two & a half gamers session #3 - Is Roblox evil mega corp or money making machine?

[Music] welcome welcome everybody this is no gaming podcast two and a half gamers discussing the latest news fun stuff and then obviously dropping some knowledge as well but you know don't forget this is also 4 a.m conference discussion feeling about the gaming industry so let's dive in welcome guys felix and jakob hello there how was your week very very good it's a lot of happening we'll get into i got a lot of questions this week from some devs uh about one particular ad unit i'll go into that bit later nice but before we kind of just dive into it i just wanted to make a announcement in the spirit of self-improvement so

it was brought to my attention by my two dear co-hosts last week that i use a lot of fillers and in the spirit of self-improvement i will now uh or we all will donate one euro per filler uh every week to a charity uh of our listeners choosing and we're gonna have a little poll on linkedin after this podcast comes out to choose it so we're gonna be counting fillers from now on very good well don't worry i will definitely be counting it and that was the one that was the one already yep got it there you go there you go okay and uh and you know uh you wanted to do a quick round of intros again because you feel a bit intimidated that nobody knows you felix so please can you just introduce yourself as well and the aqua bezel and then i'm gonna tell uh our

listeners about myself too yeah sure so i'm felix i'm the director of admonization at network inc i have worked at dsps and ad networks before so anything that has to do with in-game ad monetization i've seen how the sausage is made and i've also made the sausage oh nice that's nice uh so names jacob or you can hear it in the conversation also reno uh pretty much head of monetization and trap light currently but more on the game design stuff the jobs that i did before was i guess 80 percent game design and currently lots of projects are pretty much coming through my hands so that's there but uh mostly focus on game design system design and all the nitty-gritty parts of monetization that are pretty much tying to the game economy which is of course today's trend favorite subject amazing

and my name is mate and i'm independent ua consultant working in games for nine years already now having a team of motion designers 10 at the moment and i work very closely with the server developers around the world to grow their games that's it and uh guys welcome again so let's uh let's dive into the news what's happening not many acquisitions this this week i know i know right it's like a week nobody bought anyone or maybe there is some m a but not that huge as the week before oh yeah we'll we'll definitely see some more acquisitions later down the line i can i can guess that this will be happening this year why why are you so sad about it like well we are going to see something like that that's how this industry works it's just expecting like we talked about

it before that we are guessing that ea's the next company to be acquired on the chopping block or play rigs yeah let's let's start with the news i guess um so we're looking at some of the blizzard related news lately uh so there's this historic uh start of the game industry union in north america i think one of the first ones that's actually gonna be within a really big company uh specifically activision blizzard where keyway workers are trying to establish it uh within raven software and originally they pretty much said that they will give blizzard until 25th of january which already passed out and blazer did not voluntarily choose to recognize activision blizzard didn't voluntarily choose to recognize the union so now i get what a surprise it is

it is in workers hands because if they can sway a lot of people on their side they still need to be uh recognized as a union as activision business needs to start bargaining with them if i understood the whole report correctly but on top of it uh there was this sudden change within the organization in the mentioned company where qa people were pretty much put around all of their teams and not within a qa team just by actually you need to you need to mention that the key way of call of duty team that was the yeah you have gold duty main team that they wanted to form the union 34 people and what happened well now they are definitely sitting with other teams just not to be together trying to create the union well not surprised again i think i saw it even like the gdc survey from this year that there's like

60 or 55 developers uh wanting to get the game industry union established so this this number is just rising every year pretty much yeah but it's gdc service so you know that's a little bit biased slightly yeah slightly different from the the mobile game the industry anyway the gdc audience is quite well in the pc and uh in that direction rather than mobile developers this kind of just also piles on what we've been saying before like how bad are things in there because traditionally if you think about it forming a union is traditionally at least like a blue collar thing and blizzard qa that's definitely like i would say more of a white collar job and like for them to have to actually want to group together in a tech company that generally is known for getting you know the cushy lunches and the good deals like what is going on in there like it must be so bad like well what

there was the um the posts from uh from jessica qa which we mentioned i think in the first session they're earning 60k a year which is i think really low salary for north america you know you can can you imagine like having that kind of salary in let's say san fran or are they in san francisco though or are they like in some other city not probably in san francisco specifically is it irvine california yeah okay there you go but still how much you pay for uh for rent i think this has to do with the this kind of hidden tax that's kind of plugging the gaming industry where you are expected to be paid less because you're working on the thing that's your dream job and this is kind of a really bad mantra that i think needs to definitely go away because it's just the worst to be honest yeah but still i would also take a pay cut to work on

