing production values and pushing sophistication that being said roblox studio works in lua so that has been an interesting challenge in terms of finding staff a lot of engineers want to work

in unity or in unreal because those are the biggest engines for game development and that's where your jobs are if you're an engineer and you want to have career mobility you probably don't want to be working only in lua and roblox studio so what we are doing is reaching far and wide both into the roblox community as well as into other niche development communities all over the world to find the best lua programmers and people who are passionate about what roblox is and what roblox is going to be in in the coming years and i think those are the biggest differences in in development is is working in lua and working in roblox studio and the learning curve i think the other thing to mention is we have had to onboard a number of former unity developers into roblox studio and that process is a process it's certainly doable and what's funny a lot of the native robloxian devs they're so used to roblox roblox roblox

and they sometimes believe that people who have never worked in roblox and are over 25 are actually physically incapable of working in roblox studio and that was something that i think we are starting to eventually make some traction on here in terms of winning them over it takes there is a learning curve the engineers have to come on and not only do they have to take a step into working in lua but roblox studio has its own folkways its own lore behind it in terms of the best way to get things done in its own quirks like any engine does and so there's a learning curve in terms of learning those as well and then our artists need to learn to create in a robloxy aesthetic and this is a platform where graphics are unique they're not it's this isn't a this isn't a pixel war the way it has been in the

console and even in the mobile business now for years and years there's an aesthetic that we call kind of the house aesthetic and then there are many variations of that house aesthetic and the thing that you don't want to do is you don't want to step into a wholly unique aesthetic i mean you can it is a massive risk because the the host may just reject the organ in that case people are coming to roblox players are coming to roblox and it's not just kids right we have a huge teenage and college age contingent playing our games and more and more literally every year as players age up with the platform but they're coming for a certain sensibility right and so bringing your triple a perspective to roblox it'd be like giving you know martin scorsese your tick tock account it just isn't gonna quite feel right it might be great but it's not going to be what the audience came there looking for and that's a risk that people can decide to take but we are focused on authenticity and so authenticity to us means pushing

the roblox aesthetic forward charting new ground like our hot wheels game a lot of people say it's the best looking game on roblox but it still feels like a roblox game players still take it at face value as a roblox game just a really gorgeous roblox game so would you say that when it comes to the development environment or developing for roblox in terms of like having come from developing on other platforms to roblox what are you sort of missing is is it the level of graphical fidelity and being able to get that into a roblox game or what are some of the other kind of development or technical issues that you wish you had in roblox that you potentially have in other platforms i would say that the now let me start by saying i am not an engineer and i do not write code so i am not the most qualified person

to answer this question in a deep level of detail but we can do that on another podcast in the future i can bring our cto in and he will tell you all about it i think what i can tell you a little more about though is the design side because the development side i don't think there you can do anything in roblox there are limitations to performance right and that's the biggest difference probably roblox is essentially streamed down and and forgive me dave bazuki and and and craig and anyone else listening from roblox matt curtis if i'm saying this wrong roadblocks is is essentially streamed down meaning that our games don't have a client on your phone or on your pc roblox does but the games don't they load in as you play them and so that creates some performance limitations versus a game that has a multi-gigabyte client living on your hard drive other than that you can pretty much do anything in

roblox as far as as we can tell him we have incredible first pla first person shooters like poly battle running on the platform we have incredible real-time racing games we're building a brawler based on one of the world's most famous animation brands and so we are very bullish and feel very comfortable developing incredible real-time multiplayer games on the platform i think the design side is radically different than mobile free to play and that's the thing that as developers start thinking about roblox they really need to start to understand i would say if you are looking to develop on roblox i would recommend you probably spend about a thousand hours playing roblox games and another thousand hours talking to roblox developers about what they think makes roblox good and what they think makes a great roblox game and why some games worked in some games and and then you'll start to move down the learning curve and start to speak french as we were saying so to speak in

that metaphor earlier right so let's talk about the future of roblox and clearly when you look at sort of the current market valuation of roadblocks people are expecting a lot from the company there's a lot of expectations built into their market capitalization right so i'm wondering from your perspective on the platform where do you think roblox goes next in terms of whether it's capabilities or expanding their service in some way how do you what do you think they're going to do i think roblox is going to end up being the the i don't want to be too reductive about it so i'll expand on this a little bit but in short roblox is going to be the the the youtube of games or the youtube and the tic toc combined together of games it's both a gaming platform and it's a social

platform and it's a digital world that where you have a persistent avatar and you have your friends who you hang out with and roblox has so many expansion opportunities you know the kind of the most obvious one is that it's going to continue to age up we already know that the kids who grew up playing on roblox 10 years ago are sticking with the platform more and more right over 50 percent of americans under 16 are playing roblox and that's a great stat but that doesn't mean that at 17 usage just falls off a cliff and everyone switches off roblox at 17 years old i mean that's gotta wind down gradually and we don't have any hard data on that but based on our anecdotal data and our roots in this community what we believe is that that's winding down with the kind of mass generation that first grew up with this which goes back now about 10 years so we know

