Craig Donato interview: How Roblox navigates brands, UGC, and the metaverse

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It’s a pivotal time for brands as they figure out how to navigate the metaverse. And one of the first places where they’re trying to do that is in the user-generated content (UGC) world of Roblox.

Should brands be more worried about what users might do with their brands? Or should they embrace the fact that players love them so much that they will go through enormous amounts of work to create video game homages to those brands?

Roblox has more than 50 million players a day. I talked about that and more with Craig Donato, chief business officer at Roblox, in a wide-ranging fireside chat at Stanford University Graduate School of Business AME x Gaming Clubs’ Future of the Arrts Media, and Entertainment Conference.

Donato took every question that I flung at him and he answered a bunch of questions from the audience as well. Donato has been at Roblox as CBO for more than five years, and before that he was at Next Door, QVC, Oodle, and Grand Central.

He was a grad of the Stanford University School of Business. I happen to be a UC Berkeley grad, an English major. But despite that old rivalry, we had a nice conversation.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Your title is the chief business officer at Roblox. I wonder if you could explain that. I don’t actually run into that title at every company I cover.

Craig Donato: It’s a bit of a catch-all title. At Roblox, it means the classic stuff, which is all the partnerships. It also involves the work we do to manage the different communities on Roblox. We have about 10 million people building on Roblox at any given time, so managing that developer