diablo for example but not for a long period of time just you know just for a year maybe two years tops and then just move on because well you can definitely get better salary elsewhere and you still enjoy working that's the thing you need to be happy to be able to work in gaming industry right or well working in gaming industry definitely makes me happy so and that's that's the main point yeah but you know now that there's like much more competition even with in the market of like a job market of northern america then i think like everybody gets better and these kind of problems that are or let's say the the companies that were built originally on this thesis are kind of suffering from this now which is now that you see these movements like let's establish a union now yeah well sure let's see what happens when microsoft comes in there and cleans up like say what you want to buy microsoft

but they're known for you know having a good hr system nice all right let's uh let's move on so i want to talk about something that i've actually gotten four questions from from four different devs this week and that is rewarded interstitial ads and the reason i don't know have you guys heard about these reward interstitial ads uh well a couple of months ago the rewarded interstitial ads will be available on google i think but that's it i mean no other information yeah so exactly right so six months ago google and facebook announced they're going to roll out rewarded interstitial ads so it's an interstitial ad that pops up and then users can opt out of the interstitial ads five seconds into it and then forego the reward or stay watch the ad for 30 seconds and then get the reward so

admob right now is pushing super hard for this format because it's still in beta which in google is you know it means it's on not a very strong footing but they're pushing super hard and i think that's why i got so many questions from devs this week about it and they also pitched me quite a lot facebook used to push it but not as much any pretty much a sign that they're kind of abandoning it and here's my little mini rants like whatever you do if you're a dev don't monetize with this format like you're opening yourself up to such like unnecessary risk and such unnecessary stress by using this format so when you're using interstitial ads banners or rewarded in mobile you're always using a mediator which means you always get priced because there's competition but for this reward interstitial ad abs there's only admob and facebook that actually support this format which means you're going into a duopoly and we all

know that on ios facebook is pretty much a non-existent player at the moment so which means that for ios you will be entirely reliant on admob to pay you the highest price which i guarantee you they won't like i don't have them yeah absolutely no and i've seen it like when you have one ad network and then you add mediation you double ad revenue all the time so pretty much you're accepting 50 lower ecpms if you use this format and i guarantee you that admob are pushing super hard for this right now because no one is using it and they're trying to do a last hurrah to push it and i will bet that this time in a year from now they're gonna sunset this project in a really short time frame and then if you have if you're monetizing with it you're gonna have to change your game and you're gonna hold the bag on this don't like it do i get this right so this is something in between the spectrum of interstitial

rewarded video where interstitial you don't control at all as a player it just pops up to your face and that's it you you exit or click it and reward the video you voluntarily choose to watch because there was a reward offered to you before so here the thing is the hybrid yeah you need to watch it for five seconds anyway you cannot close it yeah and then the reward is shown for you to continue watching yeah so i guarantee you there is some genius product manager in like admob or google that's been like oh yeah i can improve completion rates on our interstitial apps and that's why it's added this reward and when i spoke to adbob two months ago i was asking okay so do i get rewarded at ecpms for this and they're like no no no same as interstitial i'm like so why should i use interstitial and it's like oh yeah because you improved completion rates i'm just like

what's like now's the catch i was looking for how's that relevant oh my god okay nice but okay yeah that's my little mini runs it's just got a lot of questions over it lately but until the only way i would say you should use this if you're a developer is if you see this coming on like more mediation so you get more competition because that's the only way that you as a developer can guarantee you actually get paid the highest or a fair price for your inventory so if you're only getting google and facebook it's not going to be as high as it would if you're selling a on open mediation marketplace this is very similar to actually pre-registration campaigns with google i mean this is so useless yeah i have no idea like why every rep out there oh almost every rep is pushing it so hard you know just to spend money on pre-reg campaigns you can't optimize it properly so it's like you know giving flyers in san francisco

metro that would be more effective i would say this is this not even like install optimization it's like pre-reg so nobody cares so you will pay the same cpi sometimes even higher cpi's than mai campaigns so mobile app install campaigns so like how how does that make sense no idea really yeah okay so the lesson for me as a game designer is just you know either use interstitials or rewarded videos but this doesn't seem to fit in any like even for me like how do i slot in the reward there in the actual ad which is game related then yeah that's why it's so silly because you have to design around this new ad unit and make it a bit different from rewarded and that might actually cannibalize your rewarded video as well so it's just bad idea i don't see any good ideas about it right now like i don't yeah well that's why nobody's using it i guess

