Roblox hits 100M monthly active users, bigger than Minecraft
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Beyond that we found that the openly mod-able nature of the game allowed some remarkably disgusting 3D models and game modes. Just Google it. It was not hard to find a room with 50 kids holding adult store items and doing extremely inappropriate things.
The system is also rife with predators. One game let them share pictures somehow. Some guy was asking my daughters to send them pictures of their feet. Try to censor that request in chat, I guess.
This if course sets aside the caste system that is built on their in-game currency. Scammers can convince your kids to trade their favorite items away in a "trust trade".
Roblox is not appropriate in my experience.
Capitalism has optimised itself to the point where you are nothing more then meta data. Its at the point where a team of accredited people can sit infront of the meta data, and your product, and they can design ways to trigger dopamine responses.
Putting "any" kind of "modern product" in your childs hand will lead to one thing. Now put a connected device in their hands, and your putting your child in the hands of unlimited amounts of teams, using unlimited amounts of tickery, to earn profit from your child.
Now add back in a dynmically manipulated game environment, where these tools are utilised by predators to exploit your child for their version on profit.
This is the challenge of being a modern parent. Junk food, everywhere, all the time.
I see it so many times around us - parents are tired, so here ya go kiddo, play with a phone so daddy/mommy can rest. Kids get addicted quickly, then when you take their game away they go mental, try emotional extortion, break stuff, whatever just to get it back.
I know I must have had a mild addiction to PC gaming when being teenager, so many hours, days, weeks and months of wasted life. I won't allow the same thing for my kids, if I can help it. Replace it with physical activities, adventures, travelling, education. Harder, but much more rewarding for everybody involved
First, the super rich can afford it: they have full-time nannies that can help raising children.
Second, an exhausted parent is not going to be parenting. Everyone needs a break.
Third, your approach would have left Bill Gates a nobody. Instead , he was "addicted" to computers. Many high performing and successful individuals are so because they have in effect an addiction which makes them go beyond the ordinary person.
This clues you in on to what is next: parenting does not stop because you turned the TV or Xbox on. It means work:
- work to select and make sure your child can only watch YouTube clips that are beneficial : for example advanced math, learning a foreign language , etc (so that by age 4 he is fluent in at least 2 New disciplines)
-discipline so that you reinforce the learned material, for example sit down to review math, only speak to a child in the foreign language you are trying to teach, practice the sport he sees on a videogame
-patience to review video games so hes only playing games that will help him learn (Crusaders Kings, Europa, MS simulator, etc)
Parenting doesn't stop with videogames. My niece could type faster than her mach teacher because of Minecraft. If she had been my daughter, she would probably been a sysadmin by age 16 (server rental anyone?)
Some video games are worse than others but I think the video games themselves are more of a symptom than a root cause.
I mean our games back when were singleplayer and story-driven, but they were still super engrossing. It came to a point with me when after obsessively playing Pokemon for a few weeks (getting super red in the face and everything) I went sick for a week. Probably not related since my dad got the same bug but still, it felt related. Didn't enjoy Pokemon after that.
eve online and other MMOs on the other hand <_<
Its why we do everything. I dont know why the internet thinks video games are something special.
I imagine it is extremely difficult for the Roblox staff to moderate the disturbing content as they have their hands full around the clock. From people creating thousands of bot accounts to boost their games, security problems revolving around people getting their games/assets/money stolen, people constantly finding new ways to cheat in game, to the issues that you described. I'd also think that the people who engage in the behavior that you described are seasoned in what they do, knowing how to avoid the watchful eye of moderation and parents alike.
So I think the bad stories are more a reflection of the players playing it than the game. For whatever reason certain types of people will gravitate toward the cesspool hidden underneath the actual game and find a way to turn the whole experience into a monstrous tragedy.
It really does seem outrageous on paper, but we know now that M games are no worse than a kid seeing an R rated movie.
-grown ups do any content searching in the level editor
-ask before you try new games
-no games that haven't been voted on much
-chat filter stays on
What should that conversation look like? If you've educated her already, wouldn't it be fine for her simply to dismiss it and move on when she encounters it?
Isn't it better for your kids to experience the "worst" behaviors in a virtual simulation under your control rather than in real life when they will be adult and possibly alone ?
