Characterizing the Developer Groups for Metaverse Services in Roblox

The Metaverse has experienced exponential growth in recent years. Most metaverse platforms enable users to create their own metaverse services to deliver immersive content via visualized no-code/low-code programming tools. Usually, users with similar interests form or join a developer group to create and maintain complex metaverse services. In this paper, we focus on one of the most successful metaverse platforms, Roblox, to reveal how developer groups perform to create metaverse services. We collected a snapshot of Roblox encompassing 960,000 developer groups and 18.73 million Roblox game services. This dataset allows us to analyze the development patterns of these groups and identify key factors influencing their creativity. Our observations reveal that developer groups have diverse roles and members, exhibiting remarkable creativity that offers valuable insights into effective creation modes within the Metaverse. To understand why certain groups create exceptional game services, we examined various features of users at different ranks within the groups and developed a model to assess group creativity. Our findings indicate that the organizational structure within groups significantly impacts group creativity. Notably, we discovered that middle-ranked users, rather than top-ranked ones, play a more critical role in fostering creativity, highlighting their pivotal position in the group dynamic.