The Rise and Fall and Rise of Zach Letter, Co-Founder and CEO of Wonder Works, Part 2

I'm like, “With an original [tower defense game], it would be hard to stand out. But if I do something that's licensed, which I've never seen done on Roblox before, it would be like a user acquisition life hack, and it would get people into our experience right away.” And as long as we made a good game, it would hopefully grow. That was my bet.—Zach Letter

In the concluding half of this Design Desk profile of Zack Letter, CEO and Co-founder of Wonder Works Studio—a top 20 developer of Roblox games since its founding—we’ll get into AI and Live Ops processes at the studio, detail the formation and rise of SpongeBob Tower Defense, and shed additional light on Letter’s approach to game design and studio management.

Most of what follows was derived from a podcast between Letter and Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, that was published in June. More context on Wonder Works is here.

As covered last week, Wonder Works flew out of the gate in early 2020. Overlook Bay was a massive hit. Like many studios in the COVID-19 pandemic, though, Wonder Works over-hired and figured the pandemic-driven surge of gamers and spending would continue indefinitely. That didn’t happen, as everyone in the gaming industry knows painfully well. Wonder Works’ crash was as hard as any studio that survived the downturn. On top of that, the contract value of co-developed projects that the studio got into to make ends meet went into freefall. The handwriting was on the wall. In late 2023, Wonder Works suffered a huge layoff: The studio’s workforce was slashed by >85% and its C-suite slate was all but cleaned.

It was back to square one for Letter and the dozen employees that remained. Letter told Posner that he had nightmares for more than a year following the downsizing. It was “probably the most traumatic thing I've ever had to do in my life,” he said.

We’ll conclude on a happier note this week. We’ll ride on the coattails…or scarlet-red tie…of SpongeBob back to the crest of success on Roblox—although, as Letter knows too well, the next great plunge may be just a weekly update away.

At Wonder Works’ nadir in early 2024, Letter recalled to Posner, the remaining employees were winding down work-for-hire projects and the big question was, “What’s next?”

“I'm like, ‘Okay, I feel like we need to make a true big bet on this platform,’” Letter said. The studio needs “a real game that can sustain multiple months, if not years, on this platform, and give us a real chance to break free of work for hire [and] all the branded work we were doing” at the time.

“I had all these great relationships because of what I did,” and what the team had accomplished since Overlook Bay made a splash.

“I somehow got in front of a Paramount person who was able to get an intro to Jennifer” Smart, who was Head of Games & Emerging Media at Paramount at the time.

Letter set up “thirty minutes of her time where I could pitch my game idea” at the Roblox Dev Con (RDC), which was scheduled for early September in San Jose, CA.

“I already knew I wanted to make a tower defense game going into this meeting and we were already working on a kit.”

“Tower defense had five games in the top 25 earning [titles] at the time on Roblox,” recalled Letter. “Some people look at that as, ‘Wow, this is really saturated. There's probably not room for a new one.’”

“A lot of people don't know this, but at the time, the studio was running low on cash,” he confided. “We were still really hurting from that layoff and, like, the position we got ourselves into, and some of the debts we had.”

“I was like, ‘Okay, if I'm gonna go out, I wanna go out with a game that I'm passionate about. I am going to put my boots on. And if it doesn't work out, I know I gave it my absolute all, and maybe I wasn't meant for this life.”

Fast forward to RDC 2024.

“I made the proposal to Paramount,” Letter told Posner. “Paramount understood that Roblox is different. We need to move fast. I needed to move fast because we were gonna be bankrupt if we didn't get the game up before the end of the year!”

“I pitched this idea in that half-hour elevator pitch.”

“Jen loves it. Paramount loves it. And they give me the green light. We do a handshake.”

And the rest is history in Bikini Bottom.

We’ll finish the story Wonder Works’ and Letter’s rise back to the crest of Roblox below. First, we’ll detour into the woods of AI and Live Ops processes.

