Roblox Secrets to Success! | Matt Curtis VP Developer Relations

hi everybody and welcome today we have myself Joachim and Erik cress and we are joined by Matt Curtis who is VP of developer relations at my kids favorite game company roblox hi Matt how's it going doing whoa happy to be here awesome it's great to have you with us and for those in our audience not already aware roblox has been continuing to grow like crazy the mobile app is regularly in the top 10 grossing charts and has showed massive growth over the past five years there are actually 10 games that have reached 1 billion plays and in fact adopt me has surpassed 4 billion plays and set single game concurrent player records so first of all congrats on all the success of the platform and the massive popularity with players all these are great and also just to set the stage for our audience what we want to talk about today is primarily number one the history of roblox and how it became successful - how roblox monetizes now and potentially

in the future 3 what's coming up for roblox and for the key secrets to roblox is success but Before we jump into all of that Matt can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your role at roblox yeah sure happy to so I've been the mobile free play space for over a decade I started my career at Kabam where I focused on product management I actually crossed paths with Eric there so I've known him for quite a while very fortunate encounter of course for you oh yeah of course yes it's a great run yeah so focus on product management in the strategy and RPG studio then moved over to publishing towards them in my tenure as therefore five years pure of mine started a consulting company after that and that's actually where we got our first taste of roblox we were actually working on relax there one of our clients and this is the 2016

timeframe and we're helping out some of the top developers with game design stuff and I think it was really fortuitous because it allowed us to get a head start and kind of understand what robots was all about so much so that we tried to dive in and make a game ourselves it's so on the platform quite proud of it but you know we we went in mobile was kind of taking off especially for robotics the robots that app is doing really well so we tried to make a mobile first product and it flopped it just didn't work and I think partly because we really want to understand why and they're stubborn we kind of kept on digging in and we realized that you know there's a lot of gameplay mechanics that are probably prominent on the mobile space that are different on robots given the social network aspect of it so we continue to iterate we added in a lobby a lot of like social aspects etc and finally kind of realized some of these nuances and God - I think a pretty good spot

unfortunately it wasn't enough for us to jump full time so eventually one of our clients gree brought us on full-time I was there for a couple years focusing performance marketing and then jumped over to Zynga for a couple years where I liked growth marketing and luckily I was able to you know meet some some key contacts or roadblocks and stay in contact with them towards the end of last year there was a rule for developer relations that opened up and let me give him my background and my experience really my passion for games it just felt like the perfect fit so joined last October been running developer relations since and so far has been great run you know I'm just so thrilled to be at robotics and big growth has just been phenomenal right and I know this has been covered in other places but maybe just really briefly could we talk about in terms of the history and origin of roblox like what was the original concept and what were any big pivots

along the way to where we are today yeah well you know I think it actually starts with our founder and CEO Deepa Suki's so even previous to robots he actually founded a company called knowledge revolution and it was actually a physics engine that was in the education space and the one thing that he was always really impressed by is how creative the kids who used it and I think that was basically the foundation of roblox he wanted to create something that allowed others to just create unique instances unique experiences and even though we've grown like crazy and you know I think for thrill of where we are and where the ecosystem has become and no one could have known how big it would have become from from that point the overarching theme though this is still there you know a lot of the content on the platform or games you don't need to make a game though you know as a developer you can make anything we have other creations that are just really cool instances to show

off higher fidelity graphics stuff like that the really unique experience is we have others that are educational and are trying to teach Lua another code coding a languages so the overarching goal set is still there and I think now with the majority of our content is games we have changed and pivoted to trying to connect the world through games trying to connect the world through gameplay and really trying to get eventually to a more aspirational goal of like creating the human Coe experience so I think somewhat audacious really aspirational would think ready player one I think that's where we eventually want to be want to go but yeah generally speaking it's it's been consistent about Johnny and when I look at some of the mobile data it seems like there's just been slow steady growth over time but were there any sort of key moments along you know the company's history where

something big has happened that allowed for much greater traction or has it just been like that slow steady growth yeah definitely slow and steady that's been a big part of it we would definitely we have this one value that we really hold ourselves to call take a long view and I think it's rare for a company to actually do that and actually practice you know that type of value I robox was founded way back in 2000 before and roebucks studio which is a development platform that was released two years later in 2006 and there wasn't really a way to make money at that point we just had a bunch of users were hobbyists who wanted to create content with your friends and then we started to layer on more things we launched mobile in 2012 versus iOS and then Android in 2014 and then in the middle of that we also allowed our developers to start dev Xing meaning they could take some of the robux that they were able to crew with their

