“Algae Bloom” within Gaming Creator Platforms

This article explores content overconcentration risk within gaming creative platforms such as Roblox. All opinions are my own.

Part I: The algae bloom effect

An algae bloom occurs in nature when there is too much nutrient in the water. At first, the bloom is welcomed by fish and other animals as food. But over time, it starves the water of oxygen and kills the inhabitants, leaving behind a dead sea. Algae blooms underscore the dangers of an unbalanced system—when the overconcentration of one species undermines the health of the ecosystem.

Like natural ecosystems, creator ecosystems also require balance among its inhabitants. From YouTube to Etsy to Twitch, creator ecosystems are made up of countless creators that collaborate and compete with one another for audiences. Healthy creator ecosystems empower multitude of creators to grow. Danger forms when one creator becomes too big at the expense of others.

This type of overconcentration problem is less worrying for video creator platforms such as YouTube: after all, creators can only put out so much video content. Even the most popular BTS music videos and Chloe Ting workouts account for a very small fraction of total YouTube viewership. 

Gaming creator platforms like Roblox and Minecraft, on the other hand, are much more susceptible to concentration risk. For context, gaming creator platforms provide tools for creators to build, host, and monetize games, much in the same way YouTube hosts creator videos or Soundcloud hosts creator music. Roblox is by far the largest of these platforms, accounting for hundreds of millions of active players. 

Gaming creator platforms are susceptible to overconcentration risk because games, unlike videos, can have no engagement limit. While someone may watch their favorite YouTube video a dozen times, they could sink hundreds of hours into their favorite user-created game. 

In addition, games are often social experiences. Players like to play with their friends in the same game. More players beget more players. This social tendency to cluster creates two layers of network effect for gaming creator platforms: one at the platform level and one at the user-created game level. 

Signs point to increasing concentration among gaming creator platforms. The top Roblox game in 2018, “Jailbreak”, accounted for roughly 8-10% of all concurrent users on the platforms (though numbers vary depending on the day). Today, the top Roblox game “Adopt Me” accounts for upwards of 20-25% of all concurrent users on the platform. This concentration is even more striking when accounting for Roblox’s growth over the past two years—usually concentration risk diminishes as platforms get bigger. Beyond “Adopt me”, the majority of Roblox players can be found within a handful of games such as “Bloxburg”, “Royal High”, and “Brookhaven”.

Source: Roblox

Roblox is hardly alone in facing a concentration challenge. For years, the top community-hosted Minecraft server—Hypixel—drew in 8-10x the number of players as the next-most-popular community server. A large percentage of Fortnite Creative players can be found within just a few popular map modes such as prop hunt, a hide-and-seek game. Trouble in Terrorist Town, a user-created social deception game mode, has monopolized the community charts on Garry’s Mod for years, as has the original Dota on Warcraft III. 

When one user-created game monopolizes its creator ecosystem, it starves other games of players. And as more players leave other experiences, their creators will be less incented to provide content updates. These two effects reinforce each other to create a vicious cycle that accelerates concentration risk within the ecosystem.

Part II: Implications on the “metaverse”

The concept of the “metaverse” has recently gained traction in industry conversations. The metaverse promises myriad virtual experiences that coexist within a set of interconnected virtual worlds. That promise spans the gamut from social games to virtual concerts to shared economies. But hidden in that promise is the assumption that many high-quality games/experiences can simultaneously and profitably exist within the metaverse. 

That assumption may be too rosy. If Roblox, Minecraft, and other creator platforms are any indication, the metaverse will be a lot less uniform than we imagine. Rather than a distribution of multitudes, the metaverse would contain a mini-verse of winners that capture most of the ecosystem value, and a many-verse of losers that increasingly struggle to catch-up. 

Every creator ecosystem experiences wealth disparity among creators. That is to be expected. But the unique engagement levers within gaming creator ecosystems—and by extension the metaverse—leave these ecosystems much more vulnerable to overconcentration. The wealth gap between haves and have-nots will be meaningfully more pronounced than those of other ecosystems. 

Left alone, these gaps will increase over time. The natural forces within gaming creator ecosystems do not tend toward equilibrium. Nor, as “Adopt Me” illustrates, does the overconcentration risk diminish with increasing platform scale. 

The Hypixel Minecraft Server

Part III: Solving for concentration challenge

Solving for overconcentration is tricky. On one hand, no platform wants to punish its top creators for being too successful (a.k.a. biting the hand that feeds the platform). On the other hand, leaving overconcentration unchecked can leave long-lasting damages on the health of the ecosystem. Below are three ways that gaming creator platforms can think about tackling overconcentration.

Reimagine content discovery: Content discovery sits at the heart of creator platforms. It’s what enables users to find new content, and by the same token, allow new content to be discovered. Case in point: over the course of a single session, a YouTube viewer will engage with YouTube’s recommendation system many times as she hops from video to video, in the process discovering new content creators. 

By contrast, a Roblox player who wants to play Adopt Me will barely interact with the platform’s recommendation system. She will see other recommended games at the beginning of her play session, when she first logs in, and not again during her play session. This is clearly not optimal for the diversity of Roblox’s creator ecosystem. 

Gaming platforms can better align content discovery with user behavior. One way is to introduce content discovery within game experiences, rather than simply within the launcher. Core, a new creator platform, uses “portals” to aid content discovery. “Portals” are in-game objects that allow users to “traverse” across games, without needing to navigate back to the launcher. This novel discovery experience can meaningfully reduce friction for content discovery.

Over time, we can imagine personalized “portals” that interconnect across many user-created games, taking players to new worlds based on their play behaviors or social activity. 

Introduce progressive “taxation”: One argument for progressive taxation in the real world is that wealth is sticky. More wealth begets more wealth. To partially offset this inherent stickiness, progressive taxation pushes the wealthy to shoulder proportionally more of the tax burdens (whether this actually happens in our society requires a separate discussion). 

The same case for progressive “taxation” can also be made for gaming creator ecosystems. The top user-created experiences benefit from network effect. To offset this inherent stickiness, these experiences can be “taxed” at higher marginal rates. 

Gaming creator platforms like Roblox use fixed percentages for revenue sharing, a reflection of standard practice across most two-sided platforms (to be more precise, Roblox has a fixed exchange rate on its virtual currency for creator cash-out). But one can just as easily imagine a variable revenue-share mechanism: small gaming creators are not “taxed” with platform revenue share. That “taxation” increases with creator scale. In effect, large creators subsidize smaller creators to partially offset the benefits they get for being big. 

Incentivize diverse play behavior: Games are great at incentivizing player behavior. Achievements and rewards create nudges for players across their play journeys. The same system of nudges can be applied towards increasing platform diversity. As one very shallow example, players can be rewarded with an “explorer outfit” for their avatar for playing new and undiscovered user-created games. 

Part IV: What this implies

The future of interactive media is an exciting place. As content creation becomes increasingly democratized, and as platforms improve to support user creations, we will continue to see an acceleration in the breadth and depth of community created content. Aspects of the metaverse are not so far away. 

But we should also recognize the very real challenges along the way, such as overconcentration risk. Consumer behavior and engagement patterns within interactive media are fundamentally different from those in adjacent industries such as video or music. These differences will have profound implications on how ecosystems develop. The “YouTube” of gaming will not look like YouTube; the “new internet” of virtual worlds will follow a very different path from the internet. Within these divergences lie both opportunities and challenges. 

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