This is the second in a three-part article covering what I think are the three of the best opportunities for 2020. The original article appeared in issue 40 of my Monthly Raine Report which you can find out more about by visiting https://danraine.com
This article is not for everyone. If you follow me for marketing content then you will probably be wondering why I am writing about this. But being a geek boy at heart and a developer I couldn’t not share with you this amazing opportunity.
Let’s Talk About Roblox
it wasn’t for my niece being obsessed with it in early 2018 I probably wouldn’t have given it a second look.
Roblox is an online ‘game’ platform where millions, and I literally mean millions of kids play user-created 3D games and socialise… it really is quite
hard to put a nail in it until you actually use it.
It was actually created in 2006/2007 and called Dynablox, and I remember using it way back then and I thought it was awful in comparison to something like Second Life. It was slow, the graphics sucked, and the games were dire.
To be fair, even in 2018, I still thought this was the case, the graphics had improved a bit, but the games still sucked.
You see, most of the content is still being created by individuals, most of who are doing it for a bit of fun, to learn to code etc. Money is not their goal.
But this is where it gets interesting…
People ARE making money.
They are making money creating the crappiest of games.
In-fact Roblox expects to pay out over $100 MILLION to developers this year.
Yes, you read that right, one hundred million dollars.
It can do this because it has over 100,000,000 active monthly users, that is one hundred million ACTIVE users a month, making it the played game ever, kicking Minecraft from the top spot.
Let me put this another way. If you add up all the hours every child in the world plays with lego it comes to 400 million hours of engagement. Which is quite amazing.
Roblox however takes up 1,200 million hours of kids time. WOAH!
There are currently seven games on the platform that have reached over 100,000 concurrent players, and four which have had over a billion plays each.
These figures are mind-blowing.
And Roblox is blowing up in a huge way. Traditional developers are taking notice of these kinds of numbers and are right now starting to put together teams to figure it out.
Dave Basuki the CEO of Roblox in his Keynote speech at this years Roblox developers conference thinks that in the next couple of years they will shoot way past the $100 million in payouts and hope to get to the $1 billion mark.
The thing is Roblox is more than a gaming platform, it has become a social experience platform, and what was once a kids-only kind of platform has grown and aged as its population has aged with it. It is starting to become mainstream.
And there are huge opportunities here.
But like I said in the intro, this is not for everyone. But I did need to share this because way back in 2007, in my Immediate Edge membership I wrote extensively about the Facebook Platform, even though it was not for everyone, and several members really ran with it and created amazing businesses developing games and other apps. Two of them sold their companies for over ten million dollars apiece.
If you have ever wanted to get into development then the Roblox platform is quite frankly amazing. It costs absolutely nothing, you can build and create inside Roblox studio, and the entire ecosystem, servers, and all are free. There is literally zero hardware costs or monthly fees. EVER.
There is a premium membership for a few bucks a month which I would recommend, and will give you a stipend which will allow you to understand how the monetization works in the system, but really apart from that, there areno costs. If you have 100,000 users playing your game then it costs you nothing. If you were running your own servers for this you would be forking out tens of thousands every month in server and bandwidth bills.
The opportunity here is amazing.
Go and download Roblox on your PC, Mac, Tablet, Phone, Xbox, or PS4 and have a browse around. I am sure you will hate it at first, then hopefully you will find a few games that are fun, then maybe, just maybe, you will see an opportunity.