creations and actually transfer it to real money then later in nights a 2016 we launched on xbox which is another nice moment and in fact recently we just did a bundle with for the Xbox s it's brand-new you can actually buy an xbox and then you get some extra in-game items in some extra robot Sasori cool more recently we've been really doubling down on UGC though so usually see obviously all our content with our experiences UGC but our avatar items weren't to begin with actually roblox created all of those a late last year we started to unlock that for the community so now the community has ability to build on UTC we've been slow rolling it but by end of year we're hoping to get all of our avatar items all our catalog items to 100% UTC so that's really exciting yeah and all of that I mean has led to where we are today and just for

some quick stats I think you know we're at 115 million monthly active users 1.5 billion hours of monthly engagement so it's been a wild ride I think it's even gonna grow further well I it's unbelievable that you've only been there for a year you sound like the converted of some cult well I mean keep in mind that I've been involved since 2016 yeah I don't know I'm all for it anyway Curtis and and one of the smart guys from Kabam I mean there's a big group of people that were pretty smart at Kabam it's like it's almost like a business school class cuz they all went off to do really cool stuff Chris Pitts was the guy that you started to work with their Christmas is awesome he says he says hi yeah Curtis is one of those rare breeds though who's really smart and also nice you know crisp it's not so nice but he's actually really nice so anyway I'm really happy to have you on and also

you know frankly I don't know all that much about robotics we talked yesterday a little bit so this will be good for me to under kind of understand I did meet with the CEO and another guy from Kabam Jeff Mayer who is also very very smart and very nice most of the time so I do know a little bit but I it's it's good opportunity for me actually to kind of get up to speed with what you all are doing so I guess the one thing that I always care about because I'm the finance banker type I suppose is how do you make the money right a monetization design so I'm just gonna ask a few questions around that to see where you are now and where what the plans are for the future etc so what's interesting about your guys's thing isn't from what I've seen is that you guys both do cosmetic as well as pay2win right there are modes in there in which you could spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars just to roll over other players in the in the game so I guess you know

how do how does your player base handle all that like is it the fairness of that pay to win cuz pay to win this basically something that is getting more and more important to unlock for a console space similar to what FIFA is done and every experiment that's done with any type of pay to win gets a lot of blowback from the community so I'm just wondering how you guys handle that yeah for sure um well you know our developers choose that a month as their content so you know they can choose if they want to go the vanity route as you said or if they want to offer in game booths or in-game items some do the combination and both others actually don't really focus on monetization at all I think what's really unique about robots as a social aspect because you basically have a studio platform that a lot of people to create stuff but then you have this foundational layer that's a social network and I think that leads

to a lot of design decisions that you generally don't see frequently other platforms the other piece of the puzzle that's unique to roblox is that we offer a lot of benefits out of the box that you don't get elsewhere so we do all the infrastructure you don't need to touch any net code you know you can you can do one push publish and you have the game out there that's that's available on all platforms or platform agnostic all Geo's we support over 200 of them and you don't have to deal with any of the back-end infrastructure stuff the other thing is the Box you get synchronous gameplay with that social network so a lot of developers will focus on that first and foremost and as I noted earlier like that was actually the biggest learning curve for me when I first came on so the monetization aspects are interesting because they they are a little different based on kind of apart from gameplay I think vanity is a much bigger aspect of roblox

because expression people love the trading games as well that's another big aspect so when it comes to to pay to win though I think the given the social aspect it only self-corrects like the games that I didn't go too far one way or the other people just don't play them because they have a wealth of other content to play on the platform because it's so easy to publish it's so easy to create it's so easy to iterate and we also have a ton of users and I think user acquisition is also really affordable motives other trends so for a new developer to get on that's that's another really interesting mechanism what we want to do is provide more benefit to developers and in fact to your point of monetization because I didn't know there sub we just want to create really interesting experiences and don't care about kind of like monetization mechanics we actually just launched something called premium payouts this is about a month ago we just gave our first payment a couple