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AI Use Cases and Live Ops at Wonder Works

AI is not quite there to the capacity where it can really help me push things forward. It does help maybe brainstorm a few of my ideas, and help me iterate a little bit. But I find it to be so agreeable that I'm not getting something like I would with a focus group playtest on a game.—Zach Letter

A question Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, put to Zack Letter, CEO and Co-founder of Wonder Works, in their June exchange, involved how he and the studio use artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

“We haven't used AI too much in the game development side just yet,” Letter responded, “but I definitely use it as a companion to bounce things off of. I'll kinda talk into the ether. I talk a lot.”

“Instead of annoying everybody around me, I just talk to my AI for a bit. I'm like, ‘What do you think of this?’ And then it's like, ‘You're so smart. You're amazing.’”

LOL.

I'm like, ‘You're right…[But] let me bounce this off a few real people first before I move forward.’”

Letter said that when the studio playtests with flesh and blood gamers, “It's like, ‘These people know nothing about the game's design. They don't have any previous hints or clues or context, so their reaction is raw and honest.’ I still feel like I'd benefit most from bouncing ideas off real people, holding focus groups of players, and letting them experience our games before we release them” rather than use AI tools to collect constructive feedback.

Letter added that he uses AI “when it comes to answering really long emails. Love to throw a good email at [OpenAI’s] ChatGPT and be like, ‘Reply to this for me.’”

He says he and the team do feed player data into ChatGPT and consider the sentiment advice it produces.

“It’s like, ‘Oh, everyone's complaining that there's no unit manager in these games.’ It's like, ‘Let's add a unit manager before we release,’ you know?”

In the context of designing and prototyping SpongeBob Tower Defense before RDC 2024, recalled Letter, “we were really coming at our competition by trying to, you know, bridge the gaps between their [game’s] shortcomings and then, obviously, understanding their influencers [on YouTube, TikTok, etc.], what their video cadence was, how often they uploaded, what type of content they resonated with” in terms of the tower defense games they were pushing.

“That really influenced us to build a robust trading economy in our game, and make trading these digital assets the forefront of what the entire experience was meant to be.”

It wasn't so much strategic tower defense play. It was gacha collection, and building a massive inventory of valuable assets, with tower defense sprinkled in.

Gacha is a common Live Ops game mechanic that entices gamers to spend in-game currency or IRL money on virtual items that are (somewhat) randomly selected. As such, gacha has been criticized as being close to gambling—an illegal activity for kids in most countries.

“It was a really interesting combination of just, like, looking at all the socials, analyzing all of that,” and AI tools played a role in clarifying that market opportunity.

Posner asked Letter about how Wonder Works balanced the use of human talent in its design and prototyping processes versus moving faster, perhaps, with AI but not getting equal quality or innovation.

“On the design side, it's helped us,” Letter responded candidly. In terms of “being able to make a pitch deck, and being able to pull a bunch of data and understand it quicker,” these tools have added value.

“On art and programming, we've avoided a little bit,” he continued. The “art [team] will use it for concepting and, like, trying to get to that first iteration and just understand, ‘Is this fun? Do we care?’”

That’s where the use of AI tools ends, however.

“For us, on Roblox, it's important to get there within two weeks. Otherwise, we just need to move on, if it's not fun.”

“It was really finding the right team” that mattered more, not the adoption of ChatGPT and so on. Getting to a high-quality team only happened after the dramatic, painful, nightmare-inducing workforce cuts of late 2023.

“We took some investor money last summer because of all the success we were having” with SpongeBob Tower Defense, Letter told Posner. “I told him, ‘If you wanna give me this money and you want me to hire people, it's just not gonna happen…I’d rather only do two projects at once—but it's with the right people and we're making the right games—than do 10 projects. Because you think we can replicate this team and, you know, embed that into 30 new people that [will] allow us to 10x our revenue. [But] I much prefer to live here, where we can take many shots on goal over the years, that we have in runway, but each shot is so calculated that it could be that next top ten game.’”

“That's what is hard to replicate with something like this company, this platform. It takes time to learn,” he underscored. “I have seven years on anybody who would start today. Not discouraging people. Hop on. Get in. Roblox is just like its own living, breathing thing.”

