Trends Podcast

A Roblox game about stealing eggs from pets hit six billion visits in nine weeks. Three days after it went live, Roblox let players in New Zealand type a game into their phone.

A kid in New Zealand opens a new tab in the Roblox phone app called Build. They type one sentence: a cozy adventure game set in a dense forest with environmental obstacles. That's the example Roblox gave when it opened Build on the twenty-eighth of July.

What comes back is a game. There's a forest, a character and obstacles in the way.

The kid plays it, changes it with another sentence and plays it again.

Then they hit publish.

Build lets anyone nine and up who passes Roblox's age check make a game. A published Build game shows up for players sixteen and up.

The kid is ten. The game they just made goes out to players at least six years older.

The forest game goes through the same review as each Roblox game. Then it joins the same discovery system. That system ranks games by whether players come back.

Roblox put it in one line: if no one plays it, no one can find it.

The egg game went through that same system. It's called Steal An Egg. It went live on the twenty-fifth of July.

In Steal An Egg you sneak into a pet's nest and take its egg. The egg hatches into a rare pet and the pet earns you money.

You spend the money on a treadmill. The treadmill makes you faster, so you can steal eggs from other players.

At midday on the twenty-ninth of September, one point three million people were playing it at once.

The group behind it is run by a player who goes by Ben. Nine weeks after launch, its counter read close to six billion visits.

Ben's group gets paid by the same Roblox program that paid its makers one point seven billion dollars in the past year.

A first Build game competes with Steal An Egg for the same players.

Before Roblox shipped Build, startups like Astrocade sold the same prompt box on the web.

One maker on Astrocade goes by Tyo Studio sixty-nine. In August they typed a Squid Game knockoff called Crab Game into Astrocade's prompt box.

A friend taps a link and lands on Crab Game's glass bridge in a browser tab.

In its first month Crab Game reached three point six million plays.

To play Steal An Egg, that same friend downloads Roblox and makes an account first.

Roblox says that by the end of this year, players will join a Roblox game in the browser through a link, starting in Chrome.

Once that link works, the friend who tapped into Crab Game is one tap from Steal An Egg. Roblox gives the prompt box away free, inside an app a hundred and thirty-two million people open each day.

So a startup sells to a different buyer.

It's a shop that wants an ad people can play.

On the twenty-second of June, AppLovin opened its ad network to any business. Its CEO, Adam Foroughi, wrote that for fourteen years, advertising there took a relationship with his team. For the eight months before that, it took a referral code.

Starting that day, any business could sign up.

AppLovin's ads run inside mobile games. Foroughi says more than a billion people play them each day. They're parents, homeowners and shoppers too.

Some of those ads are tiny games. A shopper taps one, plays for a few seconds and lands on the store. It's called a playable ad.

The prompt box builds those too.

A company in Finland called Playables AI built a hundred finished playable ads in one day. The clients on its showcase make games and apps.

Rosebud, another AI game maker, publishes a guide to playable ads for brands outside gaming. A brand that reads it builds the ad itself.

Build a shop's playable ad from its product photos and sell it to the shop.

When I mapped this market for the Trends dot V C report, playable ads for shops were the opening I'd pick first.

Roblox owns the players. The shops buying ads in front of them need someone to build the game.

A Roblox game that went live three days before Build hit six billion visits in nine weeks. Visit trends dot V C and join more than fifty thousand founders to get the next opportunity.