days ago and we're just paying developers off of user engagement so you guys were a social network Rahzel it's another really interesting way that we can go about it we care about the engagement more than anything else and we want to ensure that our developers focus on that kind of first and foremost so I think there's a lot of interesting things that we're doing more to come we're trying to incentivize developers just to make really great content hi and so you're basically saying you guys don't really you know try to regulate what how what they charge and how much they charge you're saying the users are basically regulating that themselves well we do have some rules in place so I mean we make sure there's transparency you know if there's any region based rules etc that's that's definitely something that we insure yeah what happens in Belgium right so we actually have rules for Belgium and we have a really robust moderation team to deal with that so when it comes to that stuff we definitely have rules and policy in

place now definitely speaking okay good I was just going to say generally speaking though a developer it's it's up to them how they want to design their game all right the other thing I have to ask because my kids will kill me if I don't what is the deal with your language filtering system in which they can't chat and talk to their friends the way they want to talk to them can you explain why that's so frustrating for them yeah well we do it we do it because safety is actually our number-one concern so I mentioned a lot of cool things we do like infrastructure and stuff but if you were to stack rank like well what is most important to us safety is by far the most important we have a lot of players under 13 it's it's really important that we take that into account so if our your your kids under 13 I should probably know this yes there yeah that's the case 12 yeah so we're more stringent and and how we deal with users under 13

you know chat we severely restrict certain rewards and phrases and numbers so ippolit apologize to them for me but it's it's because we really really believe in safety all right and the other thing that I was actually really curious about so we're seeing this huge hyper growth on mobile right now and you guys were primarily a PC before that I believe and you're also available on the Xbox but not on Sony's platform which is a little bizarre so where do you guys see kind of the most potential for growth going forward is it you know obviously combination of all three but I'm more looking at the guise of PS 5 and Xbox you know series X do you see a lot of growth on console or is it primarily going to be coming out of mobile I mean we're seeing a lot of traction on everything I know it doesn't I know you're can be satisfied with a answer but I mean we are we're platform agnostic right like as a developer you

can one click publish in your pretty much every platform you just you do have to make some minor UI UX changes except for for Xbox and whatnot but yeah we're seeing we're seeing growth in every area Mobile has been the biggest one over over the last few years so that's a big one for us but I think it's also due to the fact that my team is responsible for working directly with developers and making sure that they're supportive but are prodding engineering teams were constantly trying to introduce new tech and whatnot so I think for us and we can get into it a little bit later as well I have some some concrete examples I can provide but we're just trying to create higher fidelity tech infrastructure and tools for developers so they can create deeper and more complex experiences and I think that leads to growth I think our international expansion has also been really good you know we started to do translations but we're working on some pretty nice machine translation tech which should help localize and

potentially cultural eyes get the right tone as well for certain Geo's but you know we're seeing a lot of traction and places like Latin America Eastern Europe Southeast Asia of South Korea so I think it's more diverse in just like the core platforms and especially because it's so easy for our developers are published on this cool alright JK go for it yeah so maybe shifting gears a little bit to more about the platform and the deaf community I guess the first question there is more about the pipeline so what are some of the key priorities and do you have any guidance in terms of you know new features or capabilities you mentioned higher fidelity but what are some of those key priorities and when is some of that stuff come out yeah so we have a lot coming down the pipe you know like I said a priority to developers we're gonna provide robust technology really powerful tools and compelling value props so I can give some examples I'm for each but like when it comes with technology one thing that we're really aspiring to do by enough year is actually facilitate 200 player

servers by diesel so imagine on row box you I mean you could be a new user you can download roblox to do you go and build an instance you press publish and by default 200 players can play your game concurrently and you didn't have to touch anything on the back like that that would be pretty amazing so that's what we're trying to do that's pretty aspirational working towards that on the tooling side we've done a lot of cool stuff I think most recently we released something called collaborative editing so it allows developers to code and build synchronous thing at the same time excuse me so we have this concept of team create where you go into an instance with your team members and got built at the same time but you know editing in real time has always been challenging usually there's mechanisms where you have to lock scripts and all that stuff we've actually created a way that you synchronously do it I'm you can actually see team members changing code but we'd have different write commands

