Roblox S-1
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I remember one game in which you started off on a massive platform full of food, and had to shovel the food onto a conveyor belt that led into a giant person's mouth. If you yourself fell onto the conveyor belt, you'd be treated to a grand tour of the person's digestive system before being turned to poop and dropped into the toilet bowl. Inside the toilet there was an obstacle course, and at the end of this obstacle course there was an array of fighter jets that you could use to get back onto the food platform. The jets didn't have throttle: they either went super fast or not at all. So the poop-people would bail out of their planes in mid-air, and the jet would crash into the baseplate, usually killing someone below.
This was back when there was no way for developers to monetize their games. Some games had "VIP T-shirts" that gave you tools or allowed you to enter a special room, but devs had neither the technical ability nor the incentive to "do it for the money". Most games were like the one I described: bizarre one-off projects created with the intent of showing something really cool. A few "classics" kept stable player-bases, but for the most part the front page was a constant churn of weirdness.
I've still never seen anything quite like it.
You had plenty of maps where the creators tried to match the game's feel, and so many that were completely unrelated. Giant bathrooms where you are the size of a mouse was one of the standouts I remember.
This level of customization is often just something businesses have moved away from allowing. And considering the "condo" problem with Roblox, it's understandable why: https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game... (The bathroom map I recall above, had a photo of a topless woman in a hidden area.)
I am glad my kids have Minecraft, but there was something special about that era in my heart. It really taught me the joy of building things I intrinsically value.
So many weird and wacky maps. Maps built to look like spongebob's house, maps to look like mario, so many hours wasted on surf maps.
I'm sad newer games don't support custom maps or servers as much these days.
It used to be, you did anything you could to sell more copies of your game, for as long as you could.
Now, the above mostly cannibalizes yourself, since there are so few other publishers around.
And who will ever forget Trainsawlaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrltoRnljqc
The global hate for flash (which is fairly warranted) drowns out the absolutely colossal impact it had on pushing the web from a purely informational thing to a platform for entertainment.
Just a curious Q: why is there hate directed at Flash but not a similar 3rd party runtime like Unity?
Feel better now?
They were not that much different than a choose your own adventure book.
Was there too.
So, when I read “grew up playing Roblox”, I had to read up Roblox's history to understand my bearing.
This is surreal.
She's been asking me that she need to become a premium member to create Roblox artifacts/items. She is creative. I need to look into this. She meets her friends, hangs out with them there. She has even taught her 4-year old sister to play and wander around with her on Roblox.
Better Roblox than TikTok.
The fun in minecraft is creating. The fun in TikTok is both consuming and creating. I know you can create Roblox games, but most kids I see only consume.
I think all 3 can be fun for them, as long as they can limit their screen time.
Please help her with that. What's she's asking it basically what I asked of my parents at her age. I did things like run a BBS and write stupid programs, and today I'm a senior software developer with a job that pays quite well. And I still love programming.
While she doesn't technically need it to be creative, doing things that interest you is a huge boost in the creativity and learning departments. She probably won't learn what you or she expects to, and that's even better, IMO.
Of course, I don't know what else you're already doing for her like that, and there's certainly a point where you're just throwing money away at whims. But I just felt the need to put this out there.
https://www.roblox.com/games/334009/Human-Body-Obstacle-Cour...
Well worth a try if you have access to a Playstation.
More platform than game. It's really easy for developers to develop a game, easily implement real money transactions, and have an audience.
I have no doubt Roblux will continue to make mountains of money. The amount of people playing it is mind blowing and I’m sure there are additional ways to monetize their ecosystem.
As a side note - it’s cool to see them play so well together and I even play with them too to engage with them on something they enjoy. On the other hand, I sometimes get concerned with how much they play and how addictive the micro transactions are for kids their age. Then again, I spent most of my days growing up playing games like EverQuest, WoW, learning to program, etc. , so it’s hard for me to judge.
If you made decisions in your youth that you think were mistakes, you should be passing on the lessons of those mistakes. Not stepping back in non-judgment because "who am I to say". You are their parent!
My daughter spent 100% of her allowance on Robux. Now she doesn’t have an allowance.
One thing parents discover is that if it's between dopamine and "lessons", dopamine wins 100% of the time. My 16 year old right now is playing games instead of doing his homework. He's going to have 2 "F"s this semester, just like the last, and one before that, and one before that. Doesn't give a shit - never experienced any hardship (yet).
