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A growing concern for major web platforms looking to attract
artists, brands, and audiences to inhabit the same “Meta” space is ensuring
online safety.
It’s an issue highlighted by British influencer and
broadcaster Yinka Bokinni, who, in her recent experience in unnamed apps,
reports on a toxic environment linked to sexual and racist harassment, bullying
and abuse.
“The internet isn’t very human,” agrees Craig Donato,
chief business officer at Roblox, in an interview at the Gamesbeat summit.
“You can have all sorts of rules, but that’s not dictating
my behavior. There are social norms that dictate my behavior. There’s reputational
impact. All this social signaling. That all impacts my behavior,” he continues.
“Humans are social animals. When we’re talking to someone, looking them in the
eye, and they’re nodding their head — we need to figure out how to bring those
social signals to the metaverse. Otherwise, it’s going to be a bad, toxic
place.”
Donato explained that Roblox is working on ways to advance
this. For instance, possibly using a webcam to map the facial expressions of a
person on their avatar.
“Humans spend most of their time looking at people’s faces,
the expressions in their eyes. I’m a lot less likely to be toxic to you if,
when I say something, I can see that I hurt your feelings. It’s just human
instinct. I don’t hear a lot about that, but I’d say that’s the area where we
think — VR and AR are hot now, but those aren’t gating factors.”
Another solution is to monitor interactions using AI. “We
need to make sure that we’re scanning not just what the assets are, but what
the code can do,” Donato explained. “The ability to do moderation of
user-generated content is incredibly complex.”
Then there is giving the community better tools to
self-moderate, such as being able to mute or block someone “so I never have to
be part of a game server with you. Or I can report you.”
In a wide-ranging interview on the Gamesbeat stage, Donato
talked principally about his company’s vision for the metaverse. The business
was founded in 2004 and since its inception has been about creating a shared
digital space. A space for people to do things together, or in the words of its
founders David Baszucki and Erik Cassel, “human co-experience: people doing
things together in synchronous 3D spaces.”
“I think people call that the metaverse now, but it’s always
been what we focus on,” Donato said. “A lot of people called us a game company,
for years. We kind of bristled at that. We accepted it, but it’s not really
what we were ever about.”
The metaverse is inevitable, he says, and Roblox is all in.
“A larger and larger percentage of people’s time is going to be spent doing
things with other people in the digital space. It’s just inevitable. It’s just
going to accelerate.”
About 50 million people a day visit the Roblox platform,
spending an average of two to two-and-a-half hours a day for a total of roughly
100 million hours daily, and earning the Roblox creator community about $500
million in 2021. The creators on Roblox range from big studios making multiple
millions of dollars a month down to individuals who are doing it as a hobby.
None of the content on its platform is produced by Roblox.
All the experiences, all the gear and avatars — anything that you can buy in
the experience — is produced by creators.
“We grew entirely through organic network effects. One
network effect is the UGC network effect. The more creators we have producing
content, the more audience that attracts. The more audience is here, the more
they build content. It’s this virtual loop. That’s paired with the social
network effect. The number one way people come to Roblox is they’re invited to
play because it’s more fun to play with your friends. Those things work in
unison,” Donato said.
“We’re only successful if our community is successful,” he
added. “We need to figure out how to incentivize them and make them successful
with the tools we provide.”
Elaborating on this, Roblox is already using a lot of what
might be called Web3 elements. For example, its business model is based
entirely on microtransactions.
“We have our own currency. People buy that and can spend it
on gear and any new experiences on our platform. Once they buy that gear they
take it with them from experience to experience. The creators on our platform
not only create an experience, but they can mint items. Those can be sold and
traded. We simply float that economy,” explained Donato. “We sell the currency
and take a cut of transactions on our platform. That’s worked quite well for
us. Years ago, we had advertising, and we eventually pulled the advertising
down from our platform because the microtransaction model is so effective.”
However, Roblox is not Web3 in several crucial aspects. It
is not on the blockchain, it does not permit tokens, and its virtual world is
not interoperable with any other virtual world.
“Philosophically, we believe in decentralized creator
communities. Ultimately, we believe the metaverse as a phenomenon will be a
community-driven, a bottom-up phenomenon,” Donato said.
NFTs, he said, are not a priority, but we can expect Roblox
to incorporate them in future. “It would be kind of buzzy if we did it. But in
terms of product functionality for our users, we’ll see. But we’re not
philosophically opposed to it at all, to the extent that it creates more value,
that it lets creators come together in more interesting ways to provide value
to users.”
Perhaps this is because Roblox wants to retain revenue from
the trade of its digital items on the platform. The trade is a pretty healthy
revenue earner — why open it out until there’s a compelling reason to do so?
“For example, some of the bags Gucci sold, virtual
representations of their physical bags, they sold for more than the actual bag.
Weird things happen. Trading, buying, holding inventory, collectibles, all that
stuff is very powerful. We see a lot of demand on our platform. Some of the
items on our platforms cost $50-60-70,000. It’s kind of crazy.”
Nearly a third of Roblox users update their avatar daily.
People change their avatars multiple times per week.
Donato was more evasive about the possibility of opening the
platform up to say, Fortnite, which would be a chief building block if the
metaverse is to be anything more than a series of walled gardens.
“Right now, we’re building all the scaffolding and
infrastructure that needs to go around [the metaverse]. We’re absolutely game
for interoperability. It’s not really the issue right now. It’s figuring out
how to get everything to work together. At least in the immediate future, there
will probably be multiple metaverse platforms that will then interoperate.
Those boundaries will get increasingly blurry over time.”
Donato shared some interesting insight into the users of its
platform and how they view the metaverse.
“Kids that grew up with interactive online gaming, based on
our research, view reality differently than we do,” he said. “I think of myself
as a colonist of the metaverse, one of the old people. We see digital and
physical reality as distinct from each other, and we see digital as less than
physical. But this younger generation sees them as not only equal but as not
separate. They live their lives both at the same time. They view it
differently. They naturally socialize. They understand how to get around, and
understand the social norms. They just see it differently.”
Donato agrees that, as it stands, a lot of the metaverse is
simply marketing.
“But I can imagine that in the not-so-distant future, retail
will be revolutionized by the metaverse. Sometimes I don’t want to buy
something on Amazon. I go to a store because I want to pick it up and I want to
see it. I want to find out if it fits me. A lot of that will be things we can
do in the metaverse.
“We can create avatars that have the same proportions as
your body,” he continued. “We can allow you to look inside a product, take it
apart, put it back together again, and understand it in ways you can’t on a
flat website. As those things happen we’ll see the more direct response. We’re
just in the very early phases of what the medium can do. But it needs to be
conceptualized by each vertical.”
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