and whatnot so you can make sure that everything is his phone in the right direction but that's been really awesome for us and we've gotten some positive feedback from developers community on that and I think from the value prop perspective premium payouts so you know as I said earlier I think the biggest learning curve especially for new developers is just understanding the consumer behavior you know because we're social network people consume content at a very different can and so expectations are really different than other platforms but what we want to do is just allow developers to focus first on engagement so then they can really get that right with Premium payouts you may get paid for that because it could even subsidize some your development and then you can focus on monetization if you want to but you know monetization is usually an augmentation just a base game so if you don't have a solid foundation it's just going to be a multiple awful small amount so we think that's actually it's most important and just in terms of

development support right now is it Lua based as far as the development is concerned are there plans to support other programming languages or its I can't say anything for other languages now right now it is Loula dad that's our that's our primary coding language the one thing I will say for for new developers this is speaking personal experience even if you didn't have experience with Lua though it's a relatively easy language to pick up especially if you have coding experience or expertise so don't don't be scared of Louisville yeah it's it's mainly duo right now okay and then in terms of like new and upcoming games and so is there anything the pipeline you think could be the next mute city or adopt me anything we should be looking out for yes as a platform we don't pick favorites so I can't say crest is shaking his head dude you can have a personal favorite right

regardless I think it'd be really hard to say like the games are so innovative there's so many games just pop out of nowhere occasionally Muser you're just so new and cool I think there's been John Roos and subgenres like the fine on roblox that haven't existed previously kress would you like oh look you could have a favorite child look my favorite childs my daughter I said it all right my son come on it's gotta be one that you like or that you enjoy yeah there's a ton I like the entire like but I want to play favorites alright so roblox we've seen like the growth over the past eight years I although I characterized it as slow and steady growth it's been actually kind of pretty crazy growth yeah how much longer do you guys like how much further can this thing go like how much more of the world can you guys capture yeah it's a good question I mean we've been thrilled with what we built

and you could system that we have and like cress is not gonna like this answer either but we we have it's in our DNA that we always target like really aspirational an audacious goal so the way we think about growth is exactly that and unfortunately in the past when we've done that we've nailed it and I don't think it's necessarily a question of like when it stabilizes it's it's always the way we view it of when we hit our goal okay what's the next big thing we can do what what do we need to do to get maybe it's something that is audacious you know we're gonna try and bite off and go after so can't really give you a answer a direct answer that question but I think the way that we approach it is even if we lure it able to hit and there was some stabilization we booked for another step function increasing we want to go after and that would be the new call right and I think that maybe the the common view in terms of roblox from a environment ecosystem

perspective is that you've got like this this set of users that are players right and those are like the young kids up to you about 13 to 16 probably a little older than that now and then you've got like the developer crew who are like 16 through early 20s who are creating the content for those younger kids but at the same time we've now been seeing like the developer pee outs you know increasing quite dramatically so 30 million in 2017 70 million 2018 over a hundred million last year and so I guess the question I have is to what extent are is this the the developer community don't starting to profession when do more when you're bigger professional developers start jumping in is that starting to happen and like what what is your perspective in terms of like the you know the the inflection point or the turning point when a lot more developers start jumping in yeah I mean especially with the

recent news of the new funding we've been getting a lot of interests and again I think for new developers the biggest learning curve just understanding the nuances of the platform and really the players on roblox because they are different they expect different things the games are different but I think the way to think about it actually is like imagine roblox is like a large MMO with a whole bunch of unique experiences almost many of us that's basically how it works because by default everything's synchronous by default you don't aware of the backend stuff but I think one of the biggest benefits is for for new developers especially it's really easy to create and get stuff live it's also like I said earlier like relatively inexpensive compared to other platforms to get users into your so you can constantly iterate and figure out what works best and I think that that's a key component with that being said we're also really working on some big

tech improvements whether that is the performance of the infrastructure the fidelity level you know concurrently hosting 200 players from the get-go so I think there's a lot of compelling things for new developers and then when you tack on premium payouts it gives even a bigger value prop to try because if you can create an engaging game you're gonna make money regardless so if you focus on monetization let me be clear here so the 100 million includes micro transactions that are done within the individuals individual games or developers games yes on top of what they make on micro transactions the 100 million is the payouts from the Devex that the developers from that year use on our lives so it's it's what they're making from their instances from their creative experiences so this is my

