(2021-03-09) Thompson The Roblox Microverse

Ben Thompson: The Roblox Microverse. Roblox isn’t a game at all: it is world in which one of the things you can do is play games, with a persistent identity, persistent set of friends, persistent money, all disconnected from the device that you use to access the world. That is the transformational change.

The article Eddy was replying to was Clubhouse’s Inevitability

The most obvious difference between Clubhouse and podcasts is how much dramatically easier it is to both create a conversation and to listen to one

Secondly, like those successful networks, Clubhouse centralizes creation and consumption into a tight feedback loop. In fact, conversation consumers can, by raising their hand and being recognized by the moderator, become creators in a matter of seconds.

We call this emerging category “human co-experience,” which we consider to be the new form of social interaction we envisioned back in 2004.

The Metaverse

Roblox isn’t a game at all: it is world in which one of the things you can do is play games, with a persistent identity, persistent set of friends, persistent money, all disconnected from the device that you use to access the world. That is the transformational change.

The problem with invoking the “Metaverse” in the context of Roblox is that the traditional conception was a virtual world that rivaled the real world; anyone could plug into it from anywhere, with full interoperability. Roblox, though, is only Roblox.

That’s actually a benefit: by controlling everything Roblox can bring all of the disparate parts of gaming into one place

This creates the conditions for the interlocking feedback loops that characterize transformational products; by reducing the prominence and feature set of games, Roblox made it possible to create something bigger. A microverse.

This actually fits the patterns of other transformational products. The feed, for instance, relies on reducing all types of content, from posts to photos to links, to the same format, such that they can all be incorporated into a greater whole

the screen you see when you launch the app, and I have to say, it looks an awful lot like an App Store!

Of course Apple (and Google) is still taking its share; Roblox has to pay 30% on every purchase of Robux, its in-game currency, as will every other would-be platform on top of their platform (like Clubhouse or Twitter).

Roblox is the exact sort of platform that is only possible when you accept the reality that the platforms on which it rests aren’t going anywhere. The responsibility of those foundational platforms is to give room to let these microverses flourish, without legislating or taxing them to death.