“It's kinda like when MTV came out and the older generation just didn't understand what the appeal was, and it was really the culture at the time.”

I feel like this is a huge cultural shift and a cultural moment, where entertainment as we know it, whether it's gaming, television, film…they're all evolving to cater more to users. That's what you're seeing with Obsession and Backrooms. It's fanfare for fan’s sake. I feel like that's how we approach game development as well.

Note: Last week’s Design Desk article touched on Obsession and Backrooms, two 2026 horror films that crushed it at the box office; both were made by former U.S. YouTube creators who’d amassed large audiences (as Letter did with his AviatorGaming role-playing account before founding Wonder Works).

Posner switch gears and double-clicked on “the twelve” that worked on what became Wonder Works’ comeback masterpiece, SpongeBob Tower Defense.

Posner noted that Letter had repeatedly crowed about the small “can-do” team that survived the cut, and Posner asked if Letter if he thought that they—and perhaps Roblox developers in general—were “secretly the best trained game devs in the industry. Make that case to a triple A studio that doesn't take Roblox seriously.”

Letter took a beat to formulate an answer.

“This Roblox breed,” Letter began, already aglow, “it's exactly what you're seeing happen on the YouTube side. Again, with Obsession and Backrooms, these directors understand this audience. These directors understand how to move. These directors are making movies for $750,000 and $10,000,000 that other studios might spend a $100,000,000 on [or] $150,000,000 [to make]. These people understand how the new media is really shaking out and how to approach it.”

It’s the “same with these Roblox developers,” continued Letter. “If you look at the last twelve to eighteen months, [they] are the ones setting records for all-time highest CCU in a video game ever…You can argue that brainrot was essentially popularized on this platform by these developers.”

Brainrot is a series of internet memes that blew up in early 2025. The focus is surrealist creatures…with pseudo-Italian names for some reason. Anyway, they first appeared on platforms such as TikTok, and kids couldn’t get enough of them.

By mid-May 2025, a game called Steal a Brainrot (by BRAZILIAN SPYDER and Sammy) had made it onto Roblox. It blew up. In fact, Steal a Brainrot continues to vacillate in the high single-digit to low teens range by concurrent users (CCUs) as of early September 2026, according to GameFam’s RoMonitor Stats. That game is still hitting home runs.

Cumulative visits to the experience are today >73 billion.

Letter’s assessment that it was on Roblox where brainrot found its audience, and likely its top monetization channel, appears sound.

“Roblox developers are probably the best developers you could have because they've had to learn multiple skills,” he elaborated. “They are okay with not being in one lane and really doing two, three, four, five things at once. Most of our devs, obviously, they don't have one discipline. They do a hundred different things.”

That sounds…painful.

“They could have been hired as a 3D artist, but now they also rig, animate, and create VFX [visual effects] for us. That's what's demanded on this platform. Everyone here is a Swiss Army knife. Everyone here can do multiple things.”

Posner reframed what he thought Letter had said. So, a “Roblox dev is kind of in that frontline, kinda listening, hearing, iterating” mode that spans many parts of the pipeline?

“A lot of these games are one to two person teams,” Letter nodded. “They had to make their UI, program the game, build the worlds, build all the assets. Yeah, you have to be really scrappy.”

Riffing on that process compared to his sense of traditional AAA development, Posner wondered if Letter thought that “long tail live service games are structurally dying, or is it just getting harder to launch” these titles successfully on PCs, consoles and mobiles?

“I think it's saturated,” said Letter. “I also think it's some user burnout and fatigue, without really the user themselves understanding that. I think they hop into the next one, expecting that same feeling from the previous one, and that second ‘hit’ just doesn't hit as hard as the first one.”

“That's what you're starting to see,” he added. “It's like repeating the same blueprint over and over again. It just feels dull.”

“GTA is a one-of-a-kind thing. You have to wait for it, but it's always worth the wait.”

“These live service games feel like one of many,” Letter continued.

