Let's take a look at a product that "started earlier than Minecraft and became popular much later than it, but has a tendency to surpass Minecraft" -- Roblox.
Roblox is a product that was officially released on September 1st, 2006. Indeed, it was earlier than Minecraft, but it was tepid until Minecraft was all over the world and then Roblox caught up -- it grew crazily in "the corner where the media spotlight didn't shine much".
According to the latest news released in February, the number of monthly active users of Roblox has reached 115 million, almost equal to the latest figure of 126 million issued by Minecraft in May.
Roblox's developer community has millions of active UGC creators, most of them are teenagers, who have earned more than $100m a year from Roblox's platform!
What kind of product is Roblox?
A "complete UGC gameplay simulator".
It provides players with a straightforward and easy-to-use experimental simulation platform, so that players can try a variety of exciting game design in this innovative space.
You can invite friends to experience the games you designed, and you can make money from game sales.
So what key points did Roblox design right to make it successful?
My summary is as follows:
1. The differential Core orientation based on the Innovation of Game play
Why do I call Roblox a product instead of a game?
Because the most significant difference between it and Minecraft is that its creation tool is independent, and its bottom design still provides you with a creation tool rather than a game.
Or rather, "Roblox started as an authoring tool, and now it's actually a platform."
Because of this, it and Minecraft represent two utterly different success models in this field, which precisely shows that "there is not only one path to success in this category."
Their earliest positioning determines the core difference between Minecraft and Roblox.
Roblox originated from an experimental teaching tool designed for physics teachers, but students used it as a toy --
The students have endless creativity.
All kinds of strange ideas burst out in this crude platform.
Its founder discovered this opportunity, turned it into a product, slowly developed and evolved into Roblox.
Because of this, Roblox has a definite "physical simulation attribute" from the beginning.
Players in this experimental site to do more things are to try a variety of physical collision effects, explosion effects, etc.
As a result, this platform's core focus is on "innovation in gameplay itself" rather than "construction that pays more attention to topography, architecture and other appearance, as Minecraft does."
Indeed, ordinary players' creativity and imagination are more easily and intuitively reflected in the "external performance layer", which is why Minecraft becomes popular more quickly because their player can make things with their own hands.
However, as we dig deeper, many players have many creative ideas in terms of play (human-scene interaction, human-to-human interaction), but they lack a "more intuitive and convenient creative platform" to play.
If Minecraft is compared to a Lego building block, then Roblox is a bit like a "programmable Lego robot".
2. Platform gene and firm platform location
According to the history of the game industry for so many years, it is easier for companies with "platform genes" to do well in the UGC category or eventually succeed in the platform's direction.
The most typical example is the Valve Corporation, which is the steam platform's parent company.
Several of its founders are from Microsoft; they have a better understanding of the platform, so they first opened up the game engine to allow players to do Mod, on their games, which created the earliest user base of the steam platform.
Now they are starting to open UGC support based on DOTA2 games, and the thinking is similar.
In contrast, Blizzard lacked platform thinking in its early days. Although the editor of "Warcraft" has spontaneously formed a good "UGC community microclimate", it has ceded the success of DOTA to Valve Corporation.
Bohemia, the parent company of "ARMA", which hatched the earliest PUBG model, also missed out on "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" because of the lack of platform thinking.
In short, the success of Roblox lies in that these founders are not game makers in the first place, and they are different from all other game companies. They have no "genes to develop games" and no obsession with "we make our own games, " making them focus on serving their users.
Users themselves make all their games, and they only provide tools and platform support.
As far as I know, up to now, the company is so big that none of their more than 600 employees are professional game developers, all platform technical engineers and platform service personnel.
They require company employees not to work part-time making Mod, which completely separates "athletes" from "referees" and better maintains UGC authors' atmosphere.
Sometimes only when you completely let go of your obsession with making games can you serve a platform.
(To emphasize, this rule is not suitable for the whole business community, but it has been verified many times for markets with small products, low development costs, abundant creativity and enough developers. )
3. Closed-loop ecological construction based on extreme support to the creator community
The most crucial part of Roblox's success (and precisely the hardest thing to do) is its "community of player creators".
Compared with Minecraft,Roblox have inherent disadvantages.
