Roblox is following the social media preferences of its young userbase and rolling out a TikTok copycat feed where users can share 30-second vertical gameplay clips.
As you probably know, Gen Z is all in on vertical video. We’ve seen this pattern growing steadily since TikTok went big during the 2020 lockdowns, and recent research from survey company Toluna showed once again that Gen Z prefers to consume content on TikTok (64% of respondents), Instagram Reels (55%) and YouTube Shorts (54%).
Roblox, of course, wants in on this. A sizable portion of its hundreds of millions of monthly active users are kids (something that’s been causing it more and more PR and legal grief lately) and it’s already one of the top gaming platform for Gen Z and Alpha demographics. With this new feed–called Roblox Moments–it’s clearly aiming to become a top video consumption platform, too.
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And, at the same time, it’s using Moments to appeal to developers, calling the feed “part of our vision for discovery.”
“Moments is an on-platform short-form video experience for creation and discovery,” it said in a company blog post. “Soon, we’ll release Moments APIs, which will help creators attract new audiences and drive stronger engagement. We’re also sharing the source code used for our own Roblox Moments experience so creators can start building and customizing right away.”
For now, the actual core components of Moments–content creation capabilities like trimming, adding music, and writing descriptions, plus the feed itself for video viewing–are launching into beta.
That beta is rolling out slowly to users 13 and older. That’s the standard age for COPPA regulations, which tells us Roblox may be planning to add short-form ads to Moments in the future. We wouldn’t be surprised, considering how hard it’s been trying to build the programmatic ad sector it launched last year (to the chagrin of studios who used to make their bank when Roblox would tap them to build custom games for brand partners, a practice they say has lessened since programmatics came into play).
Roblox said that during the beta period, it will work on testing and refining Moments moderation to ensure videos are age-appropriate, TechCrunch reports.
The discovery function of Moments isn’t the only thing Roblox is doing to charm developers.
Also at RDC, it announced it’s increasing the Developer Exchange rate by 8.5%. That means when developers of Roblox games cash out the amount of Robux spent by players in those games, they’ll get $380 per 100,000 Robux, compared to the old rate of $350 per 100,000.
“This is a significant step that reinforces the company’s dedication to fostering an economy where more creators can thrive and succeed,” Roblox told TechCrunch. “For example, the average revenue for a Top 1000 developer was almost $1 million, up 2.9x since 2020.”
Roblox additionally used RDC to announce it too is getting on the generative “AI” bandwagon, this time to launch tools for asset developers that will let them splurt out functional objects like cars and weapons via text prompting. Other incoming AI tools include text-to-speech generation for NPCs, plus real-time player-to-player voice chat translation for in English, Spanish, French, and German.
All of these tools will likely see a fair bit of use, but we’ll be keeping the closest eye on Moments–and seeing whether Roblox can succeed by punching up with the digital video big dogs.
