Category: Roblox

UPDATED: Major Avatar Apparel Creator Blueberry May Leave Second Life: Are There Greener Pastures Elsewhere?

People are often mystified as to why I continue to write about the now-twenty-year-old virtual world of Second Life, when there are so many other, newer metaverse platforms which I could discuss and dissect on my blog. I attempted to answer that question in 2019: Editorial: Why Second Life Is the Perfect Model of a Mature, Fully Evolved Virtual World for Newer Social VR Platforms to Emulate. There’s quite a lot to learn from Second Life’s rich history; ignore it at your peril!

In today’s SL lesson, we learn that there may, indeed, be greener pastures than venerable, long-running Second Life—even for those creators who got their start on the platform! And it would be wise for the newer metaverse platforms, too, to ponder the possibility that their current user base might depart for more lucrative opportunities in other virtual worlds, or even from some unexpected competition!

As usual, I am a little late to report the recent news that major women’s avatar apparel brand Blueberry has decided to, at the very least, hit the pause button, and quite possibly, leave Second Life altogether.

Nobody seems to know the future of Blueberry…

To make a real-world comparison, it would be as if Zara or H&M—or, here in Canada, the ubiquitous Reitmans—suddenly decided to go out of business. Blueberry has been a phenomenally successful store in Second Life, easily earning over a million dollars a year in revenue, according to this October 2022 business article from the Observer. Blueberry might well be the single biggest creator of womenswear in Second Life. In other words, this is major news.

In a mid-April Facebook post by Blueberry’s proprietor, Mishi (the text of which was also posted in an April 13th, 2024 notice to the Blueberry store group in SL):

Hi fam ❤
I’m very sorry to say that I will be taking a break from SL. Blueberry does not plan to release any new items for the foreseeable future. At some point, I will share an update. Right now I need this time to reflect.
I do consider all of you berries as my forever family and I am eternally grateful for your support and understanding. Thank you for all of your love.

The store group notice goes on to add:

Please send all questions regarding credit to blueberryxx in a notecard and any other questions to [a URL, which unfortunately which appears to have been cut off by the character limit in the message]

Somebody suggested that the URL shortner redirect might be to the contact page on the House of Blueberry website, which is here: https://www.houseofblueberry.com/contact.

Okay, first, let’s deal with the practical matters in the wake of this news. Then, I’m going to pull back for a bigger picture.

If you have ever been a customer, you should go to the Blueberry store, as soon as possible, and head for the Information Wall in the front entrance to the store (exact SLURL):

The Information wall at the Blueberry store in-world

First, if you have made any purchases from Blueberry in the past, hit the Redeliver sign, follow the website link, and get redeliveries of everything you’ve bought over the years (for some of you, it’s a lot!). If the store shuts down (as is indeed possible), you will want to have backups of your purchases in your inventory, since you won’t be able to get any redeliveries.

Secondly, Blueberry has always been very generous with gifts of store credit over the past dozen years (since its founding in 2012), particularly during shopping events such as the regularly-occurring Shop and Hops. Click on the blue Check Store Credit sign to see what your current level of unspent store credit is, and spend it now.

All right, now that that’s done, let’s dig a little deeper into what’s happening here. From the long and growing discussion thread on the topic on the Second Life Community forums, started by Persephone Emerald, I will share only a few quotes:

  • “It was repeatedly reinforced by the CSR’s [customer service reps] in group chat that the store would be closing, no idea when, but if you have any store credit you should use it pretty sharpish.”
  • “The Blueberry Discord [server] seems to have disappeared too.”
  • “I don’t think it’s also been mentioned here that the group moderators said in the group that they were basically laid off, but were continuing to support users as best they could for the sake of the Blueberry customers and group members.”
  • “The store is closing in SL. The CSR’s have announced that in group and her Discord group is gone as well.”
  • “They have no more CSRs, only recently laid off employees. Those people are saying they do not know whether the store will stay or go, but they know that for now, no new releases. No support provided, buy at your own risk. Whatever was said three days ago is vague, and it still remains a mystery on what is happening with this brand.”

