Roundtable #20 - The Present and Future of Roblox & Player-run NFT Game Economies

How is Roblox doing 6 months after its IPO? What are some key design decisions when building an NFT-based game economy?

Answer to this and more in this week’s roundtable!

In this Metacast episode, Aaron Bush , Yonatan Raz-Fridman and Miikka Ahonen are joined by your host Nicolas Vereecke to discuss;

The Present and Future of Roblox

Roblox is betting big on multiple angles: 

- Higher immersion through voice chat, better textures & more lifelike avatars

- More & better developer tooling

- Monetization through limited items & royalties

It is successfully innovating on different fronts, and thereby impressively deepening its competitive moat. 

NFTs and player-run Game Economies

MobileDevMemo article

According to the article: 

-  The promise of NFTs for games lies in the fact that the game marketplace is not controlled or operated by the game developer, that there is transparency and that there is potential for fractional ownership. 

- Essential requirements are that the value of in-game assets is not determined by an inflow of new players, NFTs contribute to core gameplay, and NFTs need to be freely accessible to all players.

- Some design choices that fulfill these requirements are; items are non-permanent (they can degrade or be lost upon death), there is derived scarcity (based on land for example), and items need intrinsic utility beyond speculation.

The above is a solid starting point for a comprehensive framework around NFT-based economies, but lacks some flexibility. 

As this week’s bonus segment, we are sharing bold predictions about game economies!

If you would like us to discuss any another gaming-related topics, do reach out at nicolas@naavik.co. We’d love to hear your general thoughts and feedback too!

And as always, if you like the episode, you can help others find us by leaving a rating or review!

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