By Milena Di Nenno, AGORA DC14 on Metaverse and Responsible Business Models, hosted by Innov-acts Ltd and pursuing her PhD at Cyprus University of Technology (CUT)
The metaverse promises to be one of the most transformative shifts in how we work, socialise, create, and transact online. But who actually gets to decide what it looks like and how it works? The obvious answer might be the big tech companies building the platforms. But the reality might be more interesting.
The metaverse is not just a platform
What makes the metaverse different from a conventional digital platform is the structure of who participates and what they contribute. In metaverse ecosystems, independent creators (the developers, designers, and experience builders) make the essence of the platform. They build the virtual worlds, design the economies, and create the social fabric that gives metaverse platforms their value. Without them, there is nothing for users to explore, buy, or experience.
This gives metaverse creators an unusual degree of autonomy and economic stake in the platforms they build on. This is also a degree of leverage that creators on more traditional platforms (think app developers or marketplace sellers) typically do not enjoy.
Listening to the builders
While the fully realised metaverse is still taking shape, platforms like Roblox already exhibit its defining social and economic characteristics: immersive user-created worlds, active virtual economies, and communities of independent creators who earn real income from their work. This makes Roblox a compelling window into how metaverse ecosystems actually function.
The short paper “Complementor Influence on Platform Business Models: The Case of Roblox Metaverse Ecosystem” by Milena Di Nenno, Ariana Polyviou and Efpraxia D. Zamani asks a question that rarely gets asked: can the people who build on a metaverse platform actually influence the platform owner’s decisions about its business model? The study presents preliminary findings from an analysis of posts and comments on the Roblox Developer Forum, where Roblox staff publish official announcements and developers respond. These preliminary findings suggest that the answer is yes, and that this influence is not accidental. Developers employ distinct, recognisable mechanisms to push back on, validate, and actively contribute to the platform owner’s strategic decisions, with observable consequences for how Roblox’s business model evolves over time.
Why this matters for the metaverse
These findings point to something important about how metaverse ecosystems differ from conventional digital platforms: the boundary between platform owner and platform builder is genuinely blurry. In a world where creators generate the value, governance does not simply flow top-down. The most successful metaverse platforms will likely be those that recognise this and therefore treat their creator communities not as users to be managed, but as stakeholders whose influence is legitimate and, when channelled constructively, generative.
As the metaverse continues to develop, understanding this two-way dynamic will matter for the platforms building it, for the creators whose livelihoods depend on it, as well as for policymakers thinking about how to regulate the metaverse in a way that is fair to everyone involved.
This research, carried out within the framework of the MSCA AGORA project, will be presented at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2026) in Milan in June 2026. The full text will be available online soon.