In fact, there was so much speculation (some quite unfounded), that Mishi posted a second message to Facebook:

I want to stress once again that this is not a goodbye.

I need a minute to reflect on the changes I want to make to the future content I want to create.

Please allow me some time to think in peace. This isn’t just a business for me, it has been my passion. This platform specifically has been my passion. The people have been my passion.

So I ask of you, please, to take my word at face value here. I don’t want to make promises to anything because I don’t know what changes I want to make as yet.

So, aside from closing the Blueberry Discord server, and letting their customer service representatives and group moderators go, we really don’t know anything at this point. We’re just going to have to wait and see. (But don’t wait if you had your eye on something in the store, or if you have unspent store credits. Do it now!)

But I now want to focus on the bigger picture here, and speculate a bit about what’s possibly happening with Blueberry. Blueberry and its owner, Mishi McDuff, started off small, as the Observer noted in its 2022 article:

Mishi McDuff, founder of House of Blueberry, or Blueberry for short, attended a 2011 virtual concert in Second Life, an online gaming platform some call the first metaverse. She had wanted to see Sean Ryan, a Texas-based singer and songwriter, perform. McDuff joined the platform for the first time and attended the concert with her starter avatar. But alongside characters dressed as fairies, warriors and supermodels, she felt out of place. For her second virtual concert, she wore a polka dot dress she created in Photoshop, and concert attendees asked to buy her design for their own avatars. 

McDuff founded Blueberry knowing Second Life users were willing to spend money on their digital identities. Its first year, Blueberry recorded $60,000 in sales according to McDuff. By 2016, its yearly revenue hit $1 million with a team of three, designing virtual clothing for Second Life.

But, like many creators who got their start in SL, Mishi started looking at creating wearables for other platforms:

Last year [2021], McDuff decided to expand the team and scale the company as interest in the metaverse swelled. It has now entered the Roblox metaverse and sold more than 20 million virtual assets total. In addition to digital clothing, their portfolio includes accessories, hair styles, pets and pet clothing.

As one person commented in the previously-mentioned Second Life community forums thread:

“Roblox revenue last year was 2.2 billion dollars. And they’re moving to more realistic avatars.”

Take a scroll through the House of Blueberry website, and it’s very clear where the emphasis is! (There is precious little mention of Second Life at all on their website!)

As one commenter stated on the SL Community Forums:

We know that there’s a massive number of daily and monthly users on ROBLOX (70.2 million daily and over 216 million monthly active users)… but according to Zepeto’s numbers, they have around 300 million users worldwide.  Go ahead and look, I did so myself.

Compare those numbers to what the daily and monthly numbers are for SL, and you’ll understand why this was more or less a business decision.

House of Blueberry was also front and centre in a mixed-success initiative called the Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW), and last year they received some $6 million in funding for digital fashion initiatives, according to a VentureBeat article dated January 16th, 2023. (I also wrote about Blueberry’s heavy involvement in the Metaverse Fashion week in a February 2022 blogpost on my blog.)

While blockchain metaverse platforms and NFT-based avatar wearables have largely crashed and burned since their heady heyday only a few short years ago, they are far from the only game in town. Non-blockchain platforms and apps, such as Roblox, Zepeto, and Snapchat, all have far larger markets for avatar customization, and they absolutely dwarf the user base of Second Life.

And the user base for Snapchat, Roblox, and Zepeto also skews significantly younger than Second Life’s, another important consideration to anybody looking at the metaverse marketplace. While it’s true that older users tend to have more discretionary money to spend, they also—sad to say—have a tendency to grow old and even die! Second Life’s user base keeps adding just enough new people to replace those who retire (or die), but not at a rate that makes it grow significantly (pandemic bumps notwithstanding).