I believe it's fine to have your kids safely experience "unethical" behaviors, as long as you speak with them.
I guess there have been studies about it, I'm wondering. Does anyone have scientific pointers about it ?
There are a lot of pictures and words that are inappropriate and shouldn't be in kids games. But it's really important to convey that there is a difference between that, and even pictures of feet, to pictures of you nude or pictures with your face in them.
I met people from chatrooms some 16 years ago when I was 14, with friends, at a public space and my friends parents knew the place well and knew when and where we were going. Was a fun double date. A lot of people I know would not tell any adult and lie about where they are going to avoid shame and anger.
Your kids are going to send pictures to other people.
If you can prevent either, you should prevent both.
Your reply implies that the child has been taught why it's just as bad to send a picture of their feet as of their hair as of their ankle as of their entire body as of anything. Or that they have parents who wouln't agree to them doing things that seem totally reasonable to them, and just freak out without any explanation.
Children are taught what nudity is very early. They aren't taught people's weird kinks. The difference between the two cases I mentioned is much greater than that between fentanyl and heroin. Both are not ok, but they are not even close in terms of possible adverse effects. You can't judge everything assuming the child has knowledge of the intentions of the abuser online. If your child sends the pictures because 'it's just feet, it can't hurt me' that's a much better reason, even though the child hasn't finished developing it's brain than 'my dad doesn't want me to send any pictures'.
Anyway point is, it only takes one case for the media to pounce on e.g. Roblox and drive it into the ground. And there will be a lot.
This was a big wake up call for me. Having previously seen how obvious some scammers were I didn’t think it could ever happen to me: I thought you had to be a fool to be scammed. The core lesson was that it could happen to everyone and by thinking that scams would only happen to fools I had lowered my own defenses to the point that I was susceptible.
Plus, downloading a keylogger masquerading as a RuneScape hack taught me the importance of not running random executables.
As a parent your primary duty is the safety and well-being of your child. That comes first, lessons second. Sometimes you might just need to ban Roblox for their own good and help them learn like lessons another way. Every kid is unique.
I guess it depends on what the worst-case scenario is? You're advocating for banning the game altogether just because they have the opportunity to get scammed and lose some in-game items. I'd rather lose items and still have permissions to play the game than not be able to play altogether because "otherwise I'd get scammed".
Some dangers, like traffic, have consequences that are extreme and irreversible. Getting frauded online is not.. although grooming is a more difficult issue.
That's a false dichotomy. When you over-protect your children, you deprive them of the life lessons that will keep them safe in the future. You can't protect them forever.
Before I allowed her to play I discussed with her that she is not allowed to tell anybody her real name or the state she lives in. I think and hope the experience of being scammed might have cemented the reasons for that.
“We started Roblox over a decade ago with a vision to bring people from all over the world together through play,”
A vision. To bring people together. Im over the whole 'vision to bring people together and closer thing.'
Still I made it a point to make it clear that I was not a kid and there was no way I was getting into non-group chats with anyone. The only people I ever ended up on any kind of chat with (Skype, then Discord) were the relatively tight group that I was playing with, most of whom were college-age or a bit older. We pretty much dominated that server until most of us lost interest and drifted away due to the real world.
The thing with kids is that you will not be there all the time, especially when they get older. So banning something they like, doesn't seem like a good solution to me. They will have to handle such impulses themselves. So if you can let them handle their own impulses, that is way better.
For example I will never tell my kids that they cannot smoke, because that will be out of my control anyway. But when we walk to a hospital, there are always patients outside smoking (who obviously look sick). Then I tell them "look at those smokers, how sick they are. And it really smells bad too" etc. When I ask them about smoking, they have very negative associations with it.
So if your kids are doing inappropriate things to play, maybe talk to them as if they are adults, and make a reasonable deal. And show them how their decisions will impact them.
Raising kids is not about enforcing rules, it's preparing them for the real world where they need to make their own decisions.
In hindsight this prepared me for the 2 constants in the real world: Never having enough time, and constant disappointment.