“If I wanna draw a Roblox example, it's like the brainrot stuff. There was, like, one or two really good brainrot games that drew a lot of attention to the platform. Then every dev saw that, and every dev made a brainrot game. Now there's, like, 1,000,000 brainrot games.”

Speaking of Live Ops games…

Live Ops Best Practice Tips

Developing the game is, like, 1% of the work and getting it to that release stage. 99% comes through Live Ops, where we have a big Discord community. We have YouTube channels dedicated to our specific games, and we build the game, codev with the community. It's like, ‘What are you guys looking for? What direction do you want to see the game go in?’ Then we're gonna build a roadmap around that, and ensure if there's a pain point, or there's something people are wanting to see in the game, they're not waiting months or seasons. They're waiting four days, five days.—Zach Letter

Nearly everything moves faster on Roblox than on other game platforms. From design and development to launch and ongoing support, every timescale and budget is greatly compressed. That’s certainly true in Wonder Works’ case, according to Letter.

If the feedback loop between creators and players remains tight and fast, Letter advised, players “feel instantly heard, which continues to strengthen the bond. It's almost like, you know, investing into a startup or a Kickstarter, and feeling some sense of ownership in the project.”

Posner asked how Wonder Works comes up with its Live Ops roadmaps for its games when everything else changes or moves so quickly.

“We'll build a road map because it's healthy to do that,” Letter said. “Oftentimes, that is written on a napkin, and we throw it away.”

“We're about to release another original this month, our first original in two years. But we'll have a roadmap cadence where it's like, ‘Okay, each month, we're gonna do these four updates, and it's gonna be these two core features that are gonna update on a rotation of every other month.’”

‘Then you'll release the game,” he said, “and you'll find that people really enjoy something that you didn't think was even a big deal, and you didn't plan a lot of content behind it. Now you're like, ‘Oh, okay. Instead of this, let's lean into this and evolve the game more in this [new] direction.”

Posner asked how Wonder Works manages all of its incoming player feedback streams.

“How do you kind of go through it?” he asked.

“We used to do it, you know, painstakingly, by hand, and try to use our best judgment,” Letter responded. “Maybe some polls.”

“Now we have software that polls everything our community is saying. We could, like, separate all the data by different keywords and points, and just also by different date ranges where it's like, ‘Hey, I wanna look at last week's update. Let's look at the weekend's feedback.’ Like, ‘Look at this. This suggestion's been talked about 65 times in the last hour.’”

“Because of software, and all this stuff that we have, I feel like we have so much data now that we just know more about our players than they probably know about themselves at this point.”

That sounds scary.

Wonder Works uses analytics software “that's third party as well.”

“We break down our analytics by, like, a thousand different data points. And we're analyzing everything every week. It's definitely more of a game of chess.”

“When we first came to Roblox it was like a game of Chutes and Ladders,” Letter continued. “It was relatively easy, and anyone could pick it up. As long as you just made some type of okay experience, you'd find some traction.”

Now the platform's aging up. The developers are aging up. The stakes are so high. They're still not as high as, like, [traditional] mobile [development] or anything like that, but they are getting there where a top experience can net the developer well over a $100,000,000 a year.

Posner asked Letter about, potentially, burning out Wonder Works’ team of 15 Swiss Army knife ninjas.

Letter responded that Wonder Works has a “team of absolute psychopaths,” but then he pulled back. He said the team has “my mentality, that's like, ‘Hey, the job's not done until it's done. And this isn't a nine to five’” job.

He dialed it back further.

“I'm not saying we're working eighty hours a week. We don't really work weekends, hardly ever, unless there's a critical update around a holiday or something like that.”

“It's really about, ‘How can you optimize your pipeline to succeed in these forty hours each week?’”

Given “the two plus years we've had together now since that layoff,” he continued, “everyone has optimized their pipeline in such an insane way that things that used to take a couple weeks take a couple days, and the goalpost can continue to be moved back, or forward, I should say, in a sense, to where something that we would think would take eight weeks to produce, we can do in six.”