that's why they're pushing it so hard now it's very similar to uh good old days with i think carousel ads on facebook facebook at some point in the past was pushing it so hard like yeah i use it use it for gaming it's amazing ad unit so you're using it obviously no performance anything and then after a while and it can work sometimes but it's really good and suitable for e-commerce brands obviously because you can show the different products in the in the car solar ad format for gaming not at all sometimes you can show up different characters and units yes but that's uh that's it so then when i asked facebook about it again after a couple of months of they're pushing it like hey okay so should we use carson no no no no no no it's uh you know it's uh it's not very effective like hour really who would say what a surprise uh the same thing i think it was with uh with canvas experience but i can't remember how was

it called because kind of well it was kind of us but it can be confused with the facebook canvas where which was the platform for the games 10 years ago yeah whatever nevertheless you said it worked some cases when did actually the carousel ads work for gaming when you show uh different characters and units from the game actually so like more hardcore games than i guess more probably yeah well mid-core in the hardcore so if you use the heroes all you have uh that's perfect but then years ago um they're pushing so hard to create the story in five images so you have the the carousel and then uh every image is uh one part of the story so just flashing the store page images pretty much i need to take i need to go uh for a delivery man because uh my life just next to me so give me a sec give me a sec commercial break

commercial break and a short message from our sponsors it's really interesting i i talk about this i think i saw it sometimes uh from the game cam conference the google guy was promoting it but it seems it is horrible no like i even asked them like what guarantees do you have because google is known for shutting down projects that don't perform what guarantees do you have that you won't do the same with this he's like oh yeah we won't do that trust me i'm like a graveyard explaining his last words i'm gonna go pee again because i just drank a little water before this

oh by myself and remo doesn't want to be all by his self yeah i'm recording baby [Laughter] but it must be some kind of sales quota right now because so many people are asking about it so google must be

pushing so hard so it's like yeah we're going to give it one last raw push this quarter and see if we can get the numbers up how's the numbers by the way all good what do you mean with the cover let me grow ones over 2000 rate map i'm going to check it out and give you the latest so one in i think it's one in every 29 and half athens in berlin right now i have kerbin and my dear girlfriend is one of them but i thought i had to isolate because those are old rules but i have the booster so i don't so uh

tested negative today i'm out of here yeah we're just getting up and up and up every day but currently we can heat that peak of 15k and it seems like this where the testing capacity ends so we won't go higher the positivity just get higher it already went through 44 from what i can see like monica compared to when i had delta it doesn't look as bad yeah it's slowly uh like fading into the new cycle and the ukraine is taking the main like green space now what do you mean uh yeah of course slovakia now that nato said that they're gonna host like thousand soldiers here like yeah oh you guys are getting soldiers um we first need to kind of push the crony mafia into background because they're just like like

making demonstrations that they want to go with russia and stuff like that i guess like if you're a mobster you prefer russia because then you can flourish a bit more i guess those are all former communist people man like they just switch coats after velvet revolution so yeah but of course it's best for mobsters to go with russia it's you know best worst part is that these guys have like so big of an influence on facebook and all the social media like we have this one guy who just have like 200k followers all like senior people and he's just building communistic nonsense like convincing nonsense that sounds like a very good part or to the bonus section yeah yep okay uh we can we can move on uh we can move on i i need to stop

ranting about facebook because my um personal account is still banned but it should be unbanned on monday so uh should be yeah it should be i was on the on the support with uh so many people already no one can or could help me so uh facebook you are doing very good job thank you very much for being such a great ua partner did uh do if you spent more money would they be more helpful you think are you like are you taking some kind of mid-tier how does it spend 25 million in my whole career i think that's a pretty good amount of money to not being banned but is it all is it all in your facebook account okay that's not yeah that's true yeah there we go there we go that's true but facebook was always 80 of the spent up until now up until now so maybe that that's the case facebook and they they banned me hey you you come back and spend

