Questions that I wrote out for RDC 2022
The questions that I wrote out that may or may not have been answered by David Baszucki, CEO of Roblox.
At the time of writing this article, Roblox allowed you, the humble reader to submit up to 3 questions to be sent to David himself in a question-and-answer session at RDC.
Here are the three that I submitted:
A few months ago, it was revealed that Roblox was hiring for a senior engineer position in the space of Web3. How do you envision web3 to interlink with Roblox and the future of an interconnected metaverse?
Alright, shameless plug for the discovery I did. However, it does pose an interesting question, given that many feared that this would result in the transition of inventories and Robux, the currency of Roblox to cryptocurrencies and the dreaded non-fungible token of tokenistic linking. All that has come as a result of these job hiring positions is the creation of a blockchain spambot filtration system. Except that the job posting explicitly mentions Roblox Marketplace and is still up.
As games become increasingly complex, the time spent by solo developers modelling, programming, testing and polishing increases. Roblox is a platform already well-known for being incredibly quick to go from prototype to playable experience. Do you have any future plans to improve this?
Time is money, as the cliché goes. Whilst developers have been thrusted on to them more tools as well as the training for them, often more times than not, you have to train yourself to do these new features to unlock the extra potential. This more-or-less is asking how Roblox plans to make this quicker to ensure that indie developers as well as more established players are on the same foot.
In the last 2 to 3 years, we have seen the rise of the mega-studio in the forms of Gamefam and Voldex buying out successful smaller games to add to their portfolio. What do you think will be the future of indie developers on the platform?
I was inspired to write this question from the musings of a friend about the current experience economy on Roblox, with the rise of these mega studios, backed by venture capitalists, increasing their marketshare by snapping up the games of indie developers. Suffice it to say, there are significant ethical and economic concerns regarding to the overdominance of certain studios in this space.
(Gamefam and Voldex were the specific studios that were on my mind at the time. Please don’t take personal offense to this if you work in those two companies specifically!)
This isn’t the first time that I have submitted questions to Mr Baszucki. The last time I did it was just before the severe Halloween outage, when Roblox hosted an open AMA on Reddit, which attracted some trolls and frankly, people who don’t know any better. You may read my 4 questions, as well as his answer about sponsored event experiences here. Otherwise, here’s a recap of his answers in that AMA.
And if you want the question that David did answer, they are currently in this Twitter thread. Happy RDC, everyone!