“Slowly with Live Ops, especially in SpongeBob [Tower Defense], we found ways to kind of game the system in a way where we could have one update that still satisfied that Friday release, but still felt like significant content to the community.”

What he meant there was that one week’s update would be “more design heavy than art heavy. And then the next week was more art heavy than design heavy. It's finding that cadence where you're kinda swapping the responsibility week in and week out.”

“As a team of 15, we have four projects in the works,” he added. “Our teams are three to four individuals.”

Posner homed in on the studio’s approach to managing its Discord server. “You have a Discord of over 200,000 people,” he pointed out. “Who's running that on a day-to-day basis?”

“We have a community manager,” Letter responded. “They're in that Discord and just, like, maintaining its civility overall and keeping everything kosher.”

“I spend so much time in there secretly,” he confessed. “I'm always looking at the chat.”

“I'm always trying to understand, especially on update days, or any day we leak something for an update, trying to understand what people think, what the sentiment is.”

He added that the first- and third-party software they use “makes it a little bit easier to not have to, just, live in there. But I personally want to be super hand in hand with the community. Because on SpongeBob Tower Defense, I designed that game. I designed all the Live Ops.”

For me, it felt like, “Hey, these are my people. I wanna be with them. I wanna understand what they feel about this thing I've created, and how I can make it perfect for them.” I feel like a public servant in a way, where I'm really just trying to do as good as I can by these players. Obviously, wanting to do good by the studio as well, but players first over anything, because if you do well by the players, you can carry them from one experience to another.

That’s well said, and it rings true across several Design Desk interviews.

Surfing SpongeBob Tower Defense Back to the Crest of Roblox Success

We make the game in six weeks. Release it in December. And in a month, it becomes the number one tower defense game on the platform. A top 15 game platform wide in terms of earnings for over a year straight. Number one licensed branded game in terms of earnings all time. Number three most visited.—Zach Letter

As noted in last week’s Design Desk article, Wonder Works’ Co-Founder and CEO, Zach Letter, got a handshake agreement to license SpongeBob from Paramount’s Jennifer Sharp at RDC in September 2024.

In their June podcast, Letter explained to Player Driven founder Greg Posner, it took “a month or so to do the contract. Come, like, mid-October, we're ready to kick things off, but we gotta release in December. So, literally, in six weeks we have to make this game. And it needs to be good enough to save the studio.”

No pressure!

Letter clarified that he’d signed “an MG, as you do with these deals, and I'm like, ‘Okay, by the time we dev this game, get it out, [or] I'm gonna be bankrupt.’”

MG is shorthand for minimum guarantee. In an IP licensing contract, it’s pretty standard that the licensee/distributor is required to pay the owner of the IP some minimum sum, regardless of how well or poorly the product/content may perform commercially.

Letter’s #1 professional concern in October 2024 was this: “Won't be able to pay the MG. I'll probably get sued.”

“But I just had so much faith in the dozen people I had, and in what we were trying to build” that he stayed in a relatively positive place mentally.

“It's safe to say I was able to pay the MG, and the gamble paid off” once SpongeBob Tower Defense launched and took off like a rocket at the end of December.

What a difference a year makes.

“I really did, again, going back to the casino here,” a theme that was woven into last week’s post, “put the entire company, you know, on red, just to see if I, if we, can make it work.”

“Everyone at the company knew the kind of risk we were taking. They didn't know it would, potentially, be curtains in January, but they knew if this didn't work, it probably was.”

“Under that stress, this team didn't crumble,” Letter recalled, swelling with pride. “They became an absolute gem.”

“Obviously, we Live Op’d that game. And it's still live now, with eighteen months of weekly Live Ops, with this small team.”

That’s “70+ every Friday updates,” Letter clarified. Some updates have approached “200,000 concurrent users on the experience, nearly 700,000,000 [total] visits, and tens of millions of dollars in revenue” and counting.

For the record, GameFam’s RoMonitor shows that, as of September 9th 2026, SpongeBob Tower Defense had amassed 682 million visits cumulatively (up from the 681 million in the RoMonitor figure shown in the section above, which I captured a week ago). The game also has a 97.7% positive rating, and a session length around 11 minutes—although its CCU in recent weeks has averaged <1,000.

