Gaming platforms: Going beyond distribution [Roblox]

I want to start with an introduction to robots I think I think a lot of people will be familiar with the name still even we're kids closer okay fair enough all right moving out right okay fair enough all right well say we were kids in the age 7 to 13 age range but but most aren't can be aware of the sheer scale or the ambition of what's what's happening you just announced recently 90 million monthly active uses which is incredible so can you talk a little bit about about where roadblocks is yeah and I'm wearing sure so I think can you guys hear me yes yeah so roblox is the the largest UGC platform for kids and teens as you

mentioned we recently announced 90 million monthly active users we also have a community of developers of creators of around 2 million folks that every month come to the platform and and create experiences for us yeah everything more robust is created by our community so everything is UGC just for context we typically talk about the size of the platform as a whole but yeah we actually have several games on the platform made by our community that have more than 10 million monthly active users so if you think about that scale if you think about you know how hard it is to scale a game to even a fraction of that yeah 10 million incredible right how many how many games are you in that sort of scale I would say I would say this that can't really give you specific numbers but if you think about you know a major mega publisher and how many games of this scale they have we have many many more than that ok could you talk a little bit about your specific

role and and focus the company cuz you've had quite a illustrious career you've been working a previously Activision with triple a franchise that is and so what it seems like a quite change what attracts you to join roblox and what's your yeah so a roblox III see myself having two major goals that are interconnected the first one is to make sure there the number of experiences that are engaging on the platform the diversity of the experience is always like top-notch we really want aerobics to be a stick and engaging as we possibly can yeah the second goal is we I want to make sure that the developers or roblox are successful and obviously these two goals are interconnected because the more successful developers are the more they make better experiences the more users we get it's a it's a virtuous circle yeah essentially what I do in essence is I run all the teams are robots that touch games in any shape or form so going from our studio team or tools team or engine team or services team or avatar team avatar is this digital 3d identity that cuts across all of our

experiences game experience which essentially is all the UI and the the the basic setups in all of our games catalog which essentially is the marketplace where you can buy cosmetic items for your for your cat for your avatar so it's it's a very large team with a very very large scope okay it's a lot of different things I'm talking of larger scope you've you roadblocks are tackling a pretty ambitious combination of tasks I'm one how did you crying a a game engine for creators which is quite hard in itself you're also running a distribution platform right um and a social network for a comfort for a young audience which is tough so right how on earth do you manage that that's there are all three difficult things in themselves well I usually joke the robot is maybe like five to ten companies in one yeah we also run our own private cloud so we didn't have that on my list sure enough we also have our own avatar system you know there are companies that only do avatars out there so you have that and we probably have the largest catalogue for Avatar cosmetics that I

can think of well you know we're an engine as you mentioned tools to build on the on top of the engine all our services you know including analytics and matchmaking so is it's just the the scope of the company is truly staggering you know interestingly enough we really run a very decentralized model yeah we really believe in in personal accountability and all the product leaders of the company are the CEOs of their own area yeah and so the way we're on this is to set with the rest of the executive staff high-level goals for the year you know every 6 to 12 months basically reset those goals yeah and then we we make sure that our teams are in power to to pursue those goals in the self-organized and the coordinate with other teams but we really run it's very very decentralized ways which in a way is how we actually run roblox as a whole yeah we believe in empowering developers empowering creators you're not making games yourself right you know you just enable a nothing on the platform we are with

the exception of our Avatar content and not all of it yeah I talked about so she looks a little bit more obviously safety is an issue in Social Security is so especially with the audience you have W so can you talk about how you kind of managed the community in and deal with any toxicity or bad acts as kids quiet yeah yeah so civility and safety is really as part of the DNA of the company it's always being like when Dave our CEO and Founder yeah are the company more than 10 years ago there was one of the core principles it built the company around so it is it was true back then is very very true at now especially with the scale that we have achieved yeah and so the way we do it and we actually have a bunch of different we tackled the problem you're definitely with a big in a but related ways first of all every single piece of content that you see in any game could be like a mash a texture an image as sound is is hand moderated by a team of more than 800 humans okay

that work around the clock across geographies in multiple languages so everything you see is being seen and approved by a person okay let's call a big team of yeah of moderators yes second we actually use machine learning at AI to monitor all everything that he said on the platform yeah and we you know if you are under 12 or under we are actually apply very very strict filters yeah on what people say so for example people cannot exchange numbers phone numbers addresses that is strictly moderated out okay we also give our community tools to report and you know once the mat is reported the case is hand reveal with people can be banned forever temporarily and we have also extensive parental controls and you just manage all that for all the crises you're just correct so the creators don't have to worry about anything okay this is all like a turnkey solution so they make the game that's all you have to worry about everything else is taken care of for the who so I want to talk a

