It's no surprise that due to COVID-19, businesses had to face the challenge of jumping into the future to ensure they were able to continue operations as usual. Firms that didn't use computers for much more than email and Excel suddenly had to telecommute daily. Employees had to learn to balance family challenges with a busy workday. Brands needed to find a way to market to their audience of consumers with many in-person stores closed, concerts not happening, and much more unavailable.

One of my companies, Melon, has been building virtual worlds for almost five years now. We got our start in Minecraft, but most recently have heavily enjoyed creating in Roblox, which is an especially great fit for these worlds. They're improving and expanding faster than new SEC-filings can find a way to include "metaverse" in them. 

Traditionally, these virtual worlds would be gaming experiences, live streams, or even sources for content for various content creators. However, due to the new demand of brands needing to innovate on their marketing strategies, the next step became pretty evident.

Branded virtual worlds are nothing new either, though -- and we're certainly no pioneer to the genre. Movie & TV-themed video games date back decades. The FIFA video game series continues to sell year after year. But, the adoption rate we've seen in the last year alone is new and is one that has ever been so explosive. 

Virtual worlds offer engagement levels for brands at costs that otherwise would never be achievable. Last year, we hosted one of the first launch parties on Roblox in partnership with Warner Music Group with about 15 days of dev-time. Within just two days of us pushing live, we saw 1.2M unique users, a peak of 166,000 concurrent players, and an average experience engagement of 14.5 minutes per unique player. Compared to traditional ad spend on comparable material, those sort of figures are relatively unachievable.

Virtual worlds can be anything you can imagine, in any environment, with any retention goal, too. Have 100,000 users you want to aggregate for a weekend? Sure. How about a long-term social world built to engage for months? Yeah, even better. What about a totally-non-gaming way to help educate, teach, or spread awareness for a social cause? No better way to share your message.

Virtual Worlds are here, and they're only ever going to become more immersive and expansive.

- Devon