Max Albert

If you play Fortnite UGC this week you might see our product placements for Ballboyz Soap--clinically designed to cure middle & high school athletes of embarrassing acne.

I believe the VPP revolution will inevitably kill the impression as the standard currency advertisers buy on. It won’t be a quick death. It’ll be a really slow & painful one.

Gaming got written off post-COVID while everyone chased AI, but it’s still a ~$200B market and the incumbents are weaker than they’ve been in years. Last cycle gave us Fortnite and Roblox. This cycle will do the same. At gaming multiples vs AI at 50x revenue, it’s one of the best asymmetric bets in consumer right now. Watch.

How was your Tuesday?

@michaelmiraflor My earlier comment was mostly a joke. But I’m glad you tweeted this because yeah, it’s not great.

@maxvwalbert Not sure if that's good for a lot of questions that people are asking their LLMs.

Really makes you think.

Closing an enterprise deal with a public company after a 7-month sales cycle

@z_cox2 Yes.

Yes

@jtwald IMO: Organic = asymmetric growth Paid = consistency They’re different tools. It’s like comparing a hammer to scissors.

Cartographers lecturing captains mid-storm.

The point of paid marketing isn’t efficiency but certainty

@metapreston Preston’s tweets this week:

Roblox is now going to take a percentage of all in-game brand sponsorships. It’s like if YouTube demanded every creator with a brand deal to pay a percentage for promoting the brand on the platform.

The hot debate at SXSW thus year: Tech bros: “in the age of ai, brand is the only thing that matters” Marketing ppl: “brand is completely fake”

Running ads on OpenAI: $60 CPM $200,000 minimum buy What do yall think? Expensive or cheap?

I lowkey love @im_roy_lee

I’m pretty bullish on Roblox long term w/ Blake but if you want to make the counter argument here it is: 1. Roblox takes 76.5% of IAP transactions (ouch). Top creators often find players != profit. 2. Roblox’s engine is simply bad (Luau) 3. There’s other popular UGC worlds out there for F2P indie studios to build on with better engines & margin (e.g. Minecraft, UEFN, ZEPETO) and it’s only going to get MORE competitive (e.g. hoyoverse + GTA 6). 4. Top creators graduate Roblox for another platform & when content goes so does Roblox’s distribution. 5. Right now one big trend that’s happening amongst indie devs is platform diversification: Gamefam, Voldex, Lovespun etc. — top Roblox creators now building on ALL UGC platforms. So friction would not be hard for these creators wind down Roblox if value isn’t there. My POV: I think Roblox will be a strong “forever platform,” but I disagree it’ll have a monopoly.

@metapreston @JNavok I can't remember the last time a free-to-play multiplayer game reached any scale on Steam. Steam is essentially only premium indie games. The risk of going free-to-play as an indie is way too big on Steam vs. Roblox.

Unclear to me what stops Roblox from being a trillion dollar company in the future. Users are there, monetization is there, the lawsuits will be worked out (as they were for every major social media company before this) and as fidelity improves, the audience will age up. When I worked at Square Enix we built Core Online, a game builder, back in 2011. We didn't have the lightweight tech that Roblox has and runs everywhere, we were limited to good browsers on good PCs. We had that dream a long time ago, but couldn't pull it off. These game building platforms are definitely where Tiktok goes. Prompt based instant experiences, AI algorithms providing suggestions, creators able to quickly enable experiences that people play with them together at scale. Add fidelity realism that's coming from AI rendered textures + meshes, animation libraries called on demand and Lua managing repeatability + consistency, plus Roblox having the most scaled matchmaking services on the planet, and you have a very strong moat. As prompting enables even young kids to create a game with a few words, you'll have an explosion of creativity. Already Roblox games are innovating in game design way faster than AAA- every AAA single player game since Bioshock is basically the same collection of fetch quests bookended by fight scenes, but the speed by which the tycoon genre has been evolving on Roblox (GaG to Steal a Brainrot to Tsunami) moves as fast as Tiktok trends and mints overnight millionaires. In the 70s through the 90s, if you were a teen or 20-something who wanted to make a game, you were a programmer who distributed your own game. ZZT! Karetaka! Now you can be 15 and making a Roblox game and have access to the entire world instantly.

Maybe the Tik Tok but for games is just Tik Tok afterall 🤔

@finebaum As a big ten fan, I always loved to hate you @finebaum Kiddos to you for doing this & best of luck to the SEC next year.

A mea culpa with a side of crow about the Hoosiers this season...

Adrenaline Interactive launch video is loading….

In NYC for the week. Who has co-working recommendations??

@Ointerestrates @TomFornelli Do you think we could get cignetti part time?

The Big Ten vs. The SEC in bowl games