little bit more about the audience because I think um I think the conception historically and maybe one of the reasons boxers kind of flown a little bit under the radar I think it's in the scale you're at was that it was for a kind of a tween and maybe young teen audience but that kind of conversations with itself or some other you know he was it feels very much like that audience is broadening every year again you're getting older and yeah I don't think we got enough credit for our diverse our audiences so it's true that you know when we start again more than ten years ago we mostly attracted you know younger like younger users but obviously a lot of these users have stay with us yeah and they've grown with the platform so right now more than thirty percent of our users are there are more our 17 year years old or older okay so you know if you do the math with the size of scale of with the skill that we have and you said you're seeing that every year increasing you think that's gonna is there a limit to how I don't think so because what's happening is users are becoming creators that's people through that pipeline that we see yeah and so creators are building small games first

and then big games next and then a narrative creating teams and studios and the the content they're creating is actually mortgage more and more aged up in kurtal I believe that over time we're gonna see driven by our content more aged up you know users to come to the platform and also more people sneaked into the platform because they actually can find a content that they can enjoy okay um just one final question I guess where you've made a big push recently to push out and beyond North America so the hotline to localize into into different territories and that comparative about how that's gone but also from a platform perspective where where are your your these players is not emailing active users a lot like are they mobile players are they PC how much what's the split between mobile and PC and where roughly in the world is your biggest so let me take that question the international question first so we truly believe in a global audience so our our our mission is to unify the world through play yeah so

that is really what we're doing and so being international being global is a priority for us so right now fifty percent of our audiences in North America so we're already quite spread out yeah when it comes to to geographies okay and and one thing that is very interesting for us they were actually seeing countries that we do not explicitly serve so we're not localized in local languages these are countries that don't necessarily speak English as their first language they're actually embracing roadblocks and they're creating communities in some cases in the order of millions of people playing the our product not in their native language and in some cases you know we don't have servers in the countries so that the quality of the experience is not as good as if we were like in country that well presumably if you scare enough people then you do have a server in the country yeah of course yeah so that goes to my next point which is this has happened organically and really shows the power of a global community but at the same time we're proactively in expanding internationally and we do that in a few different ways

we're localizing a lot of our content and a lot of our tools and the platform we're actually partnering with a lot of local influencers make sure that they talk about roadblocks in that you know in a way that is compelling it wasn't always a lot of influence to say I was an influencer and then but most importantly you know is the fact that we connect with local developer communities because at the end of the day they know what content works best so these are the three ways we sort of we tackle them so that's what I'm going to come not gone see now in terms of who's creating content because there's two sides obviously you know and as obviously the interweb but on one hand you've got the actual players themselves that they're evolving to craters right so you and some of these players these credits are getting 10 million users it's incredible what's the split what's the kind of split whoops or percentage of the the players or active creators how many people actively creating stuff for the still you know if you do the ratio is 90 million monthly active users yeah around 2 million 2 million yes it's of those

again obviously that's tiered if people are just making games for the friends and at the top top end there's these 10 million companies yes 10 million plus yeah so it's actually interesting because we are very much a long tail platform and a long tail is actually pretty fat yeah so fat tail it's new thing fat tails coined a new word there we are you know you can see games that are not saralyn the top ten fifty that still have you know hundreds of thousands of users yeah and the reason is you know we we actually encourage discovery on our platform the community is very very active so the moment you are a game on roblox the community starts talking about you and you actually organically get a ton of views in a tummy you hear then it's obviously up to you to retain those but as far as a platform I don't think I've never seen a platform that serves as many users as we do and actually I have looked at the number recently because there was a question

and internally how good our discovery is and I looked at you know game number 100 which on any platform would be I can not entity here and in our on our platform is you know very very big yeah as far as user is concerned so so what I can say well I think we've established roblox is big diverse it's very ambitious very successful maybe doesn't get the credit disease but from a developer perspective that strikes me something that should be interesting so you've kind of got obviously now you got development studios that are being formed from young young brave all but presumably there's is there any reason why you can't have developers coming in to roblox from from the outside without having to you know we're not being kids let's have it better in these studios or professional studios crane games on the platform are you seeing that there's really no reason why there should not happen like we are not we know where I get it we're very we were a platform that believes in an individual initiative so we are not pushing any specific agenda we want developers to come and experience where robots is different and as you mentioned

our developers know that what they can get from the platform which is why they're actually investing their own money or their own earnings I guess yeah build bigger bigger Studios if I was a developer or in a small studio I would absolutely look at roblox as an option for a few reasons first of all again our audience is huge and scaling a game or robots a multiplayer 3d multiplayer game is essentially free mmm you don't have to think about creating all the services you don't need back engine back-end engineers to do it you don't need to pay a WS to do it and you know even if you build your infrastructure scaling a game from 1 to 100 users easy but from 100 to a million and from million to 10 million is actually really hard yeah there are entire companies they only do that and what we do is to basically tell our developers don't worry about just make the game and if you give me success successful and in a week as twenty million users you're fine your game is gonna run everything's gonna be great so for that reason and

