You are cordially invited to this weekās brew of High Tea, your dispatch of š„Ā internet culture served piping hot. This week: the rise of studios building solely for Roblox, combating creator burnout, and providing the building blox for the metaverse of the future.
Drink up! šø ā
p.s. if youāre not a paid subscriber, hereās what you missed from this weekās Bucks Fizz: our Thursday dispatch covering the best of TikTokās unsigned and emerging talent.
š„ Dixie D'Amelio, Bella Poarch & Sarah Cothran
what weāve been sipping on:Ā
Hey besties, weāre back from our High Tea Spring holibobs, did you miss us? Itās been a piping hot couple of weeks and despite us lounging about Toad Hall and taking the weight off our webbed feet (toadās orders), your favorite phrogs have been racing to get back to spilling Sundayās strong stuff, now bright-eyed and decidedly less green around the gills. Letās dive in.
When is a game not a game? When itās a metaverse.Ā
As Week 2 of Apple vs Epic Gamesā legal battle draws to a close, we canāt help but notice that Roblox has gone ahead and made some very intentional changes to its platform, days after Apple received hard questioning over whether Roblox should still be allowed on the iOS Store despite Fortnite being given the chop ā ooh err. Changing the āGamesā tab to āDiscoverā across the site, with developers now creating and managing āexperiencesā rather than āgamesā, is possibly in response to the ongoing court battle, possibly to further differentiate itself between its Epic Games counterpart, but also probably to further cement CEO Dave Buszuckiās intention to build a 3D immersive metaverse as opposed to a āgaming platformā. Our take? Roblox has always been much more than just a game, blurring the lines between a social platform, developer game engine and asset marketplace, despite the App Store categorization as such, but shhh for the purposes of the trial, you didnāt see anything right? Good.Ā
From gamer to creator to studio maker: the professionalization of Roblox
Now weāve addressed that elephant in the room, letās spill. Itās no secret that Roblox has been focusing its energies on retaining and further growing its developer base as per the S-1. And as a refresh, back in November 2020 it stated 32 Roblox developers had made over a million that past year:
Despite 960,000 community developers earning virtual currency on the platform from September 2019 - 20, only 3800 of them qualified to exchange Robux for real world $ (you need a minimum of 100,000 earned Robux in your account plus other set criteria to qualify). The TL;DR? Success on Roblox is no mean feat. It takes time, testing and constant iteration based on community feedback, plus the need to constantly outdo other competitor games. With popular Roblox games commanding more players than AAA games on Steam, burnout among young creators is rife:
"Roblox is particularly bad for it because there's this demand for that weekly content drive and these young people don't necessarily have the experience to deal with that," said Ling. "They just work themselves to the point of burnout and then they stop updating the game for a few months and then it falls off the charts. And you see this cycle repeat again and again." ā Uplift Gamesā Director of Business Operations, Josh Ling
With Roblox, weāre seeing more and more developers moving to an independent studio model not only to avoid burnout, but also to legitimize and accelerate their success by employing more developers, and providing an example of a career trajectory on the Roblox platform itself. For successful Roblox YouTuber and game producer MeganPlays itās WonderWorks Studio, for developer Alex Hicks itās his own Studio RedManta and now this week itās the turn of Robloxās most popular experience Adopt Me, to enter the fray with the announcement of their new studio, Uplift Games.
For context, if youāre wondering just how ābigā can this game be? How about 22.5 billion visits at the time of writing with a highest online concurrent player count of 1.9 million, kinda big.Ā
Adopt Me, the brainchild of former Roblox players NewFissy and Bethink (who met in-game), is a simulation game that allows you to raise a virtual pet. The game has grown from strength to strength, even collaborating with Scoob!, the Scooby-Doo movie back in May 2020. Now the team wants to take their success and translate that into a fully-fledged studio that can employ 100 developers, with a twist. Launched this week, Uplift Studios is a fully remote āzero burnoutā studio, fostering an environment that is diverse, inclusive and supportive of new talent from the outset. Oh, and did we mention the benefits package? Where do we sign up?
āWe are a small, growing studio, and while we arenāt perfect, we strive every day to build the sort of studio we always wished we could work for. A place where unforgettable AAA-scale experiences can be created with an independent spirit, by people who live happy and healthy lives. This excites us.ā ā Uplift Studios
As we all know, creator burnout is a real thing, with creators under pressure to be consistent with their content output ā at most daily, at least weekly. For solo developers this becomes a downward spiral and leads to breaks in development or even leaving the platform altogether. Friend of High Tea, Hunter Walk, leans into this in his January article on prioritizing Creator Wellness:Ā
āSo what do I hope Phase 3.0 looks like? It has Creator Wellness built fundamentally into the product itself, in a way which signals to both the creator and their community that this stuff matters.ā
We think weāre just at the beginning of solo developers and micro-teams creating larger studios to capitalize on the opportunity within UGC metaverse platforms. While many traditional industry folks are still getting acquainted with the Roblox platform and game engine itself, weāre all eyes on our Gen Z to not only lead development on the next social gaming sensation, but also to built the blueprint for the gaming studio model of the future centred on the needs of creators themselves as well as their players. Phase 3.0 on Roblox is the development of games by creators building for the new creators.
kettles on: ones to watch
šĀ itās all Gucci: Roblox had been secretly uploading a ton of new Gucci assets to their Avatar Shop recently and today we got our answer why. On May 17 we can expect a new Gucci x Roblox experience, complete with assets that are directly connected to badges. Does this mean they wonāt cost the metaverse? We arenāt so sure. But one thing we do know, we wonāt let themĀ steal from Kestrel and Ana Reloux again. š āāļø
š©š¼āš¤Ā punk rock$. This week we had another mammoth NFT auction, with a collection of CryptoPunks selling for close to $17 million at Christieās, no less. Not bad for a collection that was originally offered up for free, yes free. Back in 2017 all 10,000 were quickly scooped up, with founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson ending up with 1,000 themselves. A mere 9 (!) were auctioned off this week.Ā
Okay you made it, now you can get back to streaming āBuild a Bitchā because Bella truly won the internet this week.
ttyl,