biggest question well there's I have a few more later but the one thing that I am trying to get my head around is in an absurd example what if EA says hey we really want to support roblox we are making FIFA on roblox right and they would come in and take 70% of the audience away from all your Indies developers would you they then make the 70 million and the rest would carve out the 30 you know like why is it that more big publishers like that are not getting involved with roblox and building their content on roblox and would you allow it even if they wanted to you know tell me that's an interesting question I mean theoretically yes I personally think if they tried to do that I don't know if they'd have that much success I think there's a lot of nuances that they need to understand and the experience is really different than probably what they're used to from the design perspective but it's not necessarily a zero sum either I think as you've seen we went from thirty to

seventy two hundred over the past four years we're expecting payouts to be even higher this year and we expect it to go up even more or so even if he did come in and started to make a lot of money I still think our existing developers still be really successful why they have it that's a good question I I think part of it is they don't they don't know about the opportunity I think another part is it's not as easy just to come in and reproduce what's working other platforms so I think there's a there's a steeper learning curve that needs to happen right and we talked about this briefly yesterday and I hadn't even thought about it is that the synchronous game play is probably the biggest potential roadblock right because no games on mobile I shouldn't say that not many games on mobile actually do synchronous right well and totally yeah given the social nature and the synchronous game play it's just a different game design than would work on

mobile all right you're more recently this has changed a little bit you've seen some Emma knows come in from especially from East Asia I mean the majority of those are asynchronous I do some synchronous game play obviously though all of the battle Royales I think those are extensions of kind of their core offering though traditionally mobile it's going to be a PDE asynchronous experience there might be some white social attack on the mid to end game if you're an RPG or a strategy game yes your your endgame is going to be more alliance or tilt based asynchronous social game play so I think it is rare for a lot of mobile developers to think about it this way and generally speaking it was caused prohibitive right you would if you wanted to go global you'd have a pop and every major Keough so that's something that's I think a huge benefit that we provide that you're not going to get anywhere else maybe the last question I have for you is really around so the developers

that have been finding success the you know the meet cities that adopt means these guys what what are like what are the kinds of developers that are having the most success or what are some of the characteristics of those developers or development teams that allow them to be successful on the road block platform in other words what are they doing right yeah I think I think it all goes back to kind of understanding you know the players on roblox so the developers who have the most success or those who take the time that understand what works some of those we understand that you know it's it's intuition they've been on the platform for a long time is through experience I think for new developers it there's a little bit more of a learning curve but you know if they take the time to iterate test things out figure out what works and what doesn't I'm especially with the stuff we've already talked about I think they can get there and we're seeing success with some new developers who do that but yeah it's definitely understanding the fundamentals of the social network and

how players play it all right the the thing that I always try to point out is what the key challenges are you know I have to pick pick it apart right of course you know not everything is just easy right so I guess my actually answered my first question I think earlier but I want to talk about something else as well what is the business model for like developers that don't make money they don't have good microtransactions systems in your anything I mean is does your CEO take like this purest view that subscriptions are not an option you know like the James Halliday thing and ready player one right where we're not we're gonna let free for everyone is that kind of the mantra that's how I envisioned it right is that we'll never charge for access type thing so anyway can you answer that quickly is there other word the the the payouts that you were talking about earlier pretty creative I guess that's kind of answers the question to some degree but do you think you ever see a situation in which you'll do subscriptions for non revenue

generating yeah so I mean we have a subscription it's that's premium users but you don't need a subscription order to spend any money to have a great experience on roblox and you're right I think you've echoed what our what our stance is we want to make sure that's still the case what is the sad what is this description this description just gives you see or something what would I give you currency at the moment okay good but you know to your point I think we want to ensure that players always have a great experience regardless they you know spender they don't with that being said I think developers can choose how they want to monetize and how they actually want to support the players you know in their creations so you know we we have some developers who don't like I said earlier one aman monetize at all we have a few instances on roblox that literally are just showing off the fidelity level they're really photorealistic and you

