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In the real world, Ikea stores are laid out like labyrinths. Yet the company’s pixelated virtual store beats them all. Not only is there no way out, there is no outside. So why do hundreds of thousands of people want to work here?
Earlier this year, Ikea announced it would pay ten remote workers £13.15 an hour to staff a new store on Roblox, the gaming platform that became incredibly popular during the pandemic. The company says it received more than 178,000 applications for the roles. That figure is either a depressing commentary on how difficult the job market is for young people, or proof of how popular Roblox is. Probably both.
Virtual stores are extremely aseptic as a workplace. You don’t have to lug around boxes of goods and you don’t have sore feet at the end of the day. But there’s also not much to do.
When I register The colleague game, I can have my avatar walk around on its clunky legs until it finds an employee in a t-shirt that says “Hej.” He waves me over and offers to take me to the canteen where I find Ikea’s famous Swedish meatballs. And then… what? He has no products to sell me. This store is not designed to make money. Ikea has created a way to appeal to young consumers. It’s a form of branded content disguised as a game.
If you don’t spend a lot of time on gaming platforms like Roblox, you might be surprised to see a lot of these quasi-advertisements. This year, the Welsh Tourist Board created a metaverse version of Wales, complete with castles and mountains, on the gaming platform Spatial. Last year, McDonald’s Hong Kong created a “McNuggets Land” game within The Sandbox, where players sell McDonald’s food while their fellow nuggets are confusingly together.
Of course, creating your own universe on a gaming platform is much more labor-intensive than paying an advertising agency to create an image or two. But what else can companies do when young people no longer watch live TV and continue to opt out of targeted online advertising? Plus, there’s always the chance that immersive experiences will create goodwill.
Roblox, based in San Mateo, a few miles south of San Francisco, welcomes corporate content with open arms. After being a private company for 17 years, Roblox decided to join the dizzying wave of tech IPOs in 2021. That pandemic year, the company’s revenue doubled and it came close to a valuation of nearly $78 billion. Since then, however, growth has slowed. Gamers have had to go back to work and school (Roblox has many nine- to 12-year-old users) and the company now trades at a market value of $23 billion. It has yet to report annual profit. Advertising is one way to boost those numbers.
That this is happening on Roblox and not Meta’s metaverse will annoy Mark Zuckerberg. Roblox doesn’t require expensive virtual reality equipment and its avatars look like Lego figures. It’s decidedly low maintenance and some of the most popular games are simple and user-generated. Still, it has nearly 80 million players.
But they don’t just make games. Last year, a group met on the platform and held a digital protest in support of Palestine.
With typical tech executive modesty, Roblox CEO David Baszucki has suggested that Roblox could one day be the dominant form of communication. In his view, we’ve moved from the telegraph to the telephone, to video, and now to “3D simulation communication” (a term that could use a little reworking).
Commercial ventures, however, are still in an experimental phase. It’s not easy to balance brand building and entertainment for a community capable of promotional gimmicks. H&M, for example, has a Roblox game called Loooptopia that leans so much towards “gaming” that you might not realize it came from the fashion retailer. And when Walmart launched its Roblox Walmart Land in 2022, its marketing director appeared on the platform and was watched by a lone solo player.
If companies listen carefully, they can learn from the mistakes made in Second Life, the oldest virtual world. Brands like Apple and Reebok had already opened stores in Second Life in the early 2000s. But within a few years, it had become an abandoned shopping mall. There was not much to do, which deterred players.
One way to get around this problem is to turn branded content into games – as long as the game is fun. Paying people to work in a virtual store is one thing. Giving them a reason to come by for free is another.