I'm pretty sure that overall this 1h limit rule made me completely obsessed with computer games and the only thing that brought me back to the real life was WoW. Yeah it sounds funny, but i actually had "/played" 360 days of 2years period. And after the disband of my guild i had no interest in any other game. Yeah i play from time to time, but don't have the hunger to play every new thing out there.
I'm pretty sure that i would have burn out of this games addiction much faster in my childhood without the limitation and probably could start coding earlier. Probably would have eye problems by now because of a cheap crt monitor back then and would never meet lots of good friends in wow. So honestly i don't know was it good or bad, but i'm sure the time limit had a huge impact and not in a favor of my parents intentions.
The poor impulse control remains poor impulse control. They will grow up from that, but in the mean time if you expect self regulation they are not ready for yet, both you and them are in for very unhappy time when they both play too much and are regularly punished for that - despite not being capable to self regulate yet. One would almost say that it is unfair.
But those kids need to be taught how to self-control those impulses more, not less than those who can already do it easily.
"A man convinced against his will. Is of the same opinion still" ― Dale Carnegie
I asked my Dad what he thought of that statement, and he responded that gatekeeper was the completely wrong approach to parenting. The role is closer to a bodyguard or the secret service, you protect from harm and provide context when appropriate, but leave enough room to explore without your biases.
Self-sufficiency in ones own behaviors, responsibilities and statements should be your goal, just make sure they have a safe environment to explore and carve their own path.
Agreed. In my opinion being a gatekeeper with hard and fast limits often only fuels the wrong outcome. Safety nets and moderation are a core approach in our household. They can do most things with some boundaries and aren't afraid to ask for something outside those boundaries which is often met with a conversation vs just a yes or no answer.
I and my wife chose to be "support" in a gaming style. So far so good.
I do this as well but I also try to explain the upside so that they can understand why smokers exists at all.
"When they smoke they feel excited for a short time but after a while, if you do it often enough, you get hooked and then you don't get that excited feeling anymore but you feel sick if you don't do it". Something like that.
The alternatives have merits too.
That said, I don't pretend that my approach would have worked in all situations. For example, you gave your son a choice about being aggressive with his XBox with a threat that he would have to stop completely. What if you had to follow through on your threat because your son escalated his aggression?
Sometimes, some kids need an adult to make a decision for them that their brains just aren't mature enough to make.
To be clear, my kids have an xbox1, ps4, xbox360, two gaming PCs, a Vive VR headset, their own macbooks, a switch, their own dedicated Chromecast TVs, and one even has a pixel 3a. Roblox is the only thing we have ever had to perma-ban. Fortnite got a one week hold once, but Roblox had to go forever.
They play fortnite, Minecraft, and lots of other stuff. Unfortunately, as soon as I find out my daughter joined a server where lego looking avatars were walking around with massive hard penises doing sex acts on each other, we were done with moderation and guardrails.
In Sweden no screen time is recommended until the age of two, and I would easily say that until 3 or 4 years of age, screen time is really not necessary and possible harmful.
My biggest complaint is how tedious it is to remove apps, since the kids eventually fill up the kindle.
We had to completely ban Roblox as well, even using OpenDNS to block it, but that just led to the use of other networks.
We're now not letting any internet access without us being right there in the same room. We're done with Roblox and its ilk. By the time our child will be allowed access again, it will be a distant memory in the context of later teen life.
I had a friend back in university who's parents did the same. Completely locked down with no internet access unless it was explicitly with her parents observation well into her late-teens. She found freedom when she went away to university, and with that freedom she didn't know how to regulate it. She'd be up all hours of the night scrolling everything shes missed in years past. Games, pop culture references, ancient memes, hours and hours of YouTube playlists, etc. It affected her schooling to the point where she almost withdrew because she'd be so wrapped up in the internet, she wouldn't know how to time-manage for completing assignments or even getting to class. Needless to say her inability to impulse control caused quite a few GPA scares and a lot of money spent on off-term sessions. I remember we agreed as an apartment to put a parental control pin on the communal Xbox because she'd sit for hours and skip class to play.
I can't quite say all this is related to her parents essentially banning her from technology, but it certainly changed my view on how I'd introduce my child to the internet. We're coming to view internet addition similar to drug or alcohol abuse; and I think any sort of responsible moderation that can be learned as a child continues as skills into adulthood.