As we said just now, given its core orientation of biased play, its creation cost is too high and the requirements for the ability of players are too high, so it has to be created through an independent editor.
The creative process is inevitably closer to the professional creative method, rather than just fiddling something intuitively in the game.
Accordingly, the display cost created by this method of play is also higher, and most games require users to enter the game experience to know whether it is fun or not. Just watching the videos shared by users may not work.
Its entire community of players and creators is highly unified in a closed system.
The advantage of this closed system is that once the positive cycle starts, no one can stop it, which can create a "huge attraction" and involve outside users crazily.
But, it is difficult to start!
Because it is not easy for you to borrow external forces, if you want to reach the tipping point and turn your flywheel, you must have a strong active thrust, so it is difficult for Roblox to start a business in the first place.
It wasn't until 2011 (when Minecraft was already hot) that they managed to raise more than $5 million in a fourth round of financing. Still, the only thing they insisted on was pushing their flywheel in a firm direction-- the "player creator community."
They always have an open attitude.
No matter how much money other companies make by developing games in the PGC way, they insist on not making money by developing games themselves.
Instead, the money they raised, the money earned through the virtual currency system in the game, spared no effort to guide, cultivate and strengthen the player community.
Serve players and creators by creating a "complete business ecology".
In this way, after a long construction period, there are more and more excellent content on the platform, and more and more players will be brought about by all kinds of word-of-mouth and sharing, which will push up the creators on the platform for more and more benefits.
In turn, it promotes more game creators, even professional game creators, to come to this platform to create more and better game content…In such a positive cycle, this is the "magic flywheel" of Roblox's success!
What is the future of Roblox?
In my opinion, Roblox has gone far beyond a Sandboxie UGC product, a game simulator, and a creative tool for gameplay.
It is not even a simple platform; it is actually the first "closed system that opens up development, distribution, platform and commercialization".
Even Apple's mobile platform, steam's PC platform, as well as Microsoft, Sony's game console platform, and so on, have not yet reached such an integrated and perfect closed-loop!
Such a closed-loop system has several terrifying advantages:
First, the subversive power of PUGC
PGC is actually divided into two types, one is PUGC (Professional User Generated Content), and the other is OGC (Occupationally Generated Content).
OGC should be understood as the production mode under the organizational structure of a professional company.
while PUGC is "those professional users to produce high-quality professional content, not in the traditional professional company system."
Because all the content in this platform is UGC, so "what gameplay will popular", "what is trendy" and "what is out of date"... These players are the first to understand, which is more advanced than the traditional model of OGC's big companies.
If traditional game companies want to make a new game, they must first do market research → understand user needs → do product prototypes → follow the internal project review process. Often, we do not know whether the product prototypes are really suitable for user needs.
Successful establishment of the project, and then arranging research and development, the whole chain is so long that when the product has been made, 2 years have passed, will users really like it now?
Or has the user's latest preferences changed?
We don't know anymore.
What if Roblox can continue to magnify the magic of this bottom-up content creation model?
It may provide professional creators with "R & D→distribution→operation→income closed-loop" support, allowing game creators to focus only on the gameplay design itself. Completely get rid of all kinds of company management, financing, recruitment, marketing and so on, a series of troublesome trivia.
Platforms like Roblox may attract more PGC creators in the future, especially if it may trigger an explosive growth of PUGC creators.
In the end, countless experts with professional creative ability are likely to be hatched on this platform.
But they choose not to join professional game companies, but to survive directly on this platform, using the more and more professional creative tools they provide (especially remote collaboration tools, which can work with other excellent professional creators). In the form of non-corporate organization, work together to produce higher and higher quality game content.
If they can also get better and better returns and continue to develop, do they have the opportunity to subvert the traditional OGC system?
It is really worth our serious imagination.
In fact, this topic is not limited to the game industry, in the entire Internet and even the traditional industry, is a big topic worthy of discussion.
As far as I can see, the development of a thriving "user community" in any industry will mostly start with UGC, and popular with PGC.
Their origins often rely on the spontaneous "love" of the first core users, such as Niconico, Reddit, and so on.