again the scenarios where you can get all these users are not uncommon it's not like in theory you could get I mean there are plenty of games that do that we offer too and all our games are a natively multi platform so you make the game once you press the bat well three buttons and depending what platform going to be three buttons sorry three or four and the game is everywhere any wars cross-platform beautifully you have to worry about it if you want to publish globally you press the button you're everywhere so it really makes it very easy for anybody to to to scale and make 3d multiplayer experiences which again a lot of Indies don't do because it's complicated it's expensive there's a lot of money up front and and if your game doesn't make enough money you know you're basically at a loss yeah in our case that doesn't exist so how would you from a creative perspective obviously you know a lot of Elpis uses unity unreal or various other kind of engines how does how is the the the creative tools kind of compare compare if you're

a unity developer you can be able to come in is it is it you know face is for kids that sounds like really patronizing but presumably of like if seven or eight-year-olds can can do it then like a developer can pick it up really quickly on the phone yeah I wouldn't say our tools are for kids yes they are sorry we do but you have you know traditionally kids are making games on your platform right so yeah well I mean our developers so kids are I mean kids and teens are playing games you know that our developers actually you know they can be you know late teens but they're also in their twenties so it's not just you know young developers that make it at the game I would say that our our tools are are different you know in the sense that roblox architecture is a different beast from anything else that is out there in the marketplace so we run on a streaming architecture where as you know most of the other games basically you you create a and executable that you run yeah so the big difference is that the way we stream is not video streaming so we basically stream assets so think about it this way every time anybody launch a game all the

scripts textures and meshes are streaming into the client yeah so gives us two advantages the first one is you're still playing a client based game so all the concerns about video streaming games where you know things that might be laggy we don't have that because the game is actually running on the client at the same time we involved the benefits of a streaming architecture which is began Multi multi platform cross-platform play and also the fact that join terms are very quick so that their architecture is reflecting the way you build games so the tools and the technology that you use to build a game reflects that so there are differences if you're a unity developer on a real developer you need to understand our technology works yeah and no just pour me you cannot just you know drag and drop yes I'm saying at the same time again it's something that people do it's not you know the big of the other end of the day we you know we you need to know how to code we're not just like a you know a drag-and-drop tup although you can't actually create drag-and-drop experiences you can publish them not the

platform global all that but if you wanna build a real game you need to know the code and you know me to have engineers or people that know how to script ok my questions on my from wonderful is this talk was a little bit fun where the industry as well and I'll see stepping back a bit from pure of roblox perspective it feels that there's a lot of companies looking to disrupt the market right now there's obviously Google stadia announced there's a lot of other people working on the idea of net fit for Netflix for games and subscription services do you see that that's what would you be placing your bets now what you see is the big of a roblox obviously part of that disruption that's a different yeah so when it a obviously there's a lot of announcements and a lot of you know competition going on right now the question that I have is what is competition is doing for the end user so what experiences are these all these platforms delivering yeah good end users they're different from what these users are already have access to and I really have a great answer to that like at the end of the day this to me seems like a lot of business competition you know they're competing on exclusives or

paying a lot of money for them they are competing on how much money they give back to the developer community but the experiences are the same yeah and so that's why I don't I'm not sure that the oldest competition is actually a good thing for the end-user I mean if at the end of the day the end scenario is or the end the what this is gonna become is a bunch of platforms each platform will have you know their own content because they bought it and they want their own Contini content to attract users to play on that platform and each platform is gonna charge subscription as an end user if I want to play everything I will have to buy you know five subscriptions which doesn't feel like a great other people doing that moment with the TV they're a little bit iiii don't disagree but at the same time is that good it's not gonna last very long because today i don't have to write today i can go on any platform and i have access to most of the content yeah well tomorrow you're forcing me to pay a subscription to access your content but then I also want other people content so either stop playing or

I have to pay more okay so my point is I'm not really seeing a lot of interesting innovation as far as the end user experience is concerned I'm just seeing a lot of business competition and you know money competition okay I know you're up next Kato is any question for robots the 19 million using here we go there's question forefront here [Music] thousand more questions doesn't ask a good question so we do not mandate any particular monetization so our developers can build you know the same way you build any game you can make a premium game you could be you could build a free to play game with microtransactions you construct your Metro section any way you want it's up to the developers to do whatever they want so we have they have your own own in-house currency right so we're oh yeah yeah so I mean that the the way our the monetization works is when you build the

game you build a gaming you price everything in Robox which is our our platform currency essentially users buy Robox from us and then they spend them in the game and you essentially as a developer you accumulate a balance of roebucks and it's at some point you can convert it back into money whenever you want you can cash out and just realize that because you might ask one last way so what sort of money can you make so last year we distributed around 70 million dollars to our developers you know it really depends on on how your game monetize yeah but you can be making millions oh yeah absolutely this is a game and again these are these are you know small teams in many cases one person yeah makes like ten million dollars in a year yeah so I'm gonna be back coding on that after this so there we go all right thank you so much it's happens a really quick speed panel though will be much more based on our site and you'll be around to talk to people so if

you develop interesting robox check them out