in our games like ultimate driving and poly battle which are geared towards a much older audience that are truly what you could call hardcore gamers and a lot of those are in high school and in college and we know that because we have a hundred thousand discord and twitter followers between our games and we know what they're talking about first of all we know they're they're teenagers because they're on twitter and discord that starts at probably 11 12 years old at the youngest we know on our games that have a younger appeal like speedrun simulator one of our hit simulator games that has just been on fire lately we know that's a younger audience because we don't have the social following on that game proportionally the way we do on ultimate driving or poly battle so it's very clear that the platform is aging up and there's enormous potential for the platform to essentially start sitting right next to the app store and sony and nintendo and microsoft as one of the true forces of gaming and then in terms of other opportunities i mean you know

if you if you've ever been to roblox developers conference and and and i have and it's fantastic and that's how we've met so many of these of these great developers and we were the oldest people there yes if you were wondering they said they did this thing they said okay how many people here are in high school okay and there's like a bunch of hands that go up right like over half the room and then they go how many people here are in college and it's like you know 80 percent of the room everybody how many people here are out of college and it was like there's like you know five hands that that that went up no there were there were a number of people out of college but they didn't ask for how many people here are over 25 and that would have just been me and me and me and my co-founder raising our hands probably so it's really but it's so great it's so great it's so fantastic to um you know learn to speak and gif on discord which is which is how we conduct most of our meetings now in gifts on discord so my point here is that

when dave bazuki talks at roblox developers conference he he talks about a vision that is that is so big that the only kind of easy way to describe it is just to say he wants roblox to be the oasis from ready player one he wants it to be an all-encompassing world of socialization and entertainment and education and it's built first and foremost for social experience and now it's a hardcore triple a approaching gaming platform and so where can it go it can go anywhere it has an incredible advantage over a netflix because it can bring video in and people will sit and co-view video as their avatars happily but can netflix create a gaming vertical that is going to scale and be amazing i think that's a much taller order than just streaming video into a platform where there's already players for example yeah so i mean i think the easy way

or the simple way to think about expansion for roblox is one geographical expansion they can push out to other countries you know there's some deals uh in china that i think they're working on the demographic expansion in terms of trying to age up now i you know i've heard rumors they've been working on that for a while in terms of greater capability greater graphical fidelity who knows when and if they launched that i felt like the way that you kind of described roblox to me makes a lot of sense in terms of youtube plus tick tock that's something that i can grasp and understand but i think the thing that i you know that i'm just to be honest kind of skeptical about but i know dave bizuki is talking a lot is you know what is this metaverse because it can mean so many different things so do you have and kind of i mean i kind of get the way you describe it it's a place where you kind of do all these different activities and where you know i kind of get that vision but more practically in

based upon your interactions with different folks at roblox because dave keeps talking about metaverse what do you think that actually means in roblox or is that is that something do you think it's just going to be more further off in the future no i mean i think to me and the metaverse is a very trendy buzzword and and and it's it's great it is people in the metaverse business here at game fam we're glad people are buzzing about the metaverse and we can talk about nfts later if you want as well because we we love that too um and and i'm glad you you brought a skeptical question because it wouldn't be a deconstructor of fun episode with you uh without some skepticism i think you always have a great critical perspective on things i think to me and to us a game fan what a metaverse is is a digital world where you

exist as a persistent avatar of course that avatar is dynamic that avatar is whatever you feel like being on any given day for a long time i was seth rollins from the wwe an official roblox skin and then i put a flamingo's body with a cyclops face and the hat from little nas x on seth rollins legs and that's my avatar now and i get a lot of compliments about it and my point is your avatar can reflect however you feel but it comes with your username attached to it and you start to build a digital social life here but then you do things together as well and so you can play games together you can play a casual game like game fam's hospital life role play which is literally just a laugh factory of nonsense role play going on kids are picking each other up in stretchers pushing each other into the x-ray room zapping each other with ray guns why are there ray guns in a hospital i don't know this is what happens sometimes on roblox

and it's awesome and then we have really you know sophisticated games like like poly battle which is a team-based shooter with a capture the flag mechanic and long-term class progression and then there's there's online shopping malls where you can just walk around in 3d and shop for your avatar and then there's the little nasdaq's concert where you can go with 33 million people and see a pop star put on a unique performance that is only available for a certain number of showings just like in real life and that to me is what is a metaverse a metaverse is a collection right even in in the word metaverse a collection is a a metaverse is a collection of universes and so i believe for this generation this kind of 7 to 17 roblox is already the metaverse and we are just starting to catch on

