How Roblox’s Layered Clothing Makes the Virtual World Feel More Real
[ Reading time : 5 minutes | Date : 8, February 2023 | Author : Teresa Brown ]
Roblox's virtual economy has always been based on digital clothing, but its brand-new Layered Clothing feature lets players create outfits that remarkably resemble real clothes in both appearance and functionality. The cutting-edge feature gives businesses additional chances to introduce their goods into the Roblox universe.
Layered Clothing is the result of two years of development and may grow or compress to accommodate the several Roblox character models. The inner and outside cage are included in the template, according to Mimi Dev, a Roblox creator who sought anonymity out of concern for doxing by Roblox players. Enjoy endless hours of gaming with RobloxPlayer.exe, the go-to application for Roblox enthusiasts.
"In essence, that cage has a humanoid shape, on top of which we construct our garments. so long as all of our clothing is built to fit that character, it will fit all of the other characters on Roblox.”
Layered Clothing has been a hit among Roblox users.
“Layered Clothing is still a new technology, but so far it has been proving especially popular, with my sales at tens of thousands just a week after release,” said Arthur Trusov, a Roblox creator who has made over $1 million selling virtual clothing and has worked with brands such as Sonic the Hedgehog to develop assets within the platform.
“It’s just that brands need to be more aware of the existence of Layered Clothing, and I’m very optimistic they will take advantage of that,” said Trusov. The proceeds of Roblox’s in-game sales are usually split between creators and the platform.
Some brands have already taken notice. After Virtual Brand Group, which licenses the rights to brands such as Forever 21 within virtual environments, spotted the development of Layered Clothing in Roblox’s developer forums, the company (and its stable of in-game creators) designed a line of Forever-21-branded clothes for sale the moment the feature went live. The move paid off: “Some of these are the top-selling items on all of Roblox,” said VBG CEO Justin Hochberg.
Virtual-First Clothing Brand
Virtual-first clothing brands are also using the rollout of Layered Clothing as a gateway into Roblox. The digital fashion brand DRESSX released its first line of 12 Roblox garments alongside the launch of the new feature and has already sold 26,000 of the items, which sell for 50 to 200 ROBUX (approximately 50 cents to $2 USD).
“They were developed for DRESSX initially, but then we took them to Roblox,” said DRESSX co-founder Daria Shapovalova. “Moving forward, we’re also planning to do some items specifically for Roblox.”
The feature has been available for beta testing since October 21, 2021, but it officially went live last week. Before Layered Clothing, accessories such as hats and scarves were the only items in Roblox that users could wear over their avatars; other Roblox garments were more akin to skins, simply changing the color and texture of avatars’ surfaces.
At the moment, the best-selling clothing items in Roblox are those that match real-life styles: simple black items, jeans and crop tops, T-shirts with pictures of cats on them. One of VBG’s black beanies was so popular that Forever 21 has made plans to manufacture physical versions for sale in brick-and-mortar stores.
Observers on both the creator and brand side anticipate that the freedom of creation fomented by Layered Clothing will eventually help users become more comfortable with physics-defying virtual clothes that take advantage of the more metaversal aspects of Roblox, à la “Ready Player One.”
“Players seem to like the outlandish or the normal — they don’t seem to like that middle ground,” said CoffeeNerd, another Roblox creator who requested anonymity. “They either want to be really out there, or how they would dress for school or work.”
As intriguing as these new designs might be, fashion brands in Roblox and other virtual platforms are only just dipping their toes in the metaverse by creating items similar to the ones they manufacture in the physical world. After all, the purpose of functions such as Layered Clothing is to increase the verisimilitude of Roblox’s virtual world — its appearance of being real — so creating designs that match physical garments is both a successful strategy and a lower lift for fashion brands.
And as brands kick up their involvement, the metaverse platforms that covet their dollars are sure to follow. It’s only a matter of time until other metaverse platforms such as Horizon Worlds and Fortnite introduce their own versions of Layered Clothing. (For now, Horizon Worlds avatars still don’t have legs, so it might be a while until pants come to the Meta-owned platform.)
“A series of incremental improvements or innovations will happen to get us to this level of personalization that we want, and Roblox and their ability to make this customizable layered clothing is another one of those incremental moments,” said Jason Steinberg, a managing partner at immersive marketing agency Pretty Big Monster.
“And even if this is only available in Roblox — well, now that puts pressure on every other provider of metaverses to layer in that same type of functionality. Once that pressure is on, that’s how we all move forward together.” How many children play it? (H2) Roblox doesn’t split its 100 million figure between children and adults, though it does say that 40% of them are women and girls.
In the UK alone, there are around 1.5 million children playing Roblox, according to research firm Kids Insights. Its data, based on an annual survey of 20,000 British children, suggests that 24% of 10- to 12-year-olds here are on Roblox – more than on TikTok (13%) and Snapchat (20%) and nearly as popular as Instagram (25%).