There's this misconception among non-parents (or even parents of well behaved kids) that kids are robots and they will automatically listen to whatever "lessons" you give them. That may or may not happen, depending on the kid, and you really have little to no control over whether it does happen.
And gaming, social media, etc, companies aren't making any of this any easier, unfortunately. This is something we'll have to pay a heavy price for in 10 years or so, that much is pretty certain.
My 17 year-old cousin is flunking school because (in his parents' eyes) he was "addicted" to online gaming, yet strangely when with other family members his "addiction" symptoms would disappear and he would be helpful, diligent and talkative. He'd even listen to advice and help out unprompted. As in, you literally take a phone call and come back and he's doing the dishes. Not playing Fortnite, not watching YouTube, scrubbing plates.
The reality of the situation, that's painfully obvious to everyone except his mum and dad, is that a) there is some sort of breakdown in the relationship that has nothing to do with online technology (he has his iPhone on him 24/7 and will go hours without using it outside the home) and b) he fully understands that dedicating himself to his studies will help him follow the path his parents want for him - it's just not what he wants.
Drug addicts disengage from society well before they become addicted. I don't see any reason why "Dopamine addicts" are any different.
In contrast, growing up in rural Russia I had no coattails to ride on (and my father told me this countless times), so I'm a rather extreme example of social upward mobility.
To me, it sounds like the school is either bad or the match with where your son is right now is wrong.
I've always been curious, also as a kid, but I do remember most of the class mates spending most of their time staring blankly out in the void. The only reasonable conclusion is that those lessons were wrong.
Just like if you design a UI and 70% of your users can't use it. Then we blame the designer, not the laziness of the users.
As an adult, I've since learned that large parts of the establishment doesn't regard people as humans. They don't care.
There is still a pretty big subset of students that without the threat of enforcement or bad grades leading to parental action, will do almost nothing. It's especially visible now with some of my students being remote-- it's a constant battle to avoid previously engaged, excited, and interested students from just popping a Fortnite window open and escaping the class discussion.
I can make 75% of my class time fun; I can make it pretty obvious why the skills we practice are extremely valuable stuff in both the near term and the long term whether or not they decide to be an engineer one day. But I can't make every minute of class time more immediately rewarding than playing Fortnite.
And as far as parental action, parents can't really do shit nowadays. Nearly 100% of homework is done on a computer, which of course also runs games and YouTube, and provides endless opportunities for distraction.
I hear you saying the class is surprisingly good. Just for anyone else, though: keep an open mind and open ears about these kinds of classes. There is a whole lot of "fun STEM" out there that is really... not. Nothing is more soul-crushing than something that's supposed to be fun being mindless small steps way below one's ability.
I do my very best to -not- have my classes be in that category, most of the time.
And I think the class I mentioned is genuinely good, actually. It's how I'd teach the subject - builds up from simple to complex, using an industry-leading game engine (Unity), interesting assignments, etc. Of course kids nowadays want to build an AAA 3D game right off the bat, but there's value in understanding that this doesn't work, and you have to start simple.
My eldest is currently locked down on devices because he googled a couple of answers to the online advanced math class he was taking. (It was stupid; he had honestly completed much harder problems but for some reason decided to cheat on a couple of easy ones).
He's not going to bypass controls because A) he knows he will get access back (carrot), and B) he knows that if he further abuses trust that things can get much worse (stick)... and of course C) he knows that we will know if controls are bypassed.
"Much worse" like what? I can't really take his access away, and I can't watch him 24x7. He's 16. I'd expect the brain to turn on by this point.
I'm not parent of a teen, yet, and I know things are difficult to implement (it caused enough angst to restrict and lock down my 11 year old -- it certainly wasn't the most painless option in the near term).
But you don't want to keep heading towards an inevitable cliff... fight the good fight. I wish you the best, and I'm sorry if this is tonedeaf and naive.
There's another reasonable conclusion: some kids just don't give a shit no matter what you do. That much is plainly obvious to any parent who has such a kid.
You haven't earned the trust of your children.
How about... Toys? Should toys for kids be illegal? Should lollies for kids be legal?
Should firearms for kids be illegal? Should driving for kids be illegal? Should gambling for kids be illegal? Should starring in porn for kids be illegal? Should data-mining the behaviour of children be illegal? Should paying children to work in mines be illegal?