When I said not allowed access, it's limited to Roblox. Will still have a Minecraft Realm, still have access to the Internet in various ways, but we have to govern it with a more common sense approach.
Being an engineer, I know full well that "filtering and pre-reviewing content" is pure marketing BS. That said, while I'm not delighted with the possiblities of adult content and in-game currency scams, I might not let that stop her from playing.
But predators - I'm planning on 'white listing' her chat options so she can only chat with known friends. Are there any vulnerabilities there?
I also am worried about how obsessed she could get. I'm willing to keep a close eye on it - unfortunately she's probably going to start obsessing about online games sooner or later, and perhaps the best time to start talking about it is now - while she still trusts my judgment - than later when she's ( possibly ) a surly teen.
I couldn't do it now, I've changed, the fabric of my mind has changed so that it just wouldn't appeal to me now, but back then it was great.
Would I want my son doing the same? 20,000 hours on a game over five years? Yeah I'm going to say no, but, things are different as a parent.
However, the thing I found most fun about that was programming plugins to take the chore out of various tasks, so at least it helped me in that I had countless hours of programming practice.
Otherwise, my experience was the same as the GP's, I have many friends today that I met fifteen years ago on that MUD.
I miss this terribly. I remember hanging out in a set of TF2 servers, playing Spy and contributing nothing to the team other than taking out engies, and listening to the regulars chat on alltalk.
Aging my self quite a bit here, but we used to do the same via text based MUDs. ;)
As a result the games were pretty relaxed, there wasn't any rage and the chat conversations were respectful and actually substantial (akin to an IRC network). The game was Crysis & Crysis Wars (and unfortunately the developer ruined all that going forwards with the sequel).
The issue is modern matchmaking doesn't have the same community-building effect as joining the same few servers every day, getting to know the people you're playing with.
I guess it's a little more like the "Water Cooler TV Show" of the past. Let's have a whole bunch of studios (including some dark horses) compete for our viewership instead of one product attempt global domination.
I'm not sure if they were doing anything other than using the chat capabilities, but it's sounded like a fun way to meet up with your friends without having to actually go over to their house.
Then you discover the apparently wide spread client side hacking (speed, teleport, aim bots... you name it) and content theft (models, geometry, Localscripts) and pervasive scam attempts so frequently reported. But that’s the internet, and the cost of doing business, right?
After some success (proof of concept stage) building an unreleased game, I started to notice pitfalls and inconsistencies in the developer docs, including lack of documentation for methods and properties specifically out as recommended or best practice approaches.
Chunks of the docs would suddenly disappear for days or weeks with no notice and no explanation and may or may not reappear after some time. Didn’t see any change logs that I could find.
And then one day this summer I could not access the developer docs site at all, from any of my devices on different ISP connections. After proding around, I realized this was only occurring on Safari (Mac and iOS). Too many redirects (for Tracking)! Apparently Safari had gained additional privacy checking after an update.
Got me thinking, if it’s the case that Apple effectively doesn’t trust the techniques used by Roblox to add tracking to their developer documentation site, is this effort something I want to continue pursuing?
Which segues to the question:
Given the active user base and gross cash flow of Roblox, how do you now frame the new ARKit, RealityKit, Composer, and SwiftUI announcements from WWDC?
I'm not sure what the question is, the two are hardly related. I guess you can use both to create games, but the thing is, you wouldn't have the network to go with it. I mean you could create a video but unless you upload it to youtube it might as well not exist. Or you could create a mobile game but unless it's in the app store (or featured / in the top x) it might as well not exist.
Roblox at least gives your content a chance of being discovered.
People would write scripts that would copy themselves into every object in the game, sometimes renaming those objects to a constant string just to be annoying. People who would edit their games in "build mode" (I can't actually remember what it was called) rather than directly in Roblox Studio would import an infected model from the store, get their place infected, and then any models they shared on the store would _also_ be infected.
I wrote an "anti-virus" script that would search an entire place for known viruses, delete them, and reset the names of any renamed objects back to their default. Eventually Roblox themselves started clearing the source code of any virus scripts they knew about, which I discovered when several of my "virus definitions" files got blanked out.
