Thread by @dubit

The @Roblox Investor Day livestream was packed full of fascinating insight into their plans. We enjoyed it, so here are some highlights:

1/ @DavidBaszucki highlighted 8 key tenets of the #metaverse: Identity (me/avatar); Friends (online/offline); Immersiveness; Anywhere (create and play); Variety (content); Low friction (to try new things); Economy; Trust and Civility

2/ There are 8 million #Roblox developers across 170 countries, and 20 million experiences on the platform. In 2020 players engaged in Roblox for a total of 30.6 billion hours!

3/ Between Jan-Sep 2020, 50% of the top 100 annual experiences (by hours) were created in the two years prior to achieving their ranking - new content is breaking through because the users love to try new games and it's frictionless to do so

4/ Users engage with 20 different experiences every month, playing (on average) 2.6 hours per day. According to Roblox's CFO, the average life of a Roblox users is 23 months

5/ The Roblox client sees 2 billion chat messages per day. Roblox are planning to launch safe voice chat in the future. Investing a lot in search and discovery of content to bring more of what friends are playing and better suggestions for games based on how players spend in-game

6/ In 2020 1.25m Developers and Creators earned Robux via the platform. The community earned $329m in total payouts. 1,250 developers earned more than $10k and over 300 earned $100k or more. Next, #Roblox's plans...

7/ International Expansion: 2/3 of usage is outside US/Canada. Roblox now has machine translation infrastructure enabling all content to be translated into different languages. JV (Luobo) with Tencent in China (where they will bring existing content and China specific content)

8/ Expand Age Demographic: Goal to appeal to ages 6-60. Better graphics. Faster loading. More sophisticated rendering. Improving Avatar technology (see Loom.ai acquisition) w/ layered clothes and body/face tracking. Significant no. of DAUs change avatar every day

9/ Platform expansion: Encouraging shared experiences beyond play: Concerts, Collaborative Work (sounds like Roblox HQ already use it for this!), Education... Dissecting a frog in Roblox anyone?

10/ Monetization expansion: Immersive brand advertising, Shopping in Roblox, Brand merchandising through avatar items, Brands debuting new content (see Ready Player One, Avengers, Aquaman), Branded worlds - lots more coming (we know this first hand 😉)

11/ #Roblox has 5 core values: Respect the community; Take the long view; Get stuff done; Self-Organize; Own it. 960 Roblox employees as well as now 2300 trust and safety professions!

12/ Engagement hours grew 4x from 2018 to 2020. Key growth drivers: International expansion and Ageing up.

13/ Bookings grew 5.3x from 2018 to 2020

14/ Roblox's CFO clarified their revenue recognition model to define purchases on a per item basis: Consumable virtual items (power ups) recognised when they are used. Durable virtual items (avatar items) recognised as revenue over the average life of a player (23 mths)

15/ Also identified 4 main expense buckets: Cost of revenue (mainly Apple/google play fees); Developer exchange fees (paying developers); Personnel costs (salaries and benfits - 80% on engineering/product teams); Infrastructure and trust & safety (running Roblox cloud)

16/ Developer Exchange Fees

17/ Top grossing Roblox experiences over time

18/ Cohorted bookings per signup in different regions...

19/ ...Each curve represents quarterly sign up cohort. X axis = time in months; Y axis = cumulated cohorted booking per sign up. Each cohort has continued to grow with no evident flattening of the rate of monetization. Each recent cohort shows more cumulative bookings per signup

20/ Takeaway: over the last couple of years, users across all geographies have consistently continued to pay more (Robux) as experiences get better and they spend longer on the platform. #Roblox is going from strength to strength 💪💪 -