I 100% agree, yet while the investors were buying this vision in November, just to give up a few months later amazes me. With the 2000 internet bubble there was at least enough time to see the overpriced businesses doing poorly, here the bubble popped before anything had a chance to be delivered and market tested.

Both bubbles largely ended via Fed tightening. When inflation runs hot, the speculative sectors get damaged the most via tighter monetary policy.

It just happened to be that metaverse as a concept took off near the end of this cycle.

Roblox is not a video game. It's a platform.

Sure, just like Second Life or Warcraft 3 custom maps.

Games with custom content are still games. Somehow everybody lost their minds and starting getting erroneous grandiose visions about these things.

Games as platforms in general, almost have an inbuilt kill-switch in the form of the expected constant progress in game technology. The zero-cost switch also ensures a smooth exodus when something better inevitably comes along, or the platform shoots itself in the foot somehow.

You also have the issue that user-generated content is not a business guarantee. Creators are a minority of your actual player base, and if your creators move on, the rest of your players have nothing to play.

Roblox has a network effect, but history shows gamers have no issue abandoning perfectly good games just because it's not cool anymore. The fact that most people are actually socializing on discord and not inside the games themselves really diminishes the social moat as well.

Roblox has had a pretty incredible run, though. They've been doing the same thing since 2004, and they've been extremely popular amongst their target demographic for most of that. They've clearly found a market niche that's hard to displace.

And that's not by leaning too heavily on existing players, either. They've got a a pretty continuous in/out flow of kids entering and leaving their target demographic as players, and who I can only assume are mostly bored college students as content developers.

They've continuously updated their engine to keep up with modern trends (dynamic lighting, VR, mobile), while most importantly keeping the entire system simple enough that a child can pick it up, tinker around with it, and very quickly see real results. As player expectations from standalone games have climbed over the years, there's a serious pipeline issue getting from "bored kid who has a knack for tinkering" to "I've built a game, come play it". Roblox addresses this by managing expectations. No one demands high-quality textures and models in a Roblox game, it's a Roblox game. A certain degree of buginess isn't just tolerated, it's expected. Because it's a Roblox game. They've struck a balance between a basement skill floor and sky's the limit ceiling in utilizing their tooling that most companies could only dream about.

In short, Roblox is a damn impressive company, that under no circumstances should be discounted just because they nearly exclusively target the "Kid's old enough to (perhaps inadvisably) be left unattended with a computer" demographic.

Does Roblox have a main game, or is it just an editor with some custom content. Seems more analogous to the Warcraft III World Editor that Warcraft III.

All games are created by external developers.

Roblox is more akin to Unity combined with a publishing platform.

I believe they have first-party and community content.