If a community platform only has UGC but cannot drive the flywheel to rotate and hatch enough PGC, it is difficult to produce high-quality explosive products to continue to expand and retain more users;
When a platform is starting entirely on the PGC (especially the platform with only OGC), it isn't easy to have strong endogenous vitality and vitality.
Second, the possibility of developing into a social platform
"Roblox" as a platform company, there are countless games on their platform, and they are constantly and naturally producing new games.
Their users are only pulled continuously in by this flywheel from the outside. It is not worried about the loss of "users jumping from one game to another on the platform." The roles used by these users in the platform are unique, and most of the games supported by the platform are basically multiplayer.
After playing more games together, these users have all become good friends, and their friendship has gradually expanded to offline.
Did you know that in the most popular games like "MeepCity" in Roblox, all players can do is wander and chat in the virtual world, and it doesn't even include an interactive mechanism that can be called "games"!
If you think of Roblox as a "virtual playground", all the amusement facilities are created by children playing with Sandboxie.
Even as these children grow up, they are likely to maintain the habit of coming to the amusement park to socialize, entertain and continue all kinds of creative activities in the future.
Roblox now has more than 100 million monthly active users, the most substantial proportion of which are primary and secondary school students in the US. How many primary and secondary school students are in the US?
I have done many interviews myself, and none of the parents in the US who have children of this age do not know that their children like Roblox.
What if these people have formed a habit of chatting and interacting in Roblox every day and not using Facebook after they grow up?
The precipitation of social relationships is now another secret core competence of Roblox.
There is an interesting rule in the Internet business society: the new company that kills a monopoly giant is probably not "its original competitor in the industry".
So who knows if Roblox will be the Terminator of a Facebook from the side? We don't know.
Sandboxie's hidden worries of the game giant and the rising competitors
There is no denying that Roblox allows creators to design their own business models.
Its original "pure free UGC profit model that can be exchanged for cash" does greatly support the content creators in its platform.
But it also inevitably brings another problem -- when the content creators are only for money, or when the original users are guided by a profit-seeking atmosphere to keep pace with the economy, some cheap games and homogenized games will follow.
Now, a variety of simulator games and micro-trading are flooding the whole platform, "easy making, the original attempt and creativity of the platform" are gradually submerged in the ocean of inferior products.
This is "Bad money drives out good", which makes people feel chilly.
Besides, "whether its engine technology can be improved" and "whether it can maintain easy-using on the premise of improving screen performance" determines whether it can retain these grown-up young users.
"How to provide these players with better pictures and games of higher quality" rather than “just become a memory of their younger generation".
This will determine how big the future territory of Roblox can expand and how far it can go.
Look into the future
Finally, let's look forward to the future together.
I think "the category of sandboxie UGC is just the beginning. In the future, AI will gradually replace more repetitive human work, more and more people will have more time to give full play to our creative work, and there will be more and more creators of UGC and PUGC."
Recently, more and more traditional games have begun to add "UGC functions that support players to make their own Mod", such as the workshops of DOTA2 and Overwatch (OW), the Vientiane works of Arena of Valor, and the construction of homes, guilds, and city-states that are common in traditional MMO, which have also provided players with more and freer creative space in recent years.
With the support of new technology, professional game creation can also become simpler and more civilian in the distant future. The future Sandboxie UGC platform is not necessarily a voxel or low-polygon simple character, simple scene, simple action.
A lot of complex content that is extremely expensive to produce today can be generated automatically with the help of AI in the future.
More non-professional creators can stay at home and produce more advanced professional content.
Will this completely subvert the traditional OGC model?
In the future, we all believe that "there will be more and more sandboxie UGC games on the market", but the platform competition is different from the content competition:
the content competition market can accommodate more developers, while the platform competition is often "winner is king, winner takes all". We don't know who the final winner will be. I predict that this battle will become more and more fierce in the future.
Outside the industry, due to the easy-to-use creative core features of Sandboxie's games, it is suitable for the youth education market.
We can make full use of children's enthusiasm for games, arouse children's fun of learning, let them learn programming from an early age, and exercise their creativity.
Now Minecraft and Roblox, like Lego robots, are already making great efforts to develop the "youth education market".
Some well-known universities have set up summer game design practice courses for primary and middle school students with Roblox, and it is said that the effect is excellent.