Roblox is a popular platform among children where you can create your own games (or choose from 40 million others)

We talk about the success of the “second Minecraft”, which will puzzle the adult user

Over the past few years, Roblox has been ranked alongside Minecraft and multiplayer shooters like Counter-Strike or Fortnite on the lists of the most popular games in the world. Formally, this is not even a game, but a platform with many projects created by users. And she is really very successful. At the beginning of autumn, the creators of Roblox announced that their next goal is to receive 10% of all revenue that the gaming industry generates annually. And in the long term, they dream of attracting a billion daily active users to the platform. Meduza explains why Roblox is so popular among young gamers.

Roblox is an online platform that has millions of games. It is compared to Steam: it also has a large showcase with numerous projects of different genres, which users can rate. But unlike Valve 's digital store, almost all of the content on Roblox was created not by professional developers, but by ordinary gamers. And almost all projects here are free. Therefore, journalists came up with another comparison, much more suitable: in essence, Roblox is like YouTube, only with games.

It is impossible to give an exact number of games available on Roblox. The most common estimate is more than 40 million. This number is constantly changing due to both new projects and those that are removed from the platform. The latter occurs due to violation of the rules of use of the service or claims of copyright holders. Although sometimes the developers themselves remove their games from public access. For example, because they no longer have time to support them.

It’s worth noting right away that projects from the Roblox catalog are unlikely to interest those who are already accustomed to games from professional developers. Many of them are simple (and some are even primitive), they have unattractive graphics, and, most likely, they will not be able to keep an adult looking at the screen for a long time. Statistics confirm: Roblox has almost 90 million active users every day, and more than a third of them are under 13 years old.

At the same time, the developers note that the platform’s audience is gradually maturing. Last year, the fastest growing segment was users aged 17 to 24 years. As of the fourth quarter of 2022, they made up almost a quarter of the entire community.

To create games, a separate Roblox Studio application is used, in which you can select one of the available thematic templates and change it beyond recognition. Or start over from scratch. To write scripts, you will need knowledge of Luau - this is one of the dialects of the Lua programming language. Special courses where children can learn to write code for Roblox projects are already in demand, and in some cases you can turn to artificial intelligence for help.

There are no genre restrictions on the platform—you can create almost anything. The most popular are virtual life simulators, racing and the so-called obby - games in which you need to find the right path while overcoming obstacles.

Roblox was created by an American with Ukrainian roots. Now his company is worth more than $30 billion

The Roblox platform recently celebrated its eighteenth anniversary - it was launched on September 1, 2006. But its history began a couple of years earlier, in 2004, when developers David Bazuki and Eric Cassell launched beta testing of a project called DynaBlocks. The platform received its current name a year later.

American David Bazuki was born in 1963 in Canada, his parents are descendants of immigrants from Ukraine . He studied engineering and computer science at Stanford University and wanted to start his own business. Bazuki founded his first company, Knowledge Revolution, with his brother Greg in 1989.

The brothers developed educational programs for the Macintosh, for example, they created a virtual laboratory where all objects were subject to realistic laws of physics. In 1998, Bazuki sold Knowledge Revolution to the American company MSC Software for $20 million.

In an interview with Forbes in 2016, the developer admitted that this deal would have allowed him to never work again. But Bazooka was interested in developing his ideas. “I like designers, and I saw the direction in which 3D rendering was developing,” he said. “I realized there was an opportunity to create an immersive 3D multi-user platform in the cloud where people could imagine, create and share their experiences together.”

In the new company Roblox Corporation, David Bazuki took over as CEO, and his Knowledge Revolution colleague Eric Cassell became vice president of development. Initially, they independently financed the new project. Only a few years later, the company raised an additional $11 million from investors.

In the early years, Roblox developed slowly. The project gained popularity only in the late 2010s, and the sharpest surge in interest from players occurred during the pandemic. Roblox Corporation currently has a market capitalization of over $30 billion. Last year the company earned 2.8 billion.

Eric Cassell did not live to see all this - in February 2013 he died of cancer. In many ways, it was his developments that helped Roblox achieve incredible popularity. “Eric was a prototyping master, but with such high qualifications that his prototypes could work fully for years,” said Matt Dusek, one of the first employees of Roblox Corporation, who served as the company’s technical director until 2019.

Cassell himself rarely spoke to the press and was completely immersed in his work. “I love writing code, but what motivates me the most is the incredibly fun things our community creates. Without him, Roblox would be nothing,” he said in an interview for a corporate blog in 2010.

The platform is free and therefore very popular among children. But for adults, playing Roblox is very painful

Although Roblox appeared five years earlier, it is sometimes called “the second Minecraft,” most likely because the platform’s success did not come immediately. At the same time, it is difficult to single out one reason for the success of Roblox - it is probably a combination of several features that ideally suits the target audience.

