Roblox’s gaming platform is a metaverse precursor. By giving its users tools to create block-based games that don’t necessarily require coding knowledge, it has become an easy sandbox for creating metaverse experiences, many of which are videogames. Its robust programming tools are the main reason why TagWizz is flexing its muscles to create its first multiplayer videogame metaverse experience.
“TAG by TagWizz” is our metaverse experience proposal based on the famous "Tag, You're It" game (also called tig, it, tiggy, tips, tick, tip). Once inside, users will access four game modes: in the classic Chase and Capture, one player is the hunter and the others are prey, and the hunters needs to chase and capture all of them; in Last Mouse Standing, captured preys turn into hunters, and the last prey to survive wins; in Cheese Chase there’s only one prey out to collect cheeses, and the rest are hunters; finally in Elements; players are divided into three teams, each team is a hunter of another team while being prey of the other.
We believe trends show that the metaverse will be a very influential Internet paradigm in the near future, especially for social interactions and multiplayer videogames. TagWizz is prepared for big players looking for expertise in the field of metaverse development. This technology offers a new type of experience, in which products transcend playfulness into a more communal place of encounter and discovery. This new understanding of what videogames can be is drawing the younger generations in the numbers. Roblox saw an upsurge of popularity during the pandemic, as the lockdown invited tween users to join the platform. Recently, its daily active users increased by 23% last September to 57.8 million, with a total of user engagement hours increased by 16% to 4 billion, even with the kids going back to school. Around 67% of their user base is under 16 years old, but no doubt that the average users age is going to increase, as that population grows in age. The next generation is being educated by Roblox, and will understand videogames as a metaverse experience.
The platform’s sheer size is its most compelling argument to call it a well established metaverse, for what would a metaverse be without enough users to populate it? Growing from 9 million monthly active users in 2016, today it goes over 202 million monthly active users as of last year, making it far bigger than Steam. TagWizz looks to tap on Roblox’ ecosystem’s growth. TAG is our beachhead to expand our services and products into the different metaverse ecosystems. Given that professional development within metaverses in general, and Roblox in particular, is still rather small, TagWizz aims and positioning itself as a key partner for all these ecosystems, just as we had managed to do in our other areas of service.
Starting with Roblox makes sense for reasons beyond its enormous active users base. Its technological infrastructure (its servers) supports great volumes of users active at the same time, walking the metaverse in search of experiences to join with their friends, as well as to meet new ones. And it has more complete development tools than any other metaverse at the time of writing. Its extensive set of methods and objects allow us to develop more behaviors and include more features when developing videogames and other experiences.
Roblox’s disadvantages, on the other hand, are few. We might say that a platform with over 40 million experiences, and counting each day, is a tough nut to crack from the competition point of view. But what others interpret as a steep climb, we see as a great window of opportunity to propose high quality content in such a dynamic ecosystem, as a showcase of what’s possible with TagWizz’ expertise. Monetization can also be a challenge, because all earnings are generated in the platform’s internal currency, the robux. These are exchanged back to national currencies at certain exchange rates that keep a margin of profit inside the platform, something that might represent a liquidity problem for small independent developers who will progressively disappear from the platform and leave place to more established actors. We see as only logical that the Roblox’ monetization system is a guarantee of the success of its business model in the long run, which can be successfully articulated to our clients’ advantage.
The experience the TagWizz team has acquired by coding for Roblox’ metaverse is hugely relevant to us, especially regarding the necessary skill to design experiences for multiple users in atemporal asynchrony. The nature of metaverses themselves allow users to enter and exit at any time, like with any physical space that does not need people in it in order to exist. TAG will be a place of encounter, different from more conventional videogames in which users need to access a server room opened and closed at specific times. Through our acquired expertise developing TAG, we can offer all kinds of services oriented at populating other metaverses, from art and design, to development, testing and experience maintenance for all kinds of clients looking to develop videogames, as well as experiences with a different purpose in mind.
If the metaverse technology may be the Internet’s future, as we forecast in TagWizz, our success in the development of TAG for Roblox will allow us to offer our expertise as advisors to all kinds of metaverse projects, as well as allowing out clients to offer fun, functional and aesthetically pleasing products to capture new generations of users. The metaverse is a great tool that’s not coming to replace physical reality, but to expand our life experiences if we use it properly.