Also, factor in that popular avatar clothing designers in Second Life have to deal with constant changes and additions to the various brands of mesh bodies which they are often asked to make apparel for. For example, take the recent decision by Maitreya to replace its ubiquitious Maitreya Lara 5.3 mesh body with the retweaked LaraX, which is just different enough to require some rerigging work (although things like shoes and rings should still work).

It takes a lot of work to rig clothing properly for a single brand of mesh body; multiply that work by the number of mesh bodies you are being asked to support by your customers. It quickly becomes obvious that the amount of work required (rigging an article of clothing for five or six or seven or eight of the most popular brands of male and female mesh bodies), to serve a user base which has stayed pretty much the same size for the past decade, poses a rather serious workload problem.

Some stores, such as Spoiled in this image, rig for as many as nineteen or twenty mesh body variations! This is INSANITY, and yet new mesh bodies and add-ons multiply in Second Life.

So, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest that Mishi of the House of Blueberry, and whoever is on her team, have scouted out the field, done their research, checked their spreadsheets, and decided to cut their ties to Second Life, and focus on the much more lucrative opportunity to create avatar apparel for those games and apps that boast millions of users. It just makes economic sense.

The truly worrying thought is: how many other Second Life content creators are also looking at places where the grass is greener, and are willing to jump ship? (Go ahead, call the mixed metaphor police. I dare you. 😜 )

Blueberry just might be the most public case to date, but I somehow doubt that they will be the last. And the lesson here for all metaverse platforms is: be good to your content creators, or they might desert you for better profits elsewhere! What is your platform doing to attract and keep the talent that brings in new users?

UPDATE April 25th, 2024: I forgot to mention that the Blueberry store also has a group gifts wall, opposite the Information Wall in the front entrance hall. If you are a member of the Bluebeery group, don’t forget to pick up all the gifts!

However, I have just been informed that you can no longer join the Blueberry store group to pick up these group gifts. I take this as yet another troubling sign that Blueberry is planning to leave Second Life.

Step by Step, Roblox Is Moving from a Game Platform to a Full-Blown Metaverse: A Look at Some Recent and Upcoming Features

As I mentioned in a previous blogpost, Roblox has received a lot of attention when its market valuation hit US$41.9 billion when the company went public in March 2021. I’ve only written about Roblox a couple of times in the past on my blog (here and here), but I thought it was time to take a closer look at the popular platform, and some of the moves that the company is making to branch out from simply being a place to play games created by other users, into a more open-ended metaverse platform.

But first, some statistics: the core demographic of Roblox is children and teenagers, ages 9 to 15; adults over the age of 25 make up only 14% of users. In order to keep Roblox a family-friendly place, the company has deployed a team of 400 human moderators (assisted by AI algorithms), and has instituted policies such as a ban on romance and politics:

The company’s community standards were revised this week and detail many policies that weren’t in the version that was updated in July.

• An old ban on using Roblox for dating has been expanded to “prohibit content that seeks or portrays romantic relationships,” including weddings, honeymoons and romantic animations of kissing or hand-holding.
• A new section bars “discussion or depiction” of political parties, sitting elected officials, “previously-elected officials in their official capacity” and slogans tied to any current political races.
• The new policies also explicitly ban recruitment into and fundraising for terrorist or extremist groups.

The platform saw a surge in use due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of children were in lockdown, and currently has over 202 million monthly active users (i.e., those who sign on at least once in the past 30 days). VentureBeat reported:

The platform has 1.3 million developers and creators earning Robux [Roblox’s in-world currency], and this year, they are on track to earn $500 million from their creations.

Most metaverse platforms for kill for that level of popularity, but Roblox is far from an overnight success. Launched in September 2006, it has had a 15-year head start on competitors, building slowly but surely to become a dominant player in the marketplace.

