Roblox Developer Conference Attendees Receive Free Quest Pros Ahead of Quest 3 Launch

Some ideas about why Meta might be giving away free QPro to thousands of Roblox developers, despite Roblox competing with Horizon Worlds:

– The least interesting one: they have too many that they cannot sell. Either already produced, or they have contracts with Qualcomm and others for components like the pancake optics that require them to buy e.g at least 500K.

– AFAIK RDC is invite-only, so they wouldn’t be giving out the QPro to random users, instead only to a rather exclusive list of people Roblox considered important enough to invite, incl. a lot of influencers.

– Even though Horizon Worlds and Roblox compete, Meta would still earn on every payed transaction in Roblox VR. The widely criticized up to 48% fees that creators would have to pay in Horizon Worlds on every digital sale was due to the actual Horizon Worlds fees going on top of the regular 30% fees Meta takes on (almost) everything. Something similar would apply to Roblox too.

– Roblox is huge. 169M monthly users, while the Quest 2 hit around 6.5M in late 2022, making the active Roblox user base more than 25x larger. Roblox talks numbers during the RBC, they had 65.5M daily users in June 2023, each spending on average 2.3h on the platform every day. That’s up from 58.5M just a year ago, about 11% more in a year. 30% from millions of users would be much more than 48% from a few hundred thousands.

– Roblox is already where Meta’s Metaverse wants to go. They have a large active user base, they have a developer community that works completely inside the Roblox world, while Meta relies on external tools like Unity and Unreal Engine. Roblox has thousands of user created experiences, with hundreds of them making their creators six figure sums every year.

– There are a lot of technical similarities, e.g. with avatars. About 95% of all Roblox users have enabled functions that allow them to dress their avatars, for individualization and of course enabling a market to sell lots of cosmetic items. They are pushing further in that directing, allow virtual calls between users as avatars also on mobile phones, and just announced that those will use the real mimics of the users, so a mix between the basic facial tracking for avatars on the QPro and the attempted realistic face rendering on the AVP.

– Of all the competing “metaverse” platforms, Roblox may be the best pick for Meta to partner with. It is much more restricted and “civilized” than VRChat, which is more like a grass root “anything goes” platform that doesn’t exactly appreciate attempts to moderate or commercialize it. Roblox also has a giant non-VR user base, but at the same time seems rather eager to move towards VR as a very natural fit, without any ambitions to create their own VR hardware/ecosystem, so they also like Meta. And they are clearly aiming to make Roblox a financially viable and sustainable platform of its own for all participants, which leads to things like introducing ads on the platform, but also reacting to developer criticisms and removing fees on digital sales they initially introduced. So they are trying to play nice with everyone, which will probably also include Meta, though I’d expect them to make special deals to not have to pay the full 30%. This is still more cooperative than e.g. Epic, who wanted to get rid of the 30% fee for anything sold in their Fortnite-Universe on the Apple/Google stores, deliberately broke the license agreement to start a fight in court and is trying to lobby politics to take away Apple’s and Google’s ability to arbitrarily set prices. And Epic is still rather uncommitted towards VR in general.

So it looks like a sort of “if you can’t beat them, join them” move, actually two-sided, with Roblox themselves pushing the Quest version, plus a lot of free PR from articles like this one and probably lots of Roblox Twitch and YouTube streamers showing of their QPro after the official launch of Roblox on the Quest Store in a few weeks.