Thread by @larsiusprime

Here's my current thoughts on everyone trying to be the next "instant games" or "metaverse" platform...

You MUST give something away if you are starting today. You cannot have a closed stack top to bottom unless you already have a captive audience.

Roblox can have a closed stack top to bottom because they started 10 years ago. Giganticorp can maybe put something together because they're Giganticorp, but YOU can't. You need to give people an incentive to use your stuff and that means relinquishing some control

To be perfectly honest I don't like ANY of the closed stacks no matter how cool the stuff people make with them is. But I have to acknowledge the reality that they work and are attractive for a reason. But even with that hat on, startups cannot clone Roblox and succeed

The best time to start a Robloxified platform is 10 years ago. The next best time is never, do something different instead because everyone will just play & create in Roblox instead.

Everyone who's like, "I'm going to make this great platform, it's just like Roblox but it has THIS feature, or it takes A BIT LESS revenue share" is making all the same mistakes in "So You Want to Compete With Steam"

fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to…

Briefly stated: you need players. You need creators (aka "developers"). You need both, you currently have neither (if you are a startup).

Neither will show up until the other one is already there. You must slice this gordian knot somehow.

Meanwhile the established actors (Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite) are big and entrenched and have active audiences and developers. You CANNOT compete with them on features even if you COULD somehow match them, which you probably won't even be able to.

Like honestly the entire pursuit of a Robloxified startup is very fraught. I've seen some good pitches in the past week but honestly the more I think of it the more dire the situation seems. You need to be thinking about these hard problems very deeply.

So given that success is already going to be pretty difficult to pull off no matter what, a really fatal decision IMHO is planning your business model around the assumption that you can play by the same rules as the big dogs, ie, a proprietary stack from top to bottom

There are four major pieces to a Robloxified stack:

- Editor software
- Playback engine
- Discovery
- Marketplace

Roblox owns most of all of that (some discovery happens off platform but the main place to go is Roblox.com and in-app)

Now, a developer has a lot of incentive to use Roblox's proprietary tools that can only create content for Roblox, that can only be played by customers that Roblox owns, that will mostly be discovered only by Roblox's algo, and only purchased from Roblox's market

What is that incentive? A METRIC FNARPTON OF USERS.
Do you have that? No? Then thinking you can own the entire stack is as silly as thinking you can compete with Steam and charge 30%.

In fact it's worse, because Steam DOESN'T ask me as a developer to make games that:

- Are created with an Steam editor
- Only run on Steam
- Can only be sold on Steam
- Can only be discovered on Steam

Robloxified platforms are company towns. You shouldn't build company towns because:

1) It's a bad thing to do and you shouldn't do bad things
2) You're way too late to succeed with this strategy anyways

If you want to really disrupt something, figure out a way to invent a digital crowbar that takes apart established platforms and empowers individual creators. I cannot tell you how much demand for that there is. Dunno how to do that, but whoever does will get rich.