At this year’s Roblox Developers Conference (RDC), the company did a show-and-tell of what new features they were working on. An October 19th, 2021 article in Vogue Business, titled Shaping online avatars: Why our digital identities differ, included the following picture from Roblox, showing a key future feature: dressable avatars!

At last week’s Roblox Developer Conference, the company announced an upcoming “Layered Clothing Studio” beta launch that allows a “combinatorial explosion of possibilities in customising your avatar”, according to a spokesperson, as any body can be outfitted with layered clothing items and will adjust to the avatar’s shape. This release “represents an important stepping stone in a long line of innovations to improve the expressiveness and combinatorics in the metaverse,” the spokesperson said.

This Layered Clothing Studio feature will be launching in beta sometime soon, and it would appear that, as in Sansar, Sinespace, and Second Life, there will be a new, emerging market for avatar fashion designers!

Another upcoming feature is Dynamic Heads, as mentioned in this Oct. 14th, 2021 tweet; this is a feature in private beta test, for avatar heads that support facial animations (more information here):

If you want to jump in and get started with these new avatar features, here’s a video by KreekCraft explaining how to test it out:

In addition, Roblox is hard at work on other features, including:

Finally, Roblox has launched a new feature called Party Place, where users can create a private server to host their own parties and events with friends. Last year, The Verge reported:

Party Place is currently in beta testing and free to access; it was previously used by the developers to host their own in-game events, including the One World: Together At Home Virtual Concert in April. 

As far as I can tell, the Party Place is still in beta as of this writing (November, 2021).

Step by step, Roblox appears to be adding new features that are expanding the platform to be more than just a collection of user-generated games, into a more fully-featured metaverse product where you can customize and animate your avatar in new ways, and socialize with your friends! I will be keeping an eye on Roblox and writing more about the platform in future, so I have created a new blogpost category, Roblox, and adding this and all my previous blogposts about Roblox under that new tag.

Lars Doucet: Some Required Reading for ANY Metaverse Company Hoping to Make It Big, and a Voice of Reason in the Current Metaverse Hype Cycle

If you really want your platform to become the seed for “The Metaverse”, then you need to give it away.

—Lars Doucet
If you want to make a mint off the metaverse (and especially if you dream of being the next Roblox), you’d better be listening to what Lars Doucet has to say! (image source: Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash)
Lars Doucet
(image source)

Lars Doucet is an independent game developer and consultant for various multi-million dollar game projects (through his company, Level Up Labs), as well as a games industry analyst, commentator, and blogger at Fortress of Doors.

On July 1st, 2021, Lars wrote a Fortress of Doors blogpost titled So You Want to Compete with Roblox, which is primarily directed at those companies who desire to become the next billion-dollar-valued metaverse platform (Roblox, as many of you already know, obtained a market valuation of UA$41.9 billion when the company went public this past March). However, much of Lars’ wisdom also applies to any social VR platform or virtual world that wants to break into the big leagues, especially if they are competing against an entrenched front-runner in a particular market segment, so I decided to write up this blogpost as an introduction to Lars’ ideas for my regular readers (if you’re not interested in my thoughts, just click over to read Lars Doucet’s blogpost in full; I have links to other content of his at the tail end of this post).

Lars starts off by dashing any dreams of would-be Roblox competitors, saying that they are too late to try and overtake something which has been building for years:

I used to get so many pitches from startups eager to knock PC gaming powerhouse Steam off its block, that in 2018 I wrote one big standard response called So You Want to Compete with Steam, with a follow-up a year later. The dust has now settled and the result is clear: all of the new contenders failed but Epic, and even they have a long upward climb ahead of them.

Flash forward to today, and my inbox is stuffed with pitches from start-ups wanting to compete with Roblox, that plucky Lego-ish multiplayer game-creation platform currently valued at 41 billion dollars.

So I guess we’re gonna do this again. Here’s how you can build a successful business that competes directly with Roblox: DON’T.

I say this out of love: the vast majority of you are going to fail. I admire you and your hard work and dedication; I’m pessimistic simply because your task is incredibly hard.

