Streaming: The Next Generation
Roblox and the Metaverse
Key Takeaways:
- Roblox’s success within the streaming ecosystem is the next major milestone in what the gaming community calls the “metaverse.”
- Roblox will become an even more dominant player in streaming, playing, socializing, developing, and then most importantly learning.
- Net Follower Gain = The total amount of followers gained, for all streamers across Twitch, while when they streamed a specific title.
- Hours Watched / Net Follower — This ratio is the average number of hours a viewer watches before subscribing to a streamer playing a particular game.
Live-game streaming is a cultural phenomenon that few would have predicted could be this large 10 years ago. From tournaments that bring in 100M viewers to now multi-million dollar streamer contracts, attention is being heavily directed towards the various streaming platforms, such as Twitch, YouTube Gaming, Facebook Gaming, and Mixer.
Here is a quick look at the top 10 games/categories on Twitch (~68% of Twitch’s hours watched) in 2019:
For context, the top 10 games combined had 2.2B more hours watched than the next 90 games in the top 100 combined. These games are clearly popular, yet I’d like to explore how to identify a game that is becoming popular on streaming platforms. To do this, we used a feature on Stream Hatchet that allows us to see the Net Follower Gain for a particular title over the last year.
Net Follower Gain = The total amount of followers gained, for all streamers across Twitch, while they were streaming a specific title.
Below is a chart that shows the games with the highest Net Follower Gain. The results are not surprising, as it primarily highlights some of the biggest games in the market today (besides Just Chatting).
To further explain what Net Follower Gain means, Fortnite, which was streamed across 3.8M channels in 2019, had 105M net new followers (gained followers minus lost followers) for all streamers combined while they were playing Fortnite. In 2019, each channel that streamed Fortnite gained an average of 27 new followers while streaming the game.
While Fortnite continues to grow, games come and go. To identify “what’s next,” we can look at the ratio of Hours Watched per Net Follower Gain.
Hours Watched / Net Follower Gain = the average number of hours a viewer watches before following a streamer playing a particular game.
3 Core Observations:
- Roblox and Roblox-styled (Krunker) games gained followers the fastest in 2019
- Mobile games are gaining steam on streaming platforms
- Fortnite is certainly not dead
I’d like to focus the rest of this piece on the first observation above: Roblox and Roblox-styled (Krunker) games gained followers the fastest in 2019. Not only does this trend reflect the next generation of streamers, viewers, and gamers, but I believe it shows what could be an incredible paradigm shift in content (especially gaming content).
Roblox: user-generated content on the rise
Roblox has been quietly building one of the most active platforms in video gaming. It’s worth over $4B after it’s recent capital raise from a16z (blog post) and has over 100M monthly active users. Roblox is the 5th most-watched game on YouTube and has more MAUs than the principal game distribution platform in the world, Steam (95M MAUs).
What makes it such an impressive case study is that Roblox is extremely popular in the under-18 demographic. As streaming continues to evolve and attract more viewers, the younger demographic is going to become increasingly drawn to Roblox-specific content. The key difference with Roblox is that users come for the platform, not just a specific game, which offers a wide variety of streamed content.
Streamers, especially new ones, need to take note of this phenomenon if they want to become (or stay) relevant. Just look at how successful the streamers are that fully adopted Fortnite when it was first released. A large portion of streamers that are signing massive deals with Twitch, Mixer, and Youtube hit their inflection point of popularity with Fortnite (Ninja, DrLupo, CouRage, TimTheTatman, Valkyrae).
Why Is Roblox Special?
What makes Roblox so special is that it invites gamers and creators to build without hurdles, creating a wide-reaching form of user-generated content. Roblox has created tons of resources to learn Lua (the coding language Roblox uses) but there are also models created by other developers that you can freely use. According to Roblox, they have amassed 2 million developers who have created games like MeepCity (4.5B plays), Jailbreak (my personal favorite with 3.1B plays), and Work at a Pizza Place (1.9B plays).
The current 18–35 age demographic didn’t grow up with a simple, straightforward way to create unless you knew how to code proficiently. This demographic’s UGC was through mods which is actually what created popular games like DOTA and CS:GO. But, as you can see, there are very few mods that have become successful due to the lack of people who knew how to build them. Roblox has begun to flatten the development curve — they have created a platform of successful UGC content with easy to use tools that don’t rely on a heavy codebase.
How does this change streaming?
I believe Roblox’s success within the streaming ecosystem will be a major milestone in what the gaming community calls the “metaverse.”
Many people coincide the word metaverse with the future of Fortnite but continually disregard the two million developers and 100+ million MAUs on Roblox. Epic Games is raising tons of money to make acquisitions, and build out Fortnite and Unreal Engine while Roblox has the largest active user base and developer community across gaming. The major difference here, though, is that Epic Games’ developers have a set goal and are constrained (not in a bad way) to building towards these specific goals — possibly the metaverse — while Roblox’ developers are building to express their creativity.
People have been talking about the “metaverse” for a very long time, ever since sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson first coined the concept of a global, virtual, persistent space shared by many. — a16z
The future of streaming, especially within the Roblox ecosystem, could see streamers and viewers interacting in virtual worlds together. Where viewers watch streamers build games and then play these games together. You don’t need a new console, or a high powered computer to play the same games that your favorite Roblox streamers are playing. Gamers won’t need to worry about buying a game, or leveling up in games to play with each other. This can be done successfully because Roblox allows gamers to create persistent identities across games (a powerful component of the evolution of any metaverse environment).
As Roblox continues to build-out the development tools, especially within the “Team Create” tool, you will see streamers and viewers building games together in real-time. Team Create is a “Roblox Studio tool that allows for simultaneous place and script editing among groups of developers. Once enabled, developers with the correct permissions can invite others, and each editor can see the changes others make while they work.” I predict that some streamers will build their reputation around development content and will be able to invite the 100+ millions of Roblox enthusiasts to join in and we will see an increase in developers on the Roblox platform as viewers “learn by doing.” Some streamers will then be able to become “teachers” and usher in an educational component to streaming.
Roblox will become a dominant player in streaming, playing, socializing, developing, and even learning. Streaming will give people a way to learn in real-time how to build games and begin building a career around game development. We have seen real-time education take off with the likes of Khan Academy and Coursera but what they lack is real-time feedback and synchronous work (Bloom’s 2 Sigma problem explains how beneficial tutoring and one-on-one learning is) which streaming can offer. As more games are created, and more people are playing, streamers will find even more ways to create engaging content that is fine-tuned towards Roblox’s user base.
Conclusion
Roblox is going to continue to grow within the streaming ecosystem. It will usher in the next generation of gamers in a way past generations haven’t been able to. Through collaboration and interaction within games, we will see Roblox become a powerhouse on all streaming platforms — or maybe even a Roblox-centric platform is built. As more gamers look to build, they will look for live-streamed, and VOD, content from the best developers to learn how to build games within Roblox’s studio. Roblox still has some growing to do.
