Craig Donato interview: How Roblox navigates brands, UGC, and the metaverse

What’s fascinating, though, and I alluded to this earlier, is that it’s a fluid community. We have a community where creators come in. We have creators who are designers, artists, musicians, and businesspeople. They dynamically form teams in our community. As studios, they produce an experience and then can reform into other teams. It’s an evolving... See more

we’re seeing brands try to figure this out. How do they create an interface that allows them to have an interactive experience with their fans or their customers? That will open up all sorts of experiences for retail engagement and other things. We’re just seeing this happen right now. If you read Ad Age and things like that, this is the topic. How... See more

the metaverse is more generational than a lot of people suspect. I believe that there’s something called the metaverse generation, which is people in business school and younger, approximately. It’s people that grew up with interactive online gaming.

if you’re thinking about a game is a place where you’re competing to win, very few Roblox experiences are like that. They’re almost all cooperative, shared experiences.

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 pro... See more

How do we leverage these technologies to make them transformational? It’s similar to what we talked about with the concerts. How do we think about the way music is consumed? In the metaverse, what’s the experience such that it will be 10 times better than doing it in the real world? That’s the path we’re on, figuring out how vertical by vertical, t... See more

Kids that grew up with interactive online gaming, based on our research, view reality differently than we do. 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 ... See more

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. Right now, 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.

GamesBeat: What are some big numbers when it comes to Roblox, milestones you’ve hit? Donato: Our creator community earned about half a billion dollars last year. We have about 50 million people a day on the platform. The average time people spend is two to two and a half hours a day. It’s about 100 million hours a day across everyone on the platfor... See more