‘Roblox’ Gucci Garden Event 2021: Limited-Time Items, Exhibit Duration, and How to Enter
Gucci is partnering with “Roblox” to open the virtual version of its artsy Gucci Garden, bringing the iconic fashion brand’s digital items into the gaming platform’s metaverse for a two-week limited run from May 17 to May 31.
This virtual space is actually a counterpart of a current physical installation called the Gucci Garden Archetypes, which is ongoing in Florence, Italy, The Verge reported. These virtual and real-world experiences have a series of themed rooms, such as “Tokyo tribe” or “urban romanticism,” all to pay tribute to the fashion house’s creative director Alessandro Michelle’s advertising work and to mark Gucci’s 100th anniversary.
‘Roblox’ Gucci Garden Experience: What to Expect
Entering the digital version of the Gucci Garden experience, users will see their avatars turn into a mannequin–albeit neutral, which means these humanoid-shaped mannequins will have no gender or age. As they explore each space, the transformed avatars will be able to “absorb elements of the exhibition” and retain fragments from their spaces, and eventually become “one-of-a-kind” Gucci-minted creations, Hypebeast noted in a report.
The virtual experience emphasizes a person’s quest for individuality, as users begin their journeys as mannequins to symbolize their “wandering life like a black canvas” yet eventually determining that they are “one among many, yet wholly unique.”
Read Also: World of Magic Roblox Guide: How to Play, Cheats and Tips to Level up Fast
‘Roblox’ Gucci Garden Gaming Environment
The gaming environment leverages on recent developments on the “Roblox” game engine, taking users to a highly dynamic array of environments that they can cross as blank “genderless” and “ageless” mannequins that visually evolve as users go from one virtual room to another. These rooms get their inspiration from various Gucci campaigns in Michelle’s past six years with the global fashion house.
In a Tech Crunch interview, Gucci Chief Marketing Officer Robert Triefus praised “Roblox' for creating not only an exceptional virtual experience, but also developing it at so short a time. “Hats off to Roblox, scale came quickly,” Triefus said. He added that while it had taken them 100 years to build the Gucci brand, “Roblox” took only 100 days to build something as spectacular.
Triefus added that Gucci intends to depend more on digital platforms as a way for pushing and keeping a fashion brand that promotes inclusion.
Read Also: Roblox Stock Goes Public; Value Estimated At $47 Billion!
Roblex Gucci Items: Avatars for Sale
In addition to their partnership with Roblox, Gucci had also gone into a special alliance with startup Genies to style user avatars, as the market for digital items are currently flourishing.
The virtual “Roblox” Gucci Garden, in addition, will sell limited-edition avatar items inspired by its IRL counterpart experience in Florence.
“Roblox,” on the other hand, expressed its satisfaction in this successful partnership with Gucci. Company executive Christine Wootton told Tech Crunch in a separate interview that working with Gucci had been “very special” due to the fact that the fashion brand had taken the time to fully understand their brand and what message they want to send to their community.
In order to visit the “Roblox” Gucci Garden, visit their website for more info.
Related Article: ‘Roblox’ Promo Codes March 2021: All Free Items Up for Grabs
Why beverage brands should join the race for ‘metaverse’ domination - consumer trends
A question for you: Have you ever thought about selling virtual drinks to consumers? This might sound like a wild idea to some in the beverage industry, but your competitors may already be working on such a concept.
The rise of the avatar in the ‘metaverse’ provides a new marketing opportunity for beverage brands
I recently read something that made my head spin. People are paying real money to ‘buy’ digital outfits: They send off a photograph of themselves in their normal, everyday clothes, and the next day they receive a digitally-altered image of them wearing the outfit they ‘bought’. This isn’t small change that they’re spending, either; costs range from around GBP30 (US$42) all the way up to GBP700 for more limited-edition items of clothing.
While the concept sounds rather bonkers, it’s very clever on a number of levels. With the pressures that consumers feel to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ on Social Media, 9% of people in the UK buy clothes to wear for Social Media photos - before returning the items. Digital alternatives circumvent this behaviour, saving a huge amount in terms of carbon emissions and water usage, not to mention preventing damage to the soil through the growth of cotton, for instance. And, it still provides consumers with the gratification they seek, to look their best in their online personas.
Gaming is another area where consumers are spending their hard-earned cash on fashion items that only exist digitally. These virtual outfits, known as ‘skins’, are used to change their avatars' appearance in gaming worlds such as Roblox, League of Legends, Fortnite and Animal Crossing. High-fashion brands such as Gucci and Marc Jacobs are already selling designs for these platforms, with millions being spent on skins by consumers every month. In 2019, League of Legends made $1.5bn in revenue from skins, and it’s projected that spending in these online arenas will reach $50bn by 2022.
Different gaming events and themes also provide the opportunity for seasonally appropriate or limited-edition purchases. For example, last year Fortnite ran a Summer Splash event, where the game’s island was flooded and summer-themed items were available to buy, some of which were ‘limited-time modes’.
The influence of the ‘metaverse’ - best described as alternate digital realities - has only increased with COVID - as consumers haven’t been allowed to socialise in person, their avatars have been able to mix online without risk of infection. This trend could well continue to grow, even as the world opens up.
The ultimate vision for the metaverse is a world that has its own economy, jobs and shopping centres, a world that continually exists even without people being logged in. As gamers spend more time in the metaverse, there’s a strong likelihood that more money will be spent on items for their avatars. In fact, the term ‘Direct to Avatar’ could become common parlance in marketing circles.