Those were the days. I wonder if viruses on Roblox are still a thing, or if Roblox managed to put a stop to them for good. (Less people editing their places in build mode would probably make viruses way less effective.)
I guess that's how YouTube got big too.
I've tried to get in to it myself to better understand it as a mechanism, and I'm at a loss as how it's so popular.
My guess is that on the surface it looks innocent enough to naive parents but in reality it's quite a bit 'elsagate' in nature.
I am happy that, right now, he prefers to spend time in Minecraft with his headset, it's a much more positive game (making houses and exploring without predatory in app purchases).
I was relieved because if he hadn't, I was getting ready to ban it. I had set up the account with parental controls to turn off chat because I knew adults played the game, but I ultimately decided it was inappropriate for kids after digging a little deeper and seeing what a toxic waste dump it is.
Kids are smart these days, so we've taken the tact of having the PC in the common room and only allowed access if we're in there.
http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...
“By hook, or by crook, [people] will always find a way to connect with each other.”
— Randy Farmer
The thing that I miss most about her Minecraft phase is that as far as I can tell, at least on a tablet (where she usually plays) Roblox is all about consuming other people's content rather than creatively building your own. That makes me sad. I'm sure she'll shift gears again eventually (in fact, she and her friends have been occasionally picking Minecraft back up lately), so maybe I shouldn't be so antsy waiting for that time to come.
That's correct, if your daughter could access a desktop, then she could use Roblox Studio as noted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20621457
However I have to say that, even then, the creative component in Roblox is not as central to the experience as it is in Minecraft.
But then again, my daughter often plays on those Minecraft online servers that offer mini-games (e.g. Hypixel) and those don't have a lot of creativity involved either.
You might also be interested in minetest?
You can run a Minecraft server on your own hardware (for free) [1], or pay for "Minecraft Realms" which is a cloud based server managed directly by Mojang [2]. There are also 3rd party hosting offerings [3]. It should also be mentioned that the Minecraft client has an "Open to LAN" button so you can play over LAN without even running any Minecraft server.
Roblox:
You can create your own game using Roblox Studio[4] and make it private (for free) or you can pay for a VIP Server [5] which allows you to play participating games on a private server.
Minetest:
There is also an open source Minecraft-like game called Minetest [6], it is possible to run a Minetest server on your own hardware[7].
[1] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server/
[2] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/realms/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/1vawah/whats_the...
[4] https://www.roblox.com/create
[5] https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles/Creating-a-VIP-S...
You might say "kids will be kids and they'll play those damn violent games and they'll talk to those damn pedos", but my relatives don't seem to want to do any of that.
Arguably he could be a billionaire these days if he had kept at it. He had the right idea... but did not execute.
Blockland: November 15, 2004 (Freeware) February 24, 2007 (Retail)
ROBLOX: March 23, 2004 (Beta) August 27, 2006 (Retail)
Minecraft is interesting because, according to Google Trends, it had finally been slowly dying out in terms of search volume for years.. (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=minecraf...)... until a few weeks ago! It has suddenly been spiking almost up to almost where it was in its peak of popularity in mid 2013. PewDiePie started playing it a bunch recently in his videos, so maybe that is the reason.. or maybe there is some other reason that it's been trending that Pewdiepie just picked up on. As not a regular Minecraft player I can only wonder.
I would say minecraft has progressed much more than Terraria. Minecraft started as a building only game. It then added survival elements and redstone which add two entirely new ways to play.
I didn't play Terraria in its early days, but it seems like the content added is in the form of new items, bosses and areas rather than entirely new concepts.
You can do things from smashing zombies' skulls with a sword to building a replica of your own house to building an ATARI emulator in Minecraft. How is that not exciting?
Not feeling like I'm really with friends just from talking to them online might be my problem because really anything can be fun when you are with people you enjoy spending time with.
But in general, imo, almost every game is improved with split-screen/local co-op.
Entire days and nights disappeared one Christmas, 'til we decided it was dangerous to keep on... . Suffice to say, if you wnated, you could play in the same room, or across the internet. Or both.
Minecraft appeals because it’s a huge, yet simplified, world full of mystery where you can build anything you can imagine. It’s infinitely flexible because you create your own goals. If you want a structured experience with story and someone setting your goals for you then you simply play another game.