The company adds that 19% of seven-to-nine-year-olds in the UK are playing Roblox, some way behind YouTube (43%) but ahead of TV brands like CBBC (11%), Nickelodeon (10%) and Cartoon Network (8%).
Why is Roblox popular?
“We’re not a company that does a lot of marketing. The No 1 way that someone finds out about our platform is they get invited to play by a friend. And the second way is they’ll watch people playing on YouTube,” says Roblox’s chief business officer Craig Donato. “So it’s very much an organic phenomenon.”
He also suggests that one reason for Roblox’s popularity is its emphasis on “unstructured play” in an era when many children are more restricted in their physical-world activities than previous generations were.
“When I came home from school, I’d get on my bike, go out in the woods, do pick-up baseball. But we live in a world today where it’s hard for kids to go out and have unstructured play with their friends,” he says. “Most of the experiences on our platform aren’t just about the object to win. It’s an experience you have with other people: a shared experience.”
How do people make games for it?
Anyone can make a game (or “experience” – they can simply be virtual spaces) for Roblox by downloading its separate Roblox Studio software. The company says that it has more than 2 million “creators” – so around 2% of its players – with the most popular games being played by up to 100,000 people simultaneously.
For many children, creating a simple game or virtual room where they can hang out with friends is the limit of their ambitions, but others build bigger, more complex games, and even start to make money through taking a cut of in-game purchases using Roblox’s virtual currency, Robux. The company expects to pay out more than $100m in 2019 alone to them.
“We have these teams forming businesses, and making millions of dollars a year,” says Donato. Roblox is keen to foster this community: in 2018 it launched its own curriculum, available under a Creative Commons licence, for educators to use. Donato says it reached more than 500,000 children in its first year.
Are people really making businesses out of this?
They are. Josh Wood is one of the British Roblox game-makers. He’s 18 now, but discovered Roblox in 2013, and started to make his own games for it a year later.
“From there I continued to learn and collaborate with other people on projects until I released my most successful game to date, Game Dev Life, which has so far had over a million play sessions,” he says.
Wood has now set up his own company to make games for Roblox, hiring other developers, artists and testers, and even launching a line of toys based on Game Dev Life, in partnership with Roblox.
“With the money from my games I have been able to pay for my university education, and continue to reinvest in my business,” he says.
Another young British developer working on Roblox games is Abbie Leigh. Now aged 19, she started playing Roblox in 2011, but took the leap into development in 2017, initially creating assets for other people’s games. She’s currently working on three games, including her own sports-themed title, and hopes to make a full-time career out of freelance development.
“It never feels like a job, which of course is the best part. I enjoy building and do so in my free time, and I’m simply rewarded when it comes to doing what I love.”
Game Dev Life by DoubleJGames. Players must try to build a successful game.
Is Roblox safe for children?
When Roblox has made headlines in the mainstream media, they have often been negative: from reports of adults trying to groom children on the platform in 2017 to, most infamously, a virtual sexual assault in June 2018, when a seven-year old player’s avatar was attacked by two male avatars, whose players had hacked the game’s code to show explicit imagery.
The following month, the Sun published an investigation claiming that Roblox was “a haven for roleplaying as jihadis, Nazi leaders and Ku Klux Klan members”. The company says that it has been working hard to tackle wrongdoers and fix any loopholes in its platform.
“We’re not defensive if things have ever gone wrong. We hold our hands up and say, ‘This is what we’ve done to fix it, and this is what we’re doing to make sure it never happens again,’” says Laura Higgins, a British child-safety veteran hired by Roblox in January 2019 as its ‘director of digital civility’. Her job is to learn from those problems and prevent activities that could harm young players.
“We really do start with safety as our No 1 priority. We acknowledge that we have younger players, so you have to be as ahead of the game as possible in terms of safety,” she says.
“It’s an age-old thing: if people have bad intentions towards children, they’re going to gravitate towards where the children are. We’re constantly reviewing the tools that we have, and looking at ways to improve them.”
How can parents keep informed about it?
Another measure taken by Roblox is to launch a section of its website called For Parents, which explains its safety tools – from algorithms blocking swearwords and names and addresses in text chats, to its reporting system for inappropriate chat or content. There’s even an algorithm detecting whether players’ avatars are wearing “appropriate attire”.
Higgins admits that parents can get “very frustrated” when there’s a horror story around safety on a children’s platform like Roblox: “You think, how hard can it be? [to stop these things happening],” she says. “And it’s very hard, is the answer. When things go wrong, it’s because somebody is trying very hard to break your systems.”
She’s keen to make sure that parents also see the positive side of the games that children are creating on Roblox, citing the example of a game made by a teenager whose father had recently died.
“He developed a game around managing mental wellbeing, mental health, as a journey for other young people experiencing those kinds of issues,” she says. “It was an amazing outlet for him, but it also helped many young people who played it, and were able to explore their emotions.”
That’s an aspect also highlighted by developer Abbie Leigh. “I absolutely love the developer community as a whole. We all stick together, support each other’s creations and help each other when we need it the most,” she says. “From feedback on games, to personal issues.”