First of all, you are late to this party. Roblox first launched in 2006, a full fifteen years ago – that’s five years before Minecraft, if you can believe it. They have a massive head start and are playing by an entirely different set of rules. Your only chance is to flip the entire problem on its head.

Lars outlines three components which absolutely must be in any product that tries to make a dent in the ever-evolving metaverse, they are:

  • High quality multiplayer support for user creations out of the box
  • High performance servers with excellent reliability
  • Powerful, user friendly, and joyful creation tools

Note a couple of the words he uses very carefully. “Multiplayer” support for user creations out of the box means the ability to support collaborative creation of user content (an example of this are the user creation toolset in NeosVR, although I would argue that they are not particularly “user friendly”, as they are powerful, but also have a rather steep learning curve). Many social VR platforms still lack collaborative building tools, or any sort of in-world building tools, forcing content creators and world builders to use external tools like Blender and then import 3D models.

Note also Lars’ reference to “joyful” creation tools—in other words, make it FUN to create something. From what I understand, one of Horizon Worlds’ strengths is its content creation tools, which are apparently easy and fun to use. Do this part especially well, and you will empower your userbase to create wonderful worlds, which attracts new users, who then also become content creators—it becomes a virtuous circle.

Then, Lars tackles each of the selling points of products who say they are going to be the next Roblox, “but with…”, harshly but accurately poking holes in the arguments. I’m not going to quote this section in my blopost; it’s better if you go over there and read it in full yourself.

He then talks about how Roblox spends a lot of money on hosting and network infrastructure, and how cloud provider costs (e.g. AWS) can eat up a significant chunk of cash as your platform grows. He then discusses what he sees as the three big problems you’ll face as a metaverse platform creator:

First Problem: Chicken-or-the-Egg Deadlocks

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? (Photo by Grace O’Driscoll on Unsplash)

Lars states:

One of the key themes of So You Want to Compete With Steam was a nasty paradox best articulated in Joel Spolsky’s Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg problems, which also applies to would-be Roblox competitors:

• You need players
• Players won’t show up without content, so you need creators
• Creators won’t show up until you have players

Joel points out that you can’t expect this deadlock to solve itself – instead you need to just go out there and deliver a truckload of chickens or a truckload of eggs. Typically this means spending a lot of money. Anyone able to rely on organic growth alone started ages ago and that door is now closed to you.

Note particularly that last sentence, which I am going to repeat in bold for those of you who still don’t get it: ANYBODY ABLE TO RELY ON ORGANIC GROWTH ALONE STARTED AGES AGO AND THAT DOOR IS NOW CLOSED TO YOU. I have repeated versions of this statement on my blog until I was blue in the face, and few of the newer social VR platforms have been paying any attention.

Linden Lab’s fatal mistake with Sansar (one of many) is that they 100% expected that they would be able to build a high-end social VR platform with a in-world currency and an integrated marketplace for user-generated content, just put it out there, and expect it to sell itself! What worked for Second Life in 2003 most assuredly did NOT work for Sansar in 2017. A last-minute, hail-Mary pass. pivoting from social VR to a live events platform, essentially failed, and Linden Lab landed up selling Sansar to Wookey. At present, Wookey has suspended all development and furloughed all its staff. Millions and millions of dollars† were sunk into a platform which is currently on life-support, hanging on by a thread, and could be unplugged at any moment. Say a prayer for Sansar; it could use one.

Lars Doucet advises:

Seed your platform with awesome material by paying your own employees to build beautiful creations. Hire contractors and independent content creators and then pay your staff to train them in your tools. Pay these people to make tutorials and guides and videos and post them all over the internet and don’t stop. Set up an affiliate system with creator and influencer rewards. And that’s just the obvious stuff – you need to be thinking about new and innovative solutions to this problem 24/7. Pay any and every price to get high quality content onto your platform.