more money this is not this is definitely not how they can motivate me okay let's continue yeah okay okay okay okay so blizzard is making a survival game i think uh they are inspired by their own um atmosphere and the situation in the survival mode they are in at the moment but jokes aside they're working on a new brand a new um in the whole new universe so whatever that means uh it's a new aaa title and uh and it's not the spin of an existing blizzard game but the new ip so this is new that's that's interesting it's it's first time in eight years i think yeah yeah well the overwatch was the last one right yeah but also keep in mind that overwatch wasn't really a new ip where overwatch was built on the ashes of the project titan mmo so like considering that the new ip was in the making like far

behind so i would say this is really surprising development uh considering that the current situation that blizzard is uh well what else they can do you sound as bad as excited as a chess player you don't sound excited at all yeah exactly like what's wrong with you yeah because this thing will come out it will come out like 2042 2042 mike mark my words definitely did at least we'll finally get a litmus test if remo is correct about like how the brain drain like has affected blizzard actually see if this will be a flop or not that would be a true test if riema is correct or not yeah but we will see we will see in 10 years yeah how many years it took from the first trailer announcement of the cyberpunk that was around eight years okay but that's uh that's well not blizzard so with blizzard

that's even longer that's the problem there's the raw okay okay that's your point okay fine yeah what is interesting because uh still not a mobile undertaking because the rumor on the street of course was that blizzard was working on some kind of world of warcraft or warcraft ip spin-off into geolocation like pokemon go game so that that's what i heard but yeah we we are not getting it that seems like this is not being announced apparently you are walking on a very wrong street if this is something that you i heard as a rumor on the street oh my god well you are walking in the street of slovakia so now i get it [Laughter] now i get it now i get it okay yeah let's continue staying on the blizzard note there's the new game publishing studio called new tales launched by former ubisoft and blizzard veterans in paris

uh i think lots of experience coming from free play industry there such as vivendi lucas rx blazer than ubisoft and they are planning to develop games with its internal studios as well as publish as well as publish games from other developers so it's not per se the typical blizzard developers branding together to create a new game rather than this seems like a bigger venture yeah but this is what i don't get uh publishing uh seems like a triple a games i mean there's like literally zero people from mobile gaming industry so i have no idea how they can oh i know i know how they can but no idea how they will just do the publishing oh well we'll see i guess yeah it's interesting also the artifact is interesting i didn't see any big uh dollar numbers attached to this report like uh we raised this we get this who we have that so in the current environment that's

usually the the thing that you see there but yeah let's see wishing all the best i guess more more pc console games i guess coming can't wait can't wait okay continuing next and this one's interesting so youtube head of gaming uh is leaving for a crypto company called polygon amazing i wish him all the best wish him all the best i mean this is kind of a stupid you know this now is all the vc money is going into crypto and then it's becoming the cool thing for you know the hip cool managers of san francisco to be doing so it's just kind of you know these successful executives following the money and following the hype right yeah yeah but do i get the right that this is not uh polygons not the company that actually makes him is the protocol on ethereum is it yeah yeah so so what would

come on he went from being head of gaming at youtube to being the ceo that's a step up like there's no ceo uh he's just joining the joining the company well yeah well if he's the ceo that would be definitely a big step up don't think of the game but they are not no no it's not uh not serious okay yeah and then the other other bit of the news is that youtube ceo said that nfts and crypto present the previously unimaginable opportunity without any other specific product or deadline details yeah that's maybe because they have no imagination of course is unimaginable because two years ago like nfts didn't even exist so of course it was unimaginable yeah exactly you know they saw the twitter is uh he's having their um well twitter blue subscription with the nft avatars in the profile picture so

now everything is uh amazing wouldn't this be like the biggest credential behind nfts if youtube would be going into it i i could see i could see youtube making an open c and letting creators also sell nfts on youtube to their fans and then making a nice little healthy like taking a nice little slice from it well there is also rumor on the street that yeah you know maybe slovakian street i don't know uh that uh the instagram instagram is kind of working or thinking about the very similar thing about nfts oh really social networks about pictures who would say it would be just on the benchmark about overpriced pictures yeah well that could make sense we'll see yeah we'll see but finally something about the mobile developers which is tilting

point is bringing mobile games to pc mac and browser so they're launching their tilting point launcher so releasing the launcher enabling games from its mobile portfolio to launch them on pc and mac and browser obviously and they are partnering with xola hey to be able to offer uh cross-platform compatibility options as well so they think that launch will enable games to reach new markets um with you know new ways of distribution which can be true uh but you know we see the rage at the legends hero wars and other games being on a web client and i'm seeing those ads quite often on facebook and google as well so this is uh well i would say a pretty good um activity yeah i mean i downloaded it yesterday actually and tried it uh the tilting one