• Roblox is free. You don't have to pay to access the platform itself and the vast majority of games on it. Yes, almost all games have the option to purchase in-game content, but this is not required.
• A huge number of games. If you offer your child a choice between buying one quality game once a month or access to 40 million projects of different genres, regardless of their quality, the choice for him will be obvious. Moreover, you may not like the only game you purchased, but you can launch games in Roblox one after another until you find the right one.
• Availability on any device. Many modern games require an expensive gaming console or computer. Roblox is available almost everywhere. The platform can be run even on a cheap tablet, and this will not affect the quality of the games.
• Multiplayer. In many of the games available on Roblox, it is difficult to be alone. There are other characters constantly running around, controlled by real people. They chat, add each other as friends and form teams to make the game more interesting.
• Simple games. In Roblox, users are unlikely to find complex projects with thoughtful mechanics and an exciting story. Most of them are ordinary “ time killers ” that look primitive even by the standards of modern mobile games. But for many modern children who do not want to deal with complex controls and read kilometers of plot dialogue, this is enough.

Probably another important reason why Roblox reaches its target audience so well is that many of the games are created by children. Young developers make a product that is primarily interesting to them. Here you can often find games that contain references to memes that are popular with children and unfamiliar to adults. And chat messages are often completely impossible to understand if there is no translator (that is, a child) nearby.

Games on the platform take a very liberal approach to copyright: on it you can find dozens of “clones” of GTA, Final Fantasy, Minecraft and other popular games. Just enter the name of the original into the search.

Of course, this has nothing to do with real games - you'll be lucky if the environment or characters even remotely resemble the original. But this minimal similarity is most often enough for a child. In the end, responsible parents are unlikely to buy him an expensive, and most importantly, inappropriate GTA for his age. Roblox gives the illusion of touching a famous series that is discussed at school.

In Roblox, unlike Minecraft, the gap between generations is much more acute. If adults are still able to see the meaning in the Mojang studio game, here the user finds himself in a crazy whirlpool: a crooked interface, incomprehensible sounds, endless fuss created by other players. In most cases, it remains unclear what needs to be done, and because of this, you want to immediately switch to another game, in the hope that it will be better. But all this will most likely happen again.

Roblox regularly gets into scandals. But this doesn’t bother the developers: they want to create the most profitable project in the gaming industry

In early October 2024, investment firm Hindenburg Research published a study stating that Roblox Corporation was misleading investors, regulators and advertisers. For example, the company overestimates the number of active users by 25-42%.

In 2023, Roblox Corporation reported to the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it could not determine how many accounts one person was using. The study's authors claim that this is an "outright lie." In their opinion, the platform deliberately inflates its indicators in order to increase its value. Since the company is not profitable, its share price depends on the growth rates it provides.

Hindenburg Research employees call the platform itself a “pedophile hell,” claiming that Roblox Corporation has outsourced moderation to Asian companies. And the moderators themselves, who are paid only $12 an hour, are limited in their capabilities and cannot permanently ban users who groom and bully children.

Additionally, the report states that Roblox exposes inappropriate content to children under 13 to boost certain platform metrics, such as the amount of time users spend playing games. This allegedly also allows investors to demonstrate more impressive numbers.

Representatives of Roblox Corporation denied all accusations. They also recalled that Hindenburg Research specializes in short selling . Therefore, she benefits from the fall in the value of Roblox Corporation shares, which such a report could lead to.

This is not the first child safety scandal that Roblox has been involved in. At the end of 2023, it became known that a group of parents in the United States filed a lawsuit against the creators of the platform. The company was accused, among other things, of exposing children to adult content due to lax safety protocols. They were also at risk of grooming.

In July 2024, Bloomberg journalists reported that since 2018, at least two dozen people had been arrested, accused of kidnapping or abusing victims they met through Roblox. A month later, Turkish authorities blocked the platform in the country, citing concerns for the safety of children.

All these events prompted developers to tighten the rules of use for users under 13 years of age. However, many publications agree that Roblox is hardly more dangerous than any other online game. Like other similar entertainments, it requires attention from parents.

Despite all the scandals, Roblox Corporation continues to make grandiose plans for the future of the platform. Recently, David Bazuki stated that the next goal is to earn 10% of all the revenue that the gaming industry generates annually. He estimates it's about $18 billion. Now the company earns six times less.

To achieve this goal, the platform needs about 300 million players to use it daily. Bazooka's dream is one billion users. And while the money goal is generally feasible, no one has yet been able to gather such an audience.

Mikhail Gerasimov