can go there and hang out your friends and that's all it's just showing off the technical capabilities of the platform so I think there's a lot of diverse creators out there who have different goal sets okay and then the second one is clearly the demographic issue right where how you guys planning on expanding beyond this kid demo and build content that attracts an older audience and keeps older audiences engaged with your platform longer I guess is the real question yeah so I think there's two ways really going about this the first one is is through their improvements of the technology and the tooling so I gave some examples before I have a few more but you know aspirationally we want to get to a point where you can support 200 players concurrently out of the box or working on kind of streamlining our avatars so there's no joints it actually looks much more fluid and realistic

we're really focused on physically based rendering so higher fidelity assets more photo realism collaborative Eddie and I spoke about and also machine translation so I think a lot of that focus and there's a lot more stuff on the roadmap big and small improvements that we want to make to the technology in the performance I think that's one way that you can become more appealing during demo just by providing our developers with those tools in that level performance I also think you know some of the other distinct advantages that we have especially for new developers to come in if there's new developers that you have created content before for an older demo are the premium based payouts the fact that you can iterate really quickly you can launch really quickly you can get users and very fast and affordably so I think that's that's what makes it a really special place especially for you know

more higher fidelity aged up content culture and then competition wise we don't see kind of whole lot competing directly I mean it's certainly minecraft is probably top of mind given Microsoft's positioning what they're trying to do create this ubiquitous game on every platform so similar to what what robox does and then we have a new company that's starting off called Manticore I can never pronounce this right Manticore Manticore Manticore and head Manticore yeah we did before you need to play more dungeons no that's the scary part is I did play Dungeons & Dragons and for some reason this name is just blowing me away okay so a buddy from EA is actually the VP of Marketing there and so I'm he's promised me a demo but given current situations gonna bit of a challenge but how do you how do you find both those companies as

competitors is there any other competitors that your guys are kind of worried about or is it you don't spend a lot of time worrying about competitors it sounds like but now we try to focus on our on our own stuff but I think you know manticores built is really impressive obviously minecraft speed success and and Microsoft is continuing to push it I'll tackle Manticore first I think the biggest afraid differentiation between us and manticores is our user base I mean 115 million the active users that took a long time to get to and I think it's a really huge competitive advantage when you look at Minecraft obviously they've had tremendous success they're huge and I personally play a lot of Minecraft so I love the product I think that the biggest differentiation there though is that on roblox you can create your own expression you can do something that's totally unique minecraft you can definitely create content but it's it's

somewhat within the scope of their own version system so I think both are awesome products but aren't exactly the SAMS or what that's it I mean those seem to be kind of the biggest potential roadblocks that you guys have is if competitors I guess what I worry about is a competitor's come in create more of a compelling system and take away the best best spending audience per se right so they peel off the bigger spenders that are looking for more compelling content I mean that is a risk but given your and and I think what Jeff was talking about I don't know if you can talk about this is that the difference also is that you guys have created a both a buy and sell model right where we have developers that are making games and then also an audience to actually spend money on games now that's kind of how we articulated it like Manticore guys are just starting from scratch right they have nothing really right and

it's going to take time from the build that network yeah I mean that's what I was trying to get out with just kind of quoting that they may use I think we have the supply and demand economics and teeter-totter is really difficult and it generally takes a lot of time did scale and they kind of critical mass so it's something that we know to achieve over years and years of really thoughtful implementation just continuing to do what we do best but yeah I think that's how you know we're we're approaching the future we just want to continue to create awesome content tools products and we feel if we can do that then we'll continue to be on this nice trajectory right a Minecraft doesn't have that either right they don't have any user generated my car does have some user-generated stuff your saleable marketplace yes it's for sale but I'd say the one distinction though is that you know or or offering is more

unique and robust yeah okay all right Joe alright I think that's it so Matt thanks very much for your time and I guess last two points one do you have any message for our audience and two if anyone wants to contact you let's say some developers you'd like to develop for roblox is there a good way for them to contact you yeah sure so I mean just saying it again one of the coolest things about roblox anyone can create so it's just super easy it's really easy to data rate it's it's an awesome platform as far as contacting we actually do have an alias its dev relations at roblox calm again that's dev relations that roblox like I'm sure we'll put that in the copy but happy to hear from anyone we just want to support and help anyone who's interested in Korean regardless of their experience level so that's that's our main goal just to make it easier for for

people to create create awesome content on the platform great alright I think that just about does it thank you very much Matt thanks for having me appreciate it