For an older analogy, would it be fair to compare it to something like TinyMUCK with graphics?
So far, it looks close to VR chat? I'd also like if someone could explain:
1. What the appeal is (I'm guessing mostly community?)
2. How do they monetize (purchasable cosmetic content?)
3. Where most of the demographic is (country, age, gender)
It's a game engine that allows people to create games using a visual language builder.
Here's the Roblox quick start: https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/quick-start
It's also a multi-platform portal to games developed by users and small companies.
A user will load roblox, and then select a game to play, and then the roblox backend will find a server with available slots and join the player to that game.
There are a lot of microtransations. These can be used to buy player avatar decoration items such as clothing. They can also be "pay to win" items in games.
There are very many "incremental games", usually called Something-Tycoon. The player hits a button a few times to increment a counter, then uses that counter to buy another button which increments the counter faster. The IAPs in these games are sometimes in the form of pets that multiply the counter-increments.
If you get a chance have a look at something like Bubble Gum Simulator. This combines an incremental game with an irritating parkour, and then a bunch of lootbox mechanics on top.
Firstly, try to find this by searching the roblox website. https://www.roblox.com/games/?Keyword=bubblegum
Most of those are not the game I'm talking about. This is some indication of the piss-poor quality control on Roblox.
This is the game I'm talking about. Here's their store.
https://www.roblox.com/games/2512643572/HUGE-SALE-Bubble-Gum...
If I wanted to buy everything it would cost 3550 robux in the 50% off sale or 7100 robux at the normal price.
In the UK on Xbox One I can buy 400 robux for £4.99, or 4500 robux for £48.99 or 10,000 robux for £99.99.
Here's some gameplay of Bubble Gum Simulator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-H1eXg9DIs (I haven't watched all of this).
Minecraft despite being controlled by MS now, still has a working Linux client.
Nothing a jump drive and a .deb file can't fix! Thanks MS for having a heart.
Imagine that neuralink tech starts to become normal. Inevitably, some parents will opt to have their child linked. Many children will be linked regardless because it is medically necessary. The linked children perform five times better than the linkless. They socialize by electronic telepathy, even though they only have threads in their motor cortex in the early days. Being linked also enables them to engage in wildly addictive and inappropriate behavior that had never been widely anticipated before. You become a parent in the midst of this. Do you imagine that you would opt out? Do you imagine the parents of yesterday thought they would opt out of allowing their children to do what children do now?
Mojang needs to keep things simple, functional and consistent for the vast majority of their players. They choose the best defaults that work for the most number of people.
Also, modded players will let you know just how badly Optifine breaks rendering calls. The first step of any troubleshooting is checking if Optifine is installed.
I use MCPELauncher to run the Android version under Linux, which lets me play with my son on his Switch.
As you've observed it's revenue-generating in a way the Java Minecraft is not, and it provides a controlled experience.
Microsoft has been talking to influential people about how to land some sort of modding-lite to Bedrock. I suspect that won't go well, but in principle it could work. They've been showing where they're going to people like Direwolf20 (popular Youtuber and small modder)
Actual (Java) Minecraft modding involves two layers of effort. Firstly, since Minecraft is Java, a layer is using Java's own introspection to reach inside Minecraft's core systems and genericise them. For example Minecraft doesn't really grasp "fluids" as a general group, it has a bunch of special cases for water, lava... but a mod might want to add others (Molten steel, Goat milk, Diesel, Tritium... all real examples of fluids in common mods) and then the second layer needs to add generic capabilities - if all you really have is lava and water but with different textures that's lame, but if new fluids have density and temperature and so on they can interact even without custom code for specific behaviour. Knowing Goat's milk is the same temperature as water my Seebeck Effect generator won't work if you put goat's milk on one side and water on the other. "Liquid Helium" however at 3K rather than 300K would work well, and "Molten steel" at 1800K would help on the other side, even without my Seebeck Effect Generator mod knowing what these liquids actually "are" in any sense.
I do not see an appetite at Microsoft for this level of detail in Bedrock Mods. I'm expecting some basic customisability, but nothing comparable to, say, AE2 or Thaumcraft (sprawling mods that touch every part of Minecraft).