Second Problem: Platform Dynamics

Here Lars differentiates between different kinds of platforms, from open to closed:

Image source: So You Want to Compete with Roblox

On one end you have open platforms like the World Wide Web where each of the five aspects is owned by no one but the commons.

Towards the middle you have different kinds of closed platforms like Windows and Steam where certain components of the stack are proprietary, but others are unowned; the owner either refrains from (or is simply unable) to capture most of the value that creators produce on the platform.

On the far end are digital company towns, proprietary platform stacks privately owned from top to bottom. In the physical world company towns are communities where a single corporation is not only the sole or principal employer, but also owns all the housing and stores – the company is your boss, your landlord, and even your grocer. Total ownership grants the company power over not only every aspect of their workers’ lives, but also their families and the entire local economy. Digital company towns likewise squeeze as much value out of creators as possible.

And he makes the point that Roblox is a company town, controlling the creation tools (Roblox Studio), the playback engine (the Roblox app), the discovery methods (the Roblox discovery portal), and the marketplace (items can only be bought and sold using Robux through the Roblox Marketplace, with all financial information managed by Roblox). While it might look tempting to set up wannabe Roblox competitors using the same model, Lars makes it very clear in his article that this is a tactical error:

Look, I know some of you as customers actually like company towns from giant companies like Apple precisely because they’re locked down and you trust the platform holder. Good for you, sincerely! You are more than welcome to continue liking them as a customer. But this article isn’t addressed to you; it’s addressed to startups who think they can deploy this kind of vertically integrated stack without already starting from a position of strength.

Simply put, if you’re trying to build a Roblox competitor in 2021 under the company town model, you’re delusional. You should not build a company town for two very good reasons:

1. Company towns are bad, and you shouldn’t do bad things*
2. It’s way, way, way too late to succeed with this strategy

So, if you can’t rigidly control everything in order to compete against the entrenched front-runner(s), what can you do? Lars suggests giving something away:

Give people a reason to build on your platform. Make them owners, not tenants.

What should you give away? Well, that depends on your specific situation, but I recommend “as much as you possibly can.” Recall the five components of a platform:

• Creation tools
• Playback engine
• Discovery methods
• Marketplace / transaction engine
• Relationship with the customer

Again, I’m going to refer you to Lars’ blogpost for more details.

Third Problem: Ownership and Trust

Building trust with content creators is key (Photo by Jannis Lucas on Unsplash)

Platforms tend to follow a certain kind of life cycle, and there’s no better primer than Dan Cook’s Game of Platform Power. In it he outlines how platforms transition through “Growth” and “Engage” phases where they are friendly and generous to the creators who produce value on their ecosystems, before maturing into the “Extract” phase where they leverage their size and power to lock-in users and capture as much creator-produced value for themselves as possible.

A classic example of this is Second Life, which is now merrily coasting along, collecting fees for the sale of in-world land and currency, still going strong at the ripe old age of 18 with a locked-in, relatively small but highly passionate userbase who resist leaving their friends and communities behind to join other virtual worlds. For example, it’s hardly a surprise that Linden Lab, now owned by the deep-pocketed Waterfield Network investment group, has recently raised its fees for buying Linden dollars. Second Life is a cash cow, and they are rightfully milking it!

And Lars makes what I think is a somewhat counterintuitive, very nervy, and potentially game-changing suggestion on how to build that trust with content creators: make it easy for them to pack up and leave!

No matter how generous your platform is today, content creators aren’t dumb, they know how this works, and they’re being exploited right now by company towns like Roblox. Words are cheap. What they want is assurance. Trustless assurance. And no, I’m not talking about blockchain.

You really want to shake things up? Give content creators a loaded gun pointed at your platform’s head.

Another word for this is “exit rights.” If you want creators to come over in the first place, give them the power to leave anytime they want.

