Roblox’s ‘Layered Clothing’ Is Here—but Don’t Call It an NFT
Even when fashion and video games seemed, in the popular imagination at least, polar opposite pursuits, players have always liked to dress up. Now, fashion in games isn’t just grand cosplay festivals or finding a neat mask for Link: it’s tapped into older industries, and no better demonstration of this fact is Roblox, where, for instance, a Gucci bag sold for $4,115, or 350,000 Robux, $800 more than the real thing.
In fact Roblox, now played by close to 50 million people each day and the most valuable video game company in the US, is one platform where character customization, and the self-expression it affords, is fundamental to the experience. Now Roblox has created a new system that improves this customization: “layered clothing.” It has the potential to further the company's goals of being more than a game: a place—whisper it, a metaverse—for games.
If you’re unfamiliar, Roblox is not a game but a space where you make games: You don’t play Roblox exactly, but play games inside of Roblox. Its most popular traditional avatar looked essentially the same from 2006 to 2019 (it went from 6 movable parts to 15): squat and blocky, a mix of Lego and Minecraft. For these 14 years, these avatars' clothes were 2D textures. All you had to do, explains Bjorn Book-Larsson, vice president of avatars at Roblox, was open Microsoft Paint and whip up a pink top or jean jacket, and it would fit the avatar as if you had painted it on to their skin.
"The problem is that when you started making more complicated characters, which the system actually allowed, there was no way to change the clothes of these more complicated characters," says Book-Larsson. Basically, you'd have to rebuild the character. This was a crucial problem to solve, because
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