to what a bfd that is here in the over 25 year old business world okay so i thought i could next ask in terms of game fam itself okay so you've got traction you've done a you know incredible job of kind of growing your presence on the platform building the community so what's next for gamefam in terms of how you evolve from here so what we are doing right now is we are running our live operated portfolio of nine games that portfolio tends to be growing on almost a weekly basis lately we have teams attached to each of those games we are shipping features and improving kpis in each of those games we have a hundred percent success rate at improving revenue per player so far in our in in the last year on the platform it took us a long time to learn what works let me just say that what works in free-to-play mobile is semi-irrelevant on the platform but the thought process

of how to look at a game and understand what players need and create value for those players and then capture value as a company of course is the same across all games and all platforms so we've got a really dialed in lock stock process for that right now and of course goes without saying that it's a moving target all the time we need to remain flexible so that is our first priority every day is continuing to grow our games and be the best possible partners to our creators at the company whether those creators are full-time employees or whether they're our equity partners or whether they are our marketing partners and then our next focus is on our branded games and our suite of productions in process with some of the top brands in the world and making sure we deliver on our mission statement of amazing experiences for an amazing community and then we have our creator driven prong of the portfolio where we have had a number of top creators come in and say hey

we know how to make this kind of game but we have no idea how to maximize revenue or build a live operated sustainable code base or content plan and we've said well great that's what we love to do but let we always say let let our old brains think about process and organization and the business side of things and let your young brains just run wild with creativity and development and so that that is our our you know i guess an equal priority is launching those games and so we've had now two years on the platform right we've moved down it was a very steep and long learning curve to really start to i think understand what roblox is what roblox wants and and most importantly be positive contributing community members as developers as players as business partners here and so our goal over the next year and two years is to launch the next generation of super hit

franchises that are going to come off of roblox and and be a great partner to to roblox and and part of their incredible story that that they're building here in in the history of the entertainment business and you know just want to also add you know that my personal goal is always and i it's really important for me to always say this is my personal goal every day is just to build a happy healthy positive work environment for our developers for our business people for our creators that is the thing that i get up and think about every day and knowing if i can do that that the company is going to continue to thrive the way it has been and go on to hopefully deliver our mission statement amazing experiences for an amazing community got it now one of the things that we've seen in previous gaming platforms like whether it's social or pcs we've seen like games from those platform come to mobile or come to different platforms from other platforms a lot of old nintendo ds games came to mobile for example a lot of these

you know old facebook social games and so from a game fan perspective as you're helping enable these new creative experiences on roblox and as you develop this relationship with a bunch of creators are you also thinking about potentially taking some of these things off of roblox to other platforms or is that maybe more in the future yeah i mean i think when we think about what we're doing here right we're building communities we're building brands we're building free-to-play game designs that in theory could live successfully everywhere we believe roblox is by far the best place in the media business to launch new brands and new products right now and and we have worked so hard to get to a place where we finally feel confident at truly investing in these big new ideas that that we're working on and once those are out and running our first priority is to grow with roblox roblox is exploding well you know we there's only so many hours in the day

to to think about where we should where we're going to go next in the long run we are developing deep core competencies in ugc gaming right ugc gaming we believe is going to be a major segment of the entertainment and gaming and media business over the next 10 years mobile free to play basically didn't exist right 12 years ago and now it's what like approaching a 70 billion a year consumer business we expect ugc gaming to take that same form and we expect roblox for the foreseeable future to dominate that business and so we are fully dedicated to roblox and in the future we would never limit where we go as a business we have huge dreams and we are going to go where we can achieve those dreams and right now that is definitely roblox that so those joe thanks so much for your time that's all the questions i have so maybe as a as a final comment do you have any final

words of advice for current or aspiring roblox developers and if they were interested in working with gamefam how could they get in touch with you yeah i mean my advice is if you want to make a roblox game whether you're 12 or whether you're 72 you absolutely should do it if i said anything differently i would not be being authentic to what i believe i believe if you want to create you should create it's as simple as that and there's no need to have a business plan there's no need to do to think about where it's going if you need to create you need to create and you should do it and that is what roblox offers it also offers the chance for people like ourselves who are later on in our careers to think about building a massive scaled super successful business here that can delight tens of millions of people around the world for years to come but at the end of the day it allows someone who's a one-man shop to just get on there and start

making something incredible and there's some amazing success stories from that process on the platform right now in terms of getting in touch you can go on our website or find me on linkedin i'm always happy to chat with aspiring creators please don't hesitate to reach out and and add me and at me on twitter it's just my name joe fahrens and i hope to hear from you all right joe thank you very much for your time there you have it folks please stay tuned follow gamefam follow joe on twitter and until next time that'll do it thanks joe thank you joe [Music] [Music]

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