Mind. BLOWN. I can see how Lars Doucet is a highly-paid and in-demand consultant, just for these few paragraphs of advice alone! However, I would also add that we need to see some metaverse interoperability and standards before we can really put this into action. However, Lars makes a rather compelling case for doing at first what sounds like corporate suicide, using companies such as Substack as an example of how and why such an approach works.

Lars wraps up by dispelling some common myths about what is the “metaverse” (for example, that the metaverse cannot and should not be owned by any one person or company). And he wraps up by saying that anybody who wants to become the next Roblox is embarking on a wild, crazy, risky venture—but that “simply the riskiest thing to do is to play it safe.”

As I said in my blogpost title, this is some harsh advice that many commercial social VR platforms probably don’t want to hear, but should definitely read through at least once.

You can read more of Lars’ wisdom and advice on his blog, called Fortress of Doors (here’s his recommended reading list), and by following him on Twitter.

*As an aside, Lars wraps up his Fortress of Doors blogpost with the following highly-accurate-but-snarky observation:

That’s not to say someone fundamentally can’t craft a “Dark Metaverse” under the company town model. It’s just that their name is Facebook, it will be a dystopian hellhole, and you don’t have a chance of competing on those terms.

🙌 PREACH, LARS! 🙌

†More specifically, 75 million dollars (US) over four years, according to this Sansar Wookey Investor Fact Sheet, which is attached to the publicly-accessible LinkedIn profile of Wookey CEO Mark Gustavson:

Part of the Sansar Wookey Investor Fact Sheet

This is the first time I have shared this figure on my blog. Mark and his V.P. are currently the only two Wookey employees left on the payroll; as I have said above, all the rest of the Wookey staff have been furloughed.

Lil Nas X to Perform Three Virtual Concerts in Roblox on November 14th and 15th, 2020

Following in the footsteps of other game worlds which have hosted virtual concerts (e.g. the Marshmello event in Fortnite on Feb.2nd, 2019), the online game platform Roblox is presenting three performances by Lil Nas X.

Old fart that I am (I’m now almost 57 years old), I actually had to Google “Lil Nas X” to figure out who this person is. Apparently, I have been living in a cave; he is a gay, black rapper who currently holds the record for having the longest-running number-one song on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart since it debuted in 1958. (Ryan sighs, takes another swig of Geritol, and shakes his cane, yelling at those damn kids to get off his lawn.)

The official Roblox blog says:

Get ready because Lil Nas X is going virtual for our first concert experience built and performed exclusively on Roblox on November 13-14! Featuring the debut performance of his new single, this event will also see the Grammy-winning artist bring some of his favorite songs to life like never before.

Tune in for the preshow this Friday at 4 PM PST to watch behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the Roblox concert, along with a special Q&A session. You’ll also get the chance to unlock an exclusive Lil Nas X emote by completing an in-game scavenger hunt!

The preshow will then be followed up with three global concert performances starting Saturday at 1 PM PST. Check out the showtimes below:

Concert Showtimes

– Saturday, November 14th at 1:00 p.m. PST
– Saturday, November 14th at 10:00 p.m. PST
– Sunday, November 15th at 9:00 a.m. PST

The concert venue is now open HERE! Jump in early to pick up limited-edition, Lil Nas X-inspired items for your avatar, including a free Old Town Cowboy Hat! More items will become available leading up to the main event, but get them quick because they won’t be around forever.

This immersive concert experience is the first of its kind on Roblox, featuring Lil Nas X rendered digitally with motion-capture performance. This unique celebration represents our next step in digital music experiences and opens the door for all kinds of incredible experiences. So, set your calendars for November 13-14, and keep an eye on our official Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages for even more updates about the event as well as the exclusive items that will be available.

I have written about Roblox before on this blog (notably, about the 1867 Luxembourg project, which moved from Second Life to Sansar to Roblox). It’s also on my comprehensive list of social VR platforms and virtual worlds.

I would usually say at this point, “see you there”…but you won’t, because I’m an old fart 😉