Metaverse is real, and it’s played on Mobile

For all of us in this field, the Metaverse “Pump & Dump” has been quite misleading. When we started BrandNewVerse, people asked why we weren’t making NFTs and earning big money instead of focusing on Roblox development. We always replied, “We don’t know about art, design or Monkeys… We know about audiences and marketing, and it seems we’ve forgotten the Marketeers’ Golden Rule: Brands go where the eyeballs go, not the other way around.“

The reality is that “Metaverse” is the word that best defines what Roblox is: A bunch of people interacting with each other in computer-generated virtual environments.

However, the “crypto bros” made us think the metaverse was about blockchain and NFTs. Meta insisted the metaverse could only be consumed through their glasses. Everyone else told their story with strange words trying to convince us to buy a picture of a monkey, wear some VR glasses to feel sick after a few minutes and invest in a new non-stable coin farmed by playing games.

The metaverse exists, grows at a rate of 20%, and is primarily consumed on mobile: 80% of Roblox consumption is mobile, 19% on PC, and 1% on console.

A common headline is that Roblox’s creation spiked in 2020 due to the pandemic. However, as can be observed, the platform has doubled its user base since Q4 of 2020, meaning that, contrary to what is often said about the metaverse hype nowadays: Roblox is continuously growing at an annual rate of 20%. This growth is driven by users over the age of 13, who have become the most significant age group on the platform.

It’s true that these data are as of December 2023 just a few months after the integration of Roblox on PlayStation and Meta Quests. However, looking at the badges that some VR-specialized games have racked up, which accumulate around 3 million users compared to the most popular games that can have 150 million badges awarded, it doesn’t seem likely to exceed 2%-3% as of today.

This is part of our Guide BrandNewVerse-101: Mastering Branded Experiences, you can download the full report here or you can just subscribe to our Newsletter Roblox for Brands here