“Congratulations on that,” said Posner.

“That's so cool that you could find your way, talking to the executives at Paramount and win that license over. You understood that the tower defense audience is older, and mostly strategic, and mostly anime adjacent. I know you have your YouTube background, but how did you dig into the audiences for each one of these genres and figure this out?”

“We knew SpongeBob, at the time, was 25 years old,” said Letter, nodding. “I was nine when it came out.”

“I was like, ‘Okay, I'm a millennial. It significantly touched my generation, but it still has new seasons. It's being renewed all the time, had a new movie last December.”

Tru dat: The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants came out in December 2025 and, according to Wikipedia, it performed pretty well, grossing close $168 million worldwide on a production budget of $64 million.

SpongeBob, Letter reasoned, has also “touched Gen Z, Gen Alpha. I was like, ‘Wow, this has extreme market saturation where, like, everyone on planet Earth probably knows who these characters are. But I've never seen SpongeBob in a combat setting before where it's truly, like, all these people [characters] are heroes in a way, and trying to defeat evil.”

I was like, “How can we take the route from a YouTube perspective that gets people to make videos on this?” I'm like, “Well, doing SpongeBob Tower Defense already just doesn't feel like something that should exist…There's gonna be so many influencers that make their first video just out of morbid curiosity, wanting to probably dunk on this game for being a baby game, or being stupid, or being ad slop or whatever.”

“Everyone else was doing branded integrations or paid stand-alone experiences that were just meant to be a one-off marketing opportunity,” Letter continued. “We were the first ever licensed game.”

“When you saw a new game come out” on Roblox, “even if it was an IP, it's like, ‘Oh, this is a paid game. It's a bad game.’ We knew we'd have to battle that.”

Wonder Works’ twin goals, according to Letter, were to “one, make the best tower defense game we could ever make, which I feel like we really did do. But, two, make something that just felt so over the top polished in a way that you're like, ‘Why does this exist?’ Like, ‘Why did this team try so hard with this kid’s IP?’”

Letter recalled that the first “video that was made on the game was really like, ‘What the heck is this?’ The whole video was critiquing the game. Like, ‘Why does this exist?’ But then about three or four minutes into the video, he's like, ‘Wait, why is this low key good?’”

“That guy became our first ever creator in our star program,” Letter added. His video “ended up getting hundreds of thousands of views…[He] became our largest influencer.”

He “came in skeptical, wanting to dunk on the game, memeing on it,” but, eventually, this creator asked, “Why does this have the quality of life features we've been begging for in x-y-z tower defense game?”

The answer, Letter said, is that “we listened. We combed communities. We literally went to all of these creators that created tower defense videos, combed their comment section, and just wanted to learn as much about these games as possible. What were people saying about their [game] updates? What were people saying about these videos?”

Posner was grinning.

“You had a guy that was recording a video,” he reiterated, “even if he was dunking on the game, right? Then all of a sudden, it's that ‘click’ moment… Like, ‘Oh, crap, this is good.’ Like, all of a sudden, you know, win-win…”

It was Letter who was grinning now.

As a platform, he said, Roblox is “so accessible….I could be right here on my PC playing Roblox. I could go in the bathroom, take a short break, and be on my phone on Roblox. I could go sit on my couch upstairs and be on my PlayStation on Roblox. I could throw on my Oculus [VR/MR headset by Meta] and be on Roblox.”

“I think what we've proven, and what was kinda shocking, but I was hoping for, was you could pull a lot of that 18+ millennial demo, or older Gen Z demo, over to Roblox, if you create the right game with the right IP.”

“That's part of our strategy going forward. If we find an IP that we feel skews more millennial or Gen X, it's not necessarily a ‘No’ for us. What kind of game could we build that could convince these people to come?”

Posner mentioned Star Trek in last week’s post, and Letter now circled back to it.

