Again in 2021, YouTube celebrated Minecraft‘s trillionth view on the platform with important fanfare. The sandbox builder’s historical past is inextricable from YouTube’s: It’s the place the Let’s Play style–and arguably all of YouTube Gaming–started. And, regardless of the rise (and typically fall) of different mega-popular video games, Minecraft has remained YouTube’s most-played title for nicely over a decade.
However there’s one other artistic sport platform that, similar as Minecraft is inextricable from YouTube’s previous, may be inextricable from YouTube’s future: Roblox.
This week, YouTube marked Roblox’s personal trillionth view–not simply with a video that includes high Roblox YouTubers like Lana’s Life, MeEnyu, Caylus Cunningham, and MeganPlays, but in addition with a whole customized, visitable creator museum inside Roblox itself.Subscribe for every day Tubefilter High StoriesSubscribe
The museum, which Roblox advisor James Purell says was put collectively by studio Vector3, memorializes YouTube content material from practically 90 creators, recreating iconic movies in Roblox-style tableaus. Gamers strolling by means of the displays see every creator’s deal with and the view counts of memorialized movies.
YouTube additionally constructed a scavenger hunt into the museum, and people who full it’ll obtain mysterious “restricted version UGC” for his or her Roblox avatars.
And, after all, it wouldn’t be a branded Roblox vacation spot with out having one thing on the market, so there’s official YouTube x Roblox shirts, too.
That’s a part of the place Roblox-as-part-of-YouTube’s-future is available in. YouTube, like each different main platform, hopped on the metaverse development, however (once more, like each different main platform) its ambitions pale fairly rapidly. Roblox, as we’ve written many occasions, has managed to maintain its foothold within the fashionable metaverse, aka only a digital model of actual life the place individuals come collectively from all over the world to do all the pieces they’d do IRL, like assembly for drinks, fishing, taking part in soccer, and procuring.
Minecraft and Roblox are each platforms the place artistic individuals could make in-game places for others to go to. Minecraft, although, was by no means optimized for individuals (or writer Mojang Studios) to monetize these places. That’s Roblox’s deal–and to date, it appears to be figuring out. Extra manufacturers are discovering room for Roblox of their advertising budgets, and its latest quarterly earnings despatched its inventory to a close to all-time excessive.
Possibly there’s one thing to say about how the sport of the long run is so commercialized. Nevertheless it’s additionally paying out a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to content material creators, which is one thing we are able to get behind, and is proving to be a social and gaming gathering place for Gen Z and Alpha–and hey, a few of us Millennials, too.