it worked really well like i'm quite impressed i could see it as being like a really good thing from me as a player perspective like the titles where you want to have a bigger screen i enjoyed it it was quite cool how many games do they have there it's like a couple right now but they're putting more and more it's like not more than three four but they're going to be more and more adding on later but i think after speaking to our friend nick solo what they said is that this can make you reach about 260 million more players really yeah nice so if that's if that's true that's actually what where did you know yeah where where number came from yeah so like what our friend of exodus said was that essentially like about 200 million of them are in china that you're able to reach and then there's more in russia japan south korea things like that but together it adds up to 260 million more players and i guess if you already have a game that's

plateaued on like from a ua perspective there's no more growth to kind of get on the normal channels i guess this is kind of a well let me get this straight like you are able to reach means what that they have installed tilting points newest launcher what do you mean like like is is they talking about just total addressable market or like where's this time is the time it's the time oh yeah it's a time it's not yeah because i was comparing it to something like you know bluestacks for instance has around i don't know 400 million insta base or something like that that then it would make sense but yeah that's your answer okay i have heard by the way a crypto angle on this that they're just preparing to get like cross platform for these games here oh through this who is preparing exactly do you guys think this could be a way as well to avoid some apple payments not sure most probably not that much i

mean obviously you can get different payment methods on pc and megan webb but still you still want to make the games mobile first yeah exactly because of the scale i mean this is definitely a nice addition to the growth pool or player pool as well but it's still pc weapon back i mean that inventor is shrinking every day every minute that we speak at the moment the inventor is shrinking it has been happening since what like 2015 already yeah well you mentioned apple and uh guess what apple was fine 5.6 million for not complying with the dutch dating app order oh what a nice surprise i mean uh the the news about uh apple enabling um i don't know like why netherlands and

white dating apps uh to use enabling to use the third-party payment solutions but it was just out for what week and now they're they're fine with 5.6 million for not complaining guys amazing by the way yeah it's per week so it can accumulate yeah it can be true yeah finally fines will continue to be assessed by uh at 5 million euros per week up to maximum of 50 million euros until april complies guys like guys this is no i looked it up this is not even a slap on the wrist this is a big fat nothing burger from apple in the fiscal year of 2021 apple made 366 billion dollars worth of revenue that's a billion a day so even assuming that maybe half a percent of that comes from the netherlands that's like five million yes every day like it's it's a rounding error it's not even a slap on the wrist

they can keep doing that it doesn't it's the cost of doing business like and it's like that's understandable but the very question is here you know if like you have 20 different states slapping you on the wrist and counted up then it will become a problem yeah but you know until that happens they will keep doing it that's the thing that's the thing because yeah it doesn't make any sense to you to do anything but without people it's regular agency like this is pretty much free money so i'll go after it if i'm you know sitting in a neighboring country why would i not do that also good time to be a government there is one last piece of news which is um my soft launch article how to soft launch your game in 2022 was just published on mobile devmambo.com so thank you very much eric for publishing it please go there read it it's the you know the best

guideline guide there shameless plug shameless fly now you should definitely read it share it as as much as you can because i really believe this can help a lot of developers out there just to get into the soft launch quickly to know what they're doing and yeah please share anything that you might have and now now we have the main topic of the day which is the evil behind roblox i've been looking forward to this i love it it's the fact behind roblox where you can tell then you can consider what is evil yeah if it's evil or not well definitely they're making a lot of money so let's see yeah uh so to frame these like there were these two big videos that were running around the internet one uh done in august second not done in december uh forgot the name i think people play games was the channel i think so

it doesn't matter don't remember but yeah we can link that but basically they did a really uh two research on the on the whole topic so i'm taking some of the facts from there and some of the things from around the community uh of course it can be said that it's really biased on their side because they're just really critical but i have also heard some of the other arguments there especially from just direct roblox only developers so let's assess that let's say let's start with some of the just basic facts which are just facts so if we compare the whole roblox platform uh it holds around 20 million of experiences yeah we'll get to that of course in a little bit so it's like airbnb yeah and then if you compare it for instance with something like steam steam hosts like 55k games just just to cut get the grasp how big it is in order to publish a game on steam i think you need to pay some kind of