“A good example is Star Trek,” he said, quickly clarifying that it’s not an IP Wonder Works is pursuing.

“It's an older audience…[and] if you were to look at Star Trek, you might be like, ‘Well, in Roblox that doesn't make a lot of sense.’”

But “if you made the right game and could provide something that [some other] mobile game isn't [doing with that IP], like, more frequent Live Ops, more events, and really craft that community, you can have a game with those Gen X and millennials” on Roblox, Letter argued.

ChatGPT’s rendition of the original Star Trek cast beamed into a Roblox game…I’d play this at warp ten!

“When we took SpongeBob,” Letter continued, “we knew there was some risk just because of how old the IP was, but we knew that users would be older, have more access to their own funds, and be able to spend.”

“That's why I think even though we weren't the largest, in terms of [concurrent] users, tower defense game, we were the largest in terms of revenue. Because we were able to pull a different base on Roblox. 40% of our audience” is 18+, Letter noted.

This target audience-related calculus was part of “the SpongeBob trading economy…We anticipated that it would be, like, a focus of ours. And it came out within the first update or two of the game releasing.”

“It ended up consuming the entire game,” Letter clarified. “The whole thing is now, like, a massive asset collection simulator type-experience.”

Gacha…

“I personally like starting an update on Monday, workwise, that releases on Friday…I like making assets a little bit in advance, knowing, ‘Okay, we should make these characters. We can use them eventually. We'll plug them into a system or some type of reward.’”

Letter got a little more into his personal Live Ops-focused process.

“I like to sit down after Friday's update, on Monday….Like, ‘What did people think?’ Like, ‘What can we do?’ Let's brainstorm.”

After that, “the team kicks off production. We sometimes pull assets from a backlog that we've pre-created, or sometimes it's total chaos, [and] we're creating everything from scratch in four days.”

“It feels like working on South Park, you know?”

Ooh, boy. Really, Zack? Another decades-old comedy show reference?

“Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] are handing in [the episode] to Comedy Central, you know, an hour before it airs, and just throwing it up live for the whole world to experience.”

“They're doing it live because they do so many pop culture references. It makes the show extremely relevant as you're watching those episodes.”

Fine, I gacha, bro:

“That's how I feel about game development too,” confided Letter. “Take that South Park approach. Have everything be relevant.”

“If the platform's experiencing a platform-wide shift, or a complete new trend, our game can capitalize on things like that because we can do things so ‘live.’ Because Live Ops can move very quick now based on feedback, based on vibe coding…”

Posner countered that there must be “some sort of discipline that stops you from chasing every ‘ask’ that a player has.”

Letter agreed there was.

“If you're trying to chase platform trends,” he clarified, “you quickly realize, ‘Oh, we were behind the ball already by, like, two weeks. There's already 25 solo devs making projects that are gonna beat us out’ because we're gonna try to do something that's a little bit more polished, a little bit higher end.”

“We wanna just be in our own lane. When we chose to license SpongeBob and do SpongeBob Tower Defense,” the idea was more to “carve out this specific niche for us.”

Wonder Works’ success with licensed IP has led to more doors of opportunity swinging wide.

We really have, like, our pick of the litter. What we wanna do. When we wanna do it. What genre we want. We get a lot of creative freedoms from all of the partners we're signing.

“When we make originals even, it's like, ‘How can we do something very novel that no one's gonna beat us to the punch’” on? The reaction Letter wants is, “I've never seen something like this on Roblox.”

That goal is indeed a far cry from chasing the latest brainrot meme variant.

In Letter’s view, that’s begging to be cast off the crest of Roblox’s permanent rolling wave.

“The peaks and valleys point” is important, he stressed at the very end the podcast. “You're gonna be on the summit at one point and down in the depths of hell the next. It's about not giving up in those moments, learning what you can from how you got there, and trying to re-summit.”

I’m tempted to end with a shot of Sinatra belting out “That’s Life,” but I’m afraid (1) only my Gen X peers would appreciate the reference and (2) it wouldn’t top that Matt Stone and Trey Parker shot.