In the real world, Ikea stores are designed to be labyrinthine. Still, the company’s pixelated virtual shop beats them all. Not only is there no way out, there is no outside. So why do nearly 200,000 people want to work here?
Earlier this year, Ikea announced that it would pay 10 remote workers £13.15 an hour to staff a new store inside Roblox, the gaming platform that became wildly popular during the pandemic. The company says it received more than 178,000 applications for the jobs. That number is either a depressing commentary on how difficult the job market is for young people or proof of how popular Roblox is. Probably both.
As workplaces go, virtual stores are aseptic in the extreme. There are no boxes of merchandise to lug around and no sore feet at the end of the day. But there is not a huge amount to do either.
When I log into the Co-Worker game, I can make my avatar run around on her blocky legs until she finds a worker in a T-shirt that says “Hej”. He waves me over and offers to take me to the canteen where I’ll find Ikea’s famous Swedish meatballs. And then ... what? He does not have any products to sell me. This store is not intended as a moneymaking exercise. What Ikea has created is a way to meet young consumers. It is a form of branded content dressed up like a game.
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If you don’t spend much time on gaming platforms like Roblox it may come as a surprise to learn that there are a lot of these quasi-adverts around. This year the Welsh tourist board made a metaverse version of Wales complete with castles and mountains on gaming platform Spatial. Last year, McDonald’s Hong Kong built a McNuggets Land game inside The Sandbox in which players sell McDonald’s food alongside, confusingly, co-workers who are nuggets.
Creating your own universe on a gaming platform is obviously a lot more labour-intensive than paying an ad agency to knock up an image or two. But what else can companies do when young people have stopped watching live television and keep opting out of targeted online ads? Plus there’s always the chance that immersive experiences will build goodwill.
Roblox, based in San Mateo, California, a few miles south of San Francisco, is welcoming corporate content with open arms. After 17 years as a private company, Roblox decided to join the giddy wave of tech listings in 2021. In that pandemic year the company’s revenue doubled and it came close to a $78 billion (€70.7 billion) valuation. Since then, however, growth has slowed. Players had to go back to work and school (Roblox has a lot of nine- to 12-year-old users) and it now trades with a market value of $23 billion. It has yet to report annual profit. Advertising is one way to bump those numbers up.
That this is happening on Roblox instead of Meta’s metaverse will be galling to Mark Zuckerberg. Roblox does not require expensive virtual reality equipment and its avatars look like Lego characters. It has a decidedly low-maintenance vibe and some of the most popular games are simple and user-generated. Yet it has nearly 80 million players.
They do more than game, too. Last year a group arranged to gather on the platform and create a digital protest in support of Palestine.
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With typical tech exec humility, Roblox chief executive David Baszucki has suggested that Roblox could one day be the dominant form of communication. As he sees it, we moved from the telegraph to the phone, to video and now “3D simulation communication” (a term that could use some workshopping).
But commercial endeavours are still in an experimental phase. It is not easy to balance brand-building with entertainment for a community that is wise to ad trickery. H&M has a Roblox game called Loooptopia, for example, that leans so far into the “gaming” side of things that you might not know it came from the fashion retailer. And when Walmart launched its Roblox Walmart Land in 2022 its marketing officer appeared on the platform watched by a lonely solo player.
If companies care to listen, they might learn from the mistakes made in Second Life, the oldest virtual world. Go all the way back to the early 2000s and brands such as Apple and Reebok were all building storefronts inside Second Life. But within a few years it had become the equivalent of an abandoned mall. There wasn’t much to do, which put players off.
Turning branded content into games is one way around this – so long as the game is fun. Paying people to work in a virtual store is one thing. Giving them a reason to visit for free is another.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