arbitrary fee so it's not that easy in roblox i would guess it just it is just free just like normal registration setup but no money involved if i get the drive you need to pay also on apple and google as well yeah 100 euros per year i think yeah so that's that's as for the scale the important word in this whole like setup is the word experience because roblox even though it is sitting on number one in the top grossing charts uh is pretty much blatantly breaching the guideline of store within a store just by avoiding it by renaming their games into experiences so now it's compliant with the guidelines which is number one fact that people don't know oh that's the thing uh i still believe this uh idea was pitched by apple to roblox like hey guys you know you're making a lot of money on our platform but you know we can't be really very sad yeah we can't help we can't have marketplace or like

multiple games within the app in our store so you know if you if you just rename the games to experiences that might work and you will be happy and we will be happy as well i just think it's a legal eagle i don't think it's apple i think it's some legal genius inside of roblox it's like guys i've got it yeah yeah i get it they're not games they're experiences i don't think that this legal eagle will work for anyone else if you're not called the roblox well of course if you have 47 million dius then you know it's very easy to bend the rules yeah but continuing on the facts track uh yeah there's 47.3 million dius uh which half of it are users age 12 and under this is not a really big critical factor talking around dangerous like a completely different audience that we are used to deal with within the mobile gaming

industry because even though that like common people think that games are targeted mainly at kids and children mobile gaming industry is definitely not the like the ones that targeting those main targets here we have people that are 18 plus i would say segments if we would cut those and children would of course some games have more of them some game has less but most of the gaming industry is not considered to be children i think the average age of a gamer if recounting mobile in the us is like 37 or something like that and it's a woman because there's more more women playing games than than men just by the sheer volume of numbers there but yeah roblox is a really big exception here where there's like half of the population is 12 and under which brings with itself a lot of other like legal implications i would say um yeah this will be discussed later but

let's continue current roblox market cap is around 38 billion dollars which the video famously said is the value of seven ubisofts on the current market trends i love it seven ubisofts is always a great comparison so it's pretty big as i said it's it's pretty much stopping all the grossing charts on all the mobile stores for now at least the ones that you can see in all the alternative data analytics platform such as epenion sensor tower so yeah it's it's getting there and then the other important fact is that how roblox takes a cut out of its let's say developers because usually the model here uh not only on the pc but also on mobile market is the thirty percent steam takes thirty percent out of the developers or the transactions happening on its

platform apple and google uh they do the same epic yeah they have 15 on the you know first million and yeah yeah but it's afterwards the street thirty percent that's right epic uh squeezed it to twelve percent together with microsoft store uh they're pretty much doing their best to try to force steam into the same ratio uh with their aggressive politics of giving exclus free games every week so that's there and roblox on the other hand has 75.5 cut love it man that is amazing if you're roblox yeah but perfect yeah that's that's the first interesting fact the other thing is that uh this doesn't uh even scratch the iceberg of the whole thing because roblox operates on its own internal currency called robux so even like imagine for instance that

apple would pay you in apple coins like this is not happening apple apple sends you a check in us dollars as they like flow through their platform but the roadblocks uh they do it differently in a way that when you're dealing with revenue or let's say money within their platform it's always in roblox only when it leaves the platform after all of these cuts then it's converts converted to dollars so the ingenious invention is that in order to withdraw the money out of the platform you would need to go at least 100k which is equivalent of thousand us dollars to actually even be able to withdraw the thing plus on top of it you still need to be on roblox monthly subscription program on that same account so it's exactly what ad networks do if you don't earn usually it's like 800 or a thousand a month then they keep that money for you

until you get over that that's great another comparison to get like an industry benchmark uh some older people maybe remember second life or older people that they had they had also their dollar packed economy uh called linden and the minimum withdrawal amount was like a 10 alternative there just to get the scale of like how how big the rule is here uh the other thing is that if you look at roblox quarterly reports they say that on every one dollar of revenue that they're making uh only 17 so 17 cents leaves the roblox platform all together so they're keeping almost all the money in yeah inside the platform yeah and uh can you buy stuff in the platform with these roadblocks of course you can even spend them on the

