More from Roblox: all the news about the popular social and gaming platform
Here’s just a few stats from its Q3 2023 earnings:
📈 Average daily active users hit “a new milestone” of 70.2 million, up 20 percent from the same quarter last year
📈 Daily active users grew across “all age groups”
📈 Average monthly unique players (MUP) hit 14.7 million, while the average bookings per MUP was $19.02
Basically, more and more people are playing Roblox, and many of them are spending money, too. I have to imagine the expansions to PlayStation and Meta Quest have helped.
If a developer introduces subscriptions before December 15th, Roblox says it will only take a 15 percent cut of those subscriptions instead of 30 percent, according to a post on its developer forum. However, that reduced rate will only be in place through March 15th, 2024. And, importantly, the “fee savings” from the reduced rate will be paid in a lump sum in April, Roblox says.
You can read more about Roblox’s subscription plans in my post from September.
In this blog post about how the platform connects people, Roblox said that:
😀 You’ll be able to customize the names you see for your Roblox friends “in the next month.”
📱The company will make it easier to share in-Roblox captures, using a GIF to show what that might look like.
📞 “Eventually,” you’ll be able to use Roblox’s new Roblox Connect video call feature to call people from within a Roblox experience.
In addition to Tuesday’s news that Roblox is asking employees to return to its offices, I have a few other Roblox tidbits you might be interested in.
🎮 Roblox launched on PlayStation last week, and it already has more than 10 million downloads, spokesperson Samantha Spielman tells The Verge.
😀 The company published a long blog post on Tuesday about how it’s “evolving” its avatar technology to make it more modern. It’s an interesting read, though there’s no news.
📺 Earlier this month, the company added the ability for developers to include short videos into their experiences. I worry this feature could be used for bad, but the company says videos must adhere to its community standards.
After an announcement last month, Roblox has officially been released for PS4 and PS5. Roblox is already available on a bunch of other platforms, including PC, iOS, Android, Xbox, and even Meta’s Quest VR headsets.
Roblox CEO David Baszucki thinks people will be dating in Roblox, but at Code 2023, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd doesn’t sound like a fan of that idea. “Maybe that is how people will originally connect,” she said, but noted that “I will be much more sad for humanity than myself if people just stop really meeting in real life.”
The short answer seems to be no. But in his response, he talked a lot about file formats and how they might differ for things like a pair of virtual shoes and wheels that fall off a virtual car. That might make any interchangeability would be a tricky problem to solve; companies like Roblox, Meta, and Epic Games would have to agree on file formats that could sync across systems. My sense is they might be reticent to do that right now.
The company shut down the Chinese version of its app that was operated by Tencent in early 2022, but Roblox co-founder and CEO David Baszucki says that the company is still working on something for the Chinese market.
The idea would be that Roblox can “literally print a copy of Roblox in China and bring it to market there” and that Roblox would have less and less data going back and forth between the US and China.
As a semester-long collaborative course between Parsons School of Design and Roblox comes to a close, students and faculty consider what fashion’s future might look like.