Diageo has identified gaming as a particularly interesting field for exploration when it comes to digital marketing, as chief digital officer Ben Sutherland told Just Drinks in 2019. “It’s a worldwide audience group with its own social nuances,” explained Sutherland. “From a socialising perspective, it’s certainly something we’re looking at quite closely. The audience is very much skewed older as well. When you talk about gaming, you might think about a younger age group when actually it’s 20-plus. In terms of safety around advertising to underage consumers, it’s really quite robust.”
So, what does this mean for the beverage industry? There’s a whole world of possibility out there for brand owners with a bit of imagination. Plenty of brands have created VR tours of their distilleries and brand homes, which is all well and good, albeit a bit dry.
Your company could have its own virtual brand ambassador, ‘travelling’ around the metaverse to spread the gospel of your products in tastings and other special events. ‘Alternative Reality’ bars could provide out-of-this-world digital cocktail and drinking experiences that feature your drinks brand - paying to experience such impressive bibulous designs could be a way of boosting an avatar’s cool cache.
You could host a digital product launch in the metaverse, where a limited number of avatars can attend. Or, perhaps they could get jobs making your product in your brewery or winery. Product ‘trialling’ is also worth exploration - beauty brands are already doing this, so why can’t drinks?
These are just a handful of simple ideas that spring to mind with two minutes of consideration - the possibilities are endless, given the unlimited nature of the internet. As McKinsey identified in a recent study of ‘Gen Z’ consumers, this generation sees “consumption as access rather than possession, consumption as an expression of individual identity, and consumption as a matter of ethical concern”.
The metaverse, gaming and digital products tick all of these boxes - it’s not what you can hold in your hands after you’ve spent your money, it’s what the consumer - or their avatar - has had access to, or has been seen ‘wearing’ or ‘consuming’ that’s what counts in this new world. Early-adopter brands may get a jump on the competition when it comes to making a name in this alternate reality.
Hold onto your pixelated hats!
Click here for more of Just Drinks' coverage of consumer trends
Roblox jumps to over 150M monthly users, will pay out $250M to developers in 2020 – TechCrunch
Gaming platform Roblox, which has seen a surge of use due to the coronavirus pandemic, now has more than 150 million monthly active users, up from the 115 million it announced in February before the U.S.’s shelter-in-place orders went into effect. The company also said its developer community is on pace to earn over $250 million in 2020, up from the $110 million they earned last year.
These metrics and other company news were announced over the weekend at RDC, Roblox’s annual developer conference that was held virtually for the first time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Roblox, to be clear, doesn’t build the games that run on its platform. Instead, it offers the platform for developers to build upon, similar to the App Store. Many of its most popular games are free, monetizing as players spend on in-game items using virtual cash called Robux. Some of the company’s larger individual games, before the pandemic, would average more than 10 million monthly users. And over 10 games as of February claimed more than 1 billion total visits.
Thanks to the pandemic, however, these gaming milestones have significantly increased in size.
During the first part of the year, the Roblox game Adopt Me! reached 1.615 million concurrent users and over 10 billion visits. A new game called Piggy, launched in January 2020, now has over 5 billion plays. Jailbreak surpassed 500,000 concurrent users during a live event held in April 2020.
In total, there are now 345,000 developers on the Roblox platform who are monetizing their games, and over half of Robux being spent in catalog is now being spent on user-generated content (UGC) items, less than 12 months after the UGC catalog program began.
The more than doubling of Roblox developers’ earnings year-over-year is related to a combination of factors, including the platform’s growing game catalog, new development tools, international expansions and, of course, a pandemic that has locked kids indoors away from their friends, forcing them to go online to connect.
On notable factor driving the increased developer earnings, however, was Roblox’s recent introduction of Premium Payouts, which pays developers based on the engagement time of Premium subscribers in their game. Through this system, launched earlier this spring, developers earned $2 million in June 2020 as part of this program alone.
During the RDC event, Roblox also detailed its plans for expanded developer tools and platform updates. This includes new collaboration tools for larger development teams, which will allow developers to grant permissions to team members and contractors to work only on a certain part of their game. It also will launch a talent marketplace by the end of the year to help developers find people and resources to help with game development.
Roblox also said it will begin rolling out automatic machine translation for all supported languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese and Spanish. This feature will help developers more easily reach international users with localized versions of their games.
Later this summer, Roblox said it will launch “Developer Events,” a new service that will help developers find one another in their local communities. Initially, these events will be held virtually, but will transition to in-person events when it’s safe to do so.
The company also signed its first music label partnership with Monstercat, an indie electronic music label known for its collaborations with gaming titles and artists, including Marshmello and Vicetone. The partnership has initially yielded 51 tracks for developers to use, free of charge, in their games. These include songs from a variety of EDM genres, such as Drum & Bass, Synthwave, Electro, Chillout, Electronic, Breaks, Future Bass and more. More tracks will be added over time, Roblox says.
“The accomplishments of our developer community have eclipsed even our loftiest expectations; I am incredibly impressed by the unique and creative experiences being introduced on the Roblox platform,” said David Baszucki, founder and CEO, Roblox. “Our focus is to give developers the tools and resources they need to pursue their vision and create larger, more complex, more realistic experiences and collectively build the Metaverse.”
Roblox raised an additional $150 million in Series G funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s late-stage venture fund, just before the COVID-19 health crisis hit the U.S., valuing the business at $4 billion. Ahead of this, Roblox had been working to take its platform further outside the U.S. and into China, through a strategic partnership with Tencent focused on bringing its coding curriculum to the region and through added support for Chinese languages, among other things. Also with the additional funding, Roblox said it planned to help further its expansion effects, and build out more tools and its developer ecosystem.