ua yep so the important part is that if you are an aspiring developer like roblox one you pretty much need to constantly deal with stuff that's in robux and now even if you made any money uh you you know you pretty much don't know what to do with them because you cannot do you cannot withdraw them if you don't reach this threshold so you spend it on the platform and that's how they're pretty much keeping all the money in it so even if you if you do it it's going to get uh the value developed because then there's the cut so even if you withdraw it then we're talking about the big cut that's the one that's taking up the payment and this has really similar historic uh parallel to the company money that was prevalent in america before 1930s where it was a normal occurrence where in like loggers or minor scam

companies would issue their own currency that they would pay their workers in and then these workers could use this currency within the company shops pretty much keeping the flow of money within the company if they speak against the company or you know was doing anything that was not in the best manner of the company they would be fired thus losing pretty much all their money because it was within the company and uh this can make them much more dependent on the whole thing so it's the definition of how to like do a platform monopoly and this got uh illegal uh this got illegal by law in 1938 in the u.s but of course the legislation didn't catch up to the digital space so now it's completely legal on a platform that has half of it user base 12 under yep how [Laughter]

yeah like i don't know what to say about that well i would say they're just uh money clever money making machine pretty clever yeah how do you feel if this would be happening on apple or google platform that you would pay get paid in like google currency or stuff like that so the only reason they're getting away with this is because it's mainly miners who don't yet know any better right hard to say the other thing is that they are you know they are the monopoly on their platform so they can do whatever they want yeah easy as that but it's super clever i mean look clever in the evil way right it's not clear it's clever evil way like yeah ah well you can call him i don't really like still yeah i was i was really surprised about this because i guess if if this would be happening on some kind of a let's say big store like imagine

epic would be doing this or apple or any other big company that's pretty much a platform operator or uber like uber will be paying you in uber coins like do you think this would it would it's illegal basically but within the roblox space it's not being covered by that law or pretty much somebody didn't figure out it's a publicly traded company so people know like we're not talking about some like random new entrant into the top grossing charts it's a company that's like 10 years old and is already on the stock market so everybody knows don't you think they have discovered in terms of the legal they are publicly traded companies so they asked of course they have it illegal that is working but have there been any lawsuits no i don't think so i don't think so no definitely not uh but you know something being illegal uh doesn't mean that it could not be made illegal in few

you know political terms uh yeah that's mr skeptic again in in here i mean look they're not making money now and they don't you know they don't care about what can have potentially happen can not that it's gonna happen in the future it can happen sometimes in the future until then everything is fine yeah the other thing that's kind of sad uh to me when i was looking at the video was that they had the system really good they they have set it up really good in a way that you can make games pretty smoothly like pretty much frictionless you don't know any coding nothing literally children children and some of those of course like they stay there and become the roblox developer team but the knowledge from the roblox editor isn't that transferable like the one when you would be like pretty much running some kind of conventional industry engine such as unity or unreal or stuff like that

because if you pretty much base or real knowledge on this roblox editor then when you leave the platform your skills are gone well in that case you you don't really leave the platform you don't need to leave the platform exactly there you go yeah another interesting tidbit was that uh they had this claim called make serious cash on their website and after the video was posted on youtube they removed it surprisingly well i guess they made already pretty serious cash like we met yeah we made yeah yeah like hey you have the typo there you wanted to say you make serious cash not the other developers yeah and then there's this other interesting tidbit that their forums the official ones shut down in 2017 because they weren't able to moderate it properly i guess because again all of those legal implications with miners so that's there

last interesting like fact is the roblox collectible market which is currently really booming because there's a lot of time with real world brands there such as like i don't know vance or nfl or i think gucci [Music] ralph lauren as well they opened the village there in in mountains ralph lauren uh brand it's that's that's amazing come on yeah that's amazing uh roblox is also like on the frontier of the whole metaverse hype and considered to be one of the like main competitors in the current race yeah you can still see the you know concerts there as well yeah of course so this this leads us to the other thing which is roblox collectible market where there are collectibles that are kind of platform wide so you can wear them into any of these experiences pretty much that's your cosmetic market do you mean games yeah and then

the thing is that uh they sold them of course in limited mounts throughout these promotions or like game events stuff like that that's normal but the problem is that the platform is now so massive and uh yeah the whole market is pretty much so massive there some of these literally skyrockets to values like ten thousand fifteen thousand dollars not robux that's equivalent of roblox yeah yeah and roblox still takes a thirty 30 cut from all of the transfers on on the marketplace so comparing it to something like opence which is the nft marketplace which take 2.5 they take 30 and we're still talking about a game population of 12 and under which is 50 that are now dealing with things that are pretty much having insane value really at some point

