Back in 2021, YouTube celebrated Minecraft‘s trillionth view on the platform with significant fanfare. The sandbox builder’s history is inextricable from YouTube’s: It’s where the Let’s Play genre–and arguably all of YouTube Gaming–began. And, despite the rise (and sometimes fall) of other mega-popular games, Minecraft has remained YouTube’s most-played title for well over a decade.
But there’s another creative game platform that, same as Minecraft is inextricable from YouTube’s past, might be inextricable from YouTube’s future: Roblox.
This week, YouTube marked Roblox’s own trillionth view–not just with a video featuring top Roblox YouTubers like Lana’s Life, MeEnyu, Caylus Cunningham, and MeganPlays, but also with an entire custom, visitable creator museum within Roblox itself.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
The video was directed and produced by digital media studio Portal A, which has an overall deal with YouTube that also had it making content for the platform’s 20th anniversary celebration.
The museum, which Roblox consultant James Purell says was put together by studio Vector3, memorializes YouTube content from nearly 90 creators, recreating iconic videos in Roblox-style tableaus. Players walking through the exhibits see each creator’s handle and the view counts of memorialized videos.
YouTube also built a scavenger hunt into the museum, and those who complete it will receive mysterious “limited edition UGC” for their Roblox avatars.
And, of course, it wouldn’t be a branded Roblox destination without having something for sale, so there’s official YouTube x Roblox shirts, too.
That’s part of where Roblox-as-part-of-YouTube’s-future comes in. YouTube, like every other major platform, hopped on the metaverse trend, but (again, like every other major platform) its ambitions faded pretty quickly. Roblox, as we’ve written many times, has managed to sustain its foothold in the modern metaverse, aka just a digital version of real life where people come together from around the world to do everything they’d do IRL, like meeting for drinks, fishing, playing soccer, and shopping.
Minecraft and Roblox are both platforms where creative people can make in-game locations for others to visit. Minecraft, though, was never optimized for people (or publisher Mojang Studios) to monetize those locations. That’s Roblox’s deal–and so far, it seems to be working out. More brands are finding room for Roblox in their marketing budgets, and its recent quarterly earnings sent its stock to a near all-time high.
Maybe there’s something to say about how the game of the future is so commercialized. But it’s also paying out hundreds of millions of dollars to content creators, which is something we can get behind, and is proving to be a social and gaming gathering place for Gen Z and Alpha–and hey, some of us Millennials, too.
