ControlZee recently hosted a Girls Make Games workshop. How many girls tend to be in a single workshop? Do the kids get one-on-one time with you helping them? Ashley: It was the first workshop I’d ever hosted or anything like that. Since there were around 45 people, we had to structure it and we ended up using the breakout rooms that they have in Zoom. It started with a 30 minute intro as to what we were going to be doing and the template everyone was going to be using and how to use all of the different pieces. Then once everyone knew what direction they were going in, and what was happening, we broke out into four breakout rooms and then people just had work time, with a place where they could ask more questions. If they didn’t know how something worked,
they would have enough one-on-one time that someone could just explain it to them and take the time. We met up at the end and played each other’s games. That was super fun, because dot big bang has these instant shareable multiplayer links. Everyone was jumping into each other’s games. You could just see everyone running through obstacle courses. I liked all of the crazy different things that people did. One team made new voxel art. I didn’t even teach them how to do that!
So obviously, you want kids to use dot big bang - what sets it apart from Dreams or Roblox or competitors like that? Robert: I’ve got a spreadsheet and it’s probably got 70 different projects in it that are all trying to let people make stuff. There’s some fundamental stuff. I think about it like YouTube for games. A lot of companies say that, but when you think about online video before YouTube, and online video after YouTube there was a fundamental difference. There were other video websites, but
you needed plugins. If I had a funny video, there was a chance that you couldn’t see it. Now, if I make something on Dreams, unless you’ve got a PS4 or a PS5, you just can’t see it. It doesn’t matter how good your game is. You see those posts on Twitter, and they’re amazing, but it’s locked away. With dot big bang, I can send you a link to something right now. It’s multiplayer. It’s instant. If you’re
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on Discord, trying to get your friends to play a game, it can be basically impossible. You’ve got to get them to buy it. Then they’re just like, oh, it won’t run. Oh, it’s going to take seven hours to download because the internet’s crap. So that instant access is a huge part. Even Roblox has a separate download. We’re trying to draw this nice, easy gradient
between, you know, messing about and dragging and dropping, and just putting stuff in and learning, all the way up coding. I don’t think anyone’s ever successfully done it. I don’t know if we’ll be successful. But we’re going to try. Also, people who do really complicated things
for money, on Roblox, are losing up to 84% of their revenue. If I had started out in games, and somebody had told me someone else was going to take 84% of the money from an amazing game idea that I had come up with … I think seven year old me would have been less enthusiastic about getting into games in the first place. We really want to have an equitable relationship with creators and we want it to be fair.
You’ve said before that creators can make money through dot big bang in the future? How does that work if the majority of its users are kids? Robert: You can only make money if you’re old enough to make money. Just like with YouTube. Somebody can make a YouTube channel as a kid and put a bunch of videos on it by kids, for kids. But in order to kind of pass that bar of making money, there are qualifications to meet. That’s what we’ll have. You can’t make money
today. But that will be a thing that we’re going to do in the future. We need to be very transparent and straightforward. We’re going to start off with cosmetic stuff. Hats and skins and that stuff. As
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