The Robloxification of VR
Virtual reality developers are robloxifying VR in two ways - both are bad.
Lately, steadfast virtual reality developers have taken to Roblox for inspiration on new apps. They’re generally taking two approaches - but both lead to a quickened demise for the industry.
It’s easy to see why they’re doing this: kids are obsessed with both VR and Roblox. Older developers see this and hope it means Roblox is a source of new content that’ll help them sync with their younger users more. Younger VR developers play Roblox games and know their peers would play a Roblox game adapted to VR. Arguably, it’s “all they know”, so of course they’re building VR versions of trending Roblox games.
But VR doesn’t need sustained usage, it needs to spark a viral social contagion with symptoms like hours-long VR sessions, headsets becoming a school backpack essential, and season-agnostic headset sales booms.
Towards this end, I don’t think Roblox did anything particularly well both technically and conceptually. The biggest reason for its success is that they were they persevered the most in their category and stuck to the kids demographic - while others quit or tried to take on Steam.
Roblox was a developer tool and platform before it was a product. This makes the cold start problem much harder to overcome, hence why it took them 12+ years to take off. The iPhone was an incredible product before Apple allowed developers to build apps. They only created the App Store after developers were begging to build apps.
So when VR developers start to think the “copy Roblox” model is good, I have serious doubts. There are two Versions of robloxification I see.
Version 1 of this is “become the Roblox of VR” (DigiGods, Rec Room, Gtag and Yeeps to some extent).
DigiGods failed the most horrifically at this. They didn’t have a compelling game at all to begin with. It may have helped them raise money from naive investors (“DigiGods, marks a breakthrough in the gaming category by combining proven social VR gameplay with the powerful network effects of an intuitive user-generated content platform, allowing users to create their own games” Hartmann Capital), but on the side DigiGods developers Squido Studio are throwing everything but DigiGods at the wall to see what really sticks, like their side game Grand Theft Animals.
The others are only staying alive because of acceptable retention and social relevance. But it isn’t enough to cross the years long chasm until develop-led network effects set in that Roblox courageously crossed.
The other issue here is that games that successfully build developer tools (like RecRoom or DigiGods or Gorilla Tag) haven’t yet done anything unique. At best, it’s some sort of VR-adapted primitive building system. At worst, support for Lua scripted Unity scenes. They’re no different than Roblox’s method of incentivizing and equipping developers. It unsurprisingly produces the same outcome: uninnovative mountains of slop.
Whatever is trending in Roblox is quickly turned into a Gorilla Tag or Rec Room map - like Squid Game maps or tycoon games. And it’s all surfaced in the same grid of thumbnails you’d find on a kid’s designated Roblox iPad.
That brings us to Version 2 of VR devs taking inspiration from Roblox…
Version 2 of this is “copy Roblox games into VR” (Steal a Brainrot, Bwah, Ruffnauts, UG, Grand Theft Animals).
These games climb the charts quickly and rely heavily on blitz social marketing + player posting. They are literally 1:1 copies of Roblox games, plus gorilla tag locomotion. On the bright side, they’re frequently built by younger developers who have a real understanding of their peers users.
While this might be better than developers building worn out ideas in single player game land, the games are total flashes in the pan. Just as quickly as a game meta on Roblox falls out of fashion, so does the VR equivalent. These games’ successes are tied to the quickly shifting attention cones of Roblox and TikTok. They’re microtrends, like Steam friendslop games.
Good for developers who are fast, don’t need stable income, and don’t care about actually growing the market for VR - but ultimately destructive to the industry as a whole.
Notice how Roblox only got to this “fast fashion” era of games after years of building a developer base and algorithmic content discovery.
Attempting to compete with the Roblox Machine 20 years into its efficiency optimization is like North Korea claiming to be a world power because of a few nukes but an otherwise unimpressive military. Does it make sense for North Korea to skip the skill tree and go straight for nukes? Not if they want to be an actually formidable military.
Does it make sense for VR to skip a natural product discernment process and go straight for late stage Roblox slop? You be the judge.
What you may have noticed is how both Version 1 and Version 2 lead to the same content. Whether inside an app’s individual thumbnail feed of worlds, or polluting the Quest store with those same Roblox-inspired apps - it’s all the same stuff.
And it’s the content that has led to the demise of Rec Room, which learned the hard way that it is impossible to compete with Roblox when you become Roblox. Or worse, you become Roblox with added steps.
VR needs new, native software. It’s hard, but developers need to force themselves to cut out noise and truly discover what they think software in VR should be.
If Roblox had died in 2010 (like it would have if they didn’t have superhuman perseverance), no one on earth would suggest that the VR-native way of traversing locations would be to have them on a flat discovery feed where you teleport from room to room. No one would say that the best content in VR would be glorified Cookie Clicker.
I’m not necessarily advocating all developers begin building social, persistent virtual reality worlds with gorilla tag locomotion like Wild is doing (though I’m confident in our discernment process). But there’s a well thought out reason we’re building the way we’re building. Is there a reason your app is the way it is? Is it rooted in something unique to virtual reality?
The biggest arbitrage opportunity on the table isn’t to take content from Roblox and plant it in VR, it’s to leverage the talent being wasted on Steal a Monke VR and work together on building the real future.