As the tech industry’s attention has moved firmly from Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a metaverse to focus on AI—video game giant Roblox may be proving that the CEO’s vision could be a success.
On Thursday, Oct. 31, Roblox raised its forecast for 2024 as it continues to experience major player growth and increased in-game spending.
Founded in 2006, Roblox is an online platform and game creation system where users can play games created by other users and design their own.
The platform being free to download has helped create a model that incentivizes its daily active user base, which grew 27% to 88.9 million at the end of September, to spend on in-game content.
Roblox raised its forecast for full-year 2024 bookings to between $4.34 billion and $4.37 billion, a significant increase from its previous estimate of $4.18 billion and $4.23 billion.
Michael Guthrie, Roblox’s outgoing finance chief, told Reuters that the company’s growth is due to improvements in its algorithms.
“We’re now matching users with content that’s just more interesting and relevant to them, and we’re doing that from a large and growing community of creators,” Guthrie told the publication.
“That’s a very powerful dynamic,” he added.
Meta CEO Zuckerberg has long envisioned a metaverse where users can shop, play, and learn.
The vision, which he pushed and then dramatically retracted over the past two years, has frankly been very difficult for his company to create.
Despite fierce ambitions, the CEO has faced significant implementation challenges due to a combination of technological, financial, and user adoption barriers.
Meta’s landmark metaverse product, Horizon Worlds, was widely criticized for its low-quality graphics and overall clunky experience.
The product became a key talking point about how far the metaverse had to go and how misguided Zuckerberg’s grand promises were.
In 2022, just one year after Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook to Meta to focus on the metaverse, Meta’s Reality Labs lost over $13 billion.
While many of those losses could be due to long-term investment, the metaverse has yet to show any real successful returns for Zuckerberg and Meta.
At first glance, Roblox may look like a low-polygon videogame for an extremely young audience.
While that may be true, the depths of creativity that the platform allows, mixed in with an extreme focus on social connection, makes it an eerily similar experience to what Zuckerberg envisioned as a metaverse.
Both concepts center around creating digital spaces where users can exist, play, and even work.
In a 2022 interview with Statechery, Zuckerberg described wanting users to be able to go seamlessly between “different experiences and different devices.”
“I would hope that in the future, the organizing principle will be you, your identity, your stuff, your digital goods, your connections,” Zuckerberg said.
Roblox currently takes a cross-platform approach to its accessibility, ensuring users can enter the virtual space from their phones, desktops, or even VR headsets. The accessibility creates a seamless and widely accessible experience regardless of hardware.
Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision heavily relies on advanced VR headsets and AR devices, such as Meta’s Quest, to deliver a deep sense of physical presence and immersion that’s more akin to being “inside” the internet than simply using it.
This emphasis on hardware contrasts with Roblox’s focus on accessibility through traditional devices like PCs, mobile phones, and tablets.
Although Roblox does support most major VR headsets in Roblox VR, it is not the main draw to the platform.
Sales of VR and AR headsets, the key piece of hardware for Zuckerberg’s metaverse, declined 67.4% year over year in the first quarter of 2024, according to a report from global market intelligence firm ID.
When Meta turned its focus to AI like the rest of the industry, many believed the metaverse needed more time and greater technological breakthroughs to be a success.
However, it seems that Roblox, a game first released in 2006, is proving that Zuckerberg’s vision may have been in front of us the whole time.