learning the ropes how to how to make money and what to do with them there you go yeah you're being you're being very coy mache but since you're you're the only one who's a parent here like yeah like would you let your baby play roblox after learning this i can answer that question in 10 10 years or 12 years when she's you know programming on the roblox some games hard to say i mean yeah it's definitely not what i would expect from my daughter to do and uh try to buy gucci stuff in in roblox for 10k so if if again if you remember just by the history of mobile gaming industry in i think 2012 or somewhere there there was this big crackdown in japan on the gacha games where pretty much they had by law to implement some of the controls on spending there and also prohibit some of the gacha designs such as kompugacha and similar ones that the government pretty much

penned already legal just saying that this also also remember the thing where chinese government pretty much said that you need to display the percentage chances of all the gacha or lottery based mechanics in your games which i think also follow into our western guidelines that apple kind of have in their term sheet so i guess it's more of a question that the regulation didn't catch up with roblox yet but i'm guessing it will at some point because even in japan i think it was because of the scandals that happened there or some kind of outrage by parents when the government stepped in and kind of started to regulate these so i'm guessing something similar will happen here also well we'll see because again the other interesting fact is that roblox platform has a really big problem with discoverability meaning that you are pretty much uh offered to spay the robux currency to like do ua and like user

acquisitions on your game and now uh the platform is already in the stage where your average kid developer is competing with literally dozens strongman teams making games with full vc funding companies on just roblox platform yeah but you need to find a way how to make your game discover discoverable this is so hard so hard work but you need to make a viral hit in order to make the game to be available to all the under 12. you know but with wireless the same same rules as with hyper casual like viral hit that's great but you're going to get copied in you know three days yes that actually have the manpower and then pump it up through ua the same is happening in hyper-casual how can you even comment on the ua you have no no information about the uae of the roblox nobody has in this in this

group well i am starting have you done it have you done ua roblox uh not yet but i will probably next week or the week after so i'm in the in the talks with someone to actually do it so i can yeah i can answer that question what i know is the auction is definitely way different from what we see on facebook on google and uh and targeting as well you can have us like small banners um that you can see on google adwords and webs so it's like a skyscraper type of uh the banner and uh and also the main thing that is uh out there uh is the icon which you need to you know a bit isn't that's like that's it do you no video ads no video no not good this is roblox and it's like facebook 2013 maybe really so it's getting getting there but very very slow so ecpms are going to be super low and conversion is going to be super low

yep exactly well we'll see yeah i'm looking forward to you more about it when uh you spent a couple of the robux and uh i i still i still don't know like i'm not convinced that this whole thing will kind of last through regulatory regulatory storm that i guess is brewing on it because it can't be very high if half of it's under 12 like they're spending their parents money not their own money yeah what's the problem no but the ltv is gonna be it's not gonna be high i it can't be that's why i'm just a bit shocked with hearing all this that it's such a big market cap i assume that the ltv of ubisoft's users is probably triple quadruple what roblox's ltd of their users is sure but the dius of roblox is way way different than the episode as well so yeah it evens out a bit

well and any other um skepticism around the money-making machine called roblox no no the skepticism is pretty much you know reading through the facts here but like yeah i have to like uh leave it to them that like they make a really successful company and like the successful gaming platform even though it's a store within the store that i will keep that yeah yeah of course of course again you know again the question would be would it be so successful it would be let's say pc browser based only both probably not that much yeah well the inventory again as we said is shrinking on the web you know they they had to find a workaround on the mobile which i i see they did yeah with the experience this thing they did with the experiences of course look you know like the thing is we can't we can't say anything uh like from the experience uh like building the

game on roblox because we can well we don't have any experiences with that so that's the that's the main part that you know you are all only stating the facts but then if we had someone actually uh here talking about how they can build the game there we would be having probably a very different discussion no of course like i can guarantee that yeah i'm looking forward to next week just monte take five minutes and just report back what you saw oh yeah definitely if that's gonna happen but yeah okay do we have anything else or we just go for a weekend and uh and have fun oh yeah all right thank you very much guys and uh thank you very much uh listeners as well so please share feedback i already got some and uh it was mostly positive which it was surprising but that's uh that's good keep them

coming and i will speak to you next week thanks guys [Music] [Music]