Obviously the principle would be something along the lines of "games with microtransactions are potentially hazardous to the buyer in a way, or to a degree, such that while we should allow adults to make their own choices, we should protect children from the consequences of being partially-formed minds, and so we should avoid targeting children with that business model". Same as gambling, or selling your PII to get free services, or starring in porn. I'm not saying it's a slam-dunk argument, I'm saying the structure of the argument is obvious and straightforward. And I expect every adult to be at least partially sympathetic to it, even the ones who end the paragraph with "but, on the balance, freedom is more important, so it should not be illegal".
Well. I admit. I mostly agree with GP's claim. But not with high confidence.
Whether it be tycoon games, social adventure games like About Me, Royal High, etc., it’s basically the new form of entertainment for kids. About the time my daughter became generally disinterested in toys was about the time she started liking Roblox.
They know that their parents won't be buying many of them, if they have a lot they can see the toys peppered around and parents can point to those and say "no more toys, you don't play enough with all of the ones we got you already".
A skin, special privileges, etc., are quite abstract concepts for a kid to tie it to a monetary value, they buy a skin, they can use it in game and... That's it, they will want the next fix, a new skin, more privileges, it's a bottomless pit of purely virtual assets that are easy to detach from money.
That's my take at least, from being a kid in the 90s and comparing my experience when I got real toys vs when I got digital toys (MMO subscriptions like Ultima Online, for example). I can't imagine how much harder for my parents it'd have been if instead of a subscription I was asking for them to pay or give me enough allowance to buy every item I wanted in a game. It'd be hell.
And in the case of Fortnite and Roblox, the games are free so it does make sense to pay at least some into it (there's no such thing as a free lunch) and thankfully none of the things you pay for give the player an advantage so it is mostly what elicits an "I want my avatar to look like this" reaction. Plus, it teaches limits and in the case of my daughter, she weighs what she really wants in the game vs just seeing something shiny. In Adopt Me, that is mostly ride/fly potions for pets she has raised and turned to neon via raising 4 and merging.
I do, however, think there should be limits on it. But I think lessons can be learned from the experience all the same.
If the principle is that anything hazardous for kids should be banned, it makes sense, at least in theory. In practice I think it might change a lot of what is currently considered "part of childhood", though.
If it's like that, IMO it's OK. If it's pseudo-gambling or dark-patterned squeezing all your money out, that's not OK. Roblox is more like the former, usually.
Think of it like indoor smoking or child beating. It's not OK just because some people grew up with it.
I disagree with you. I don't think that pay-by-usage is inherently bad, for adults or kids.
I also feel like... it's probably best if one doesn't encounter these kinds of things as an adult for the first time. What's better to learn moderation with?
My kids (11, 9, 6) have, so far, largely shrugged off microtransaction things and think they're kinda dumb... But they've spent maybe 10% of their discretionary money since birth on Pokemon cards, which scratches many of the same itches. I don't feel like A) it's bad for them, or B) that they're going to look back at the time and money spent and regret it. But they have regretted spending a little bit on Pokemon cards that they'd later rather have spent on something else, and that's a great lesson.
Back in my day we were using AIM in the 5th grade and joining friends of friends of friends of friends chatrooms, playing Gmod, or Habbo Hotek :)
Making reliable multiplayer games is tough: I'd love to see a serious API service that does the same thing for "real" game engine/libraries!
1) Multiplayer (skipping all netcode, account systems, and so forth)
2) Have a secured, safe, and trusted way to make transactions
If you were to try and make a multiplayer, microtransaction based game in Unity, that is a large amount of work, especially for a younger developer, and it's _critical_. Messing up payment code has huge consequences.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/471710/Rec_Room/
It's Roblox for the next generation, and extremely fun even to me when I tried it out as an adult. I hope Roblox expands into VR or recroom will eat their lunch. VR is the future and people spend HOURS in there playing all sorts of official games and community made games.
Why do you think Zuckerberg cares so much? It might be the smartest bet he's made since Instagram.
Just watch.
Even if all of this was fixed tomorrow, many people have been burnt by previous generations, and don't have much hype left for VR. I've mothballed my Go, my friends sold their Rifts. Fun as a gimmick but as a main gaming/media platform unthinkable.
While I agree that it's probably inevitable that it will become a staple device like a smartphone is today, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Roblox has the userbase it does because it's on every platform and runs on potatoes.
How many kids (using a large range from ages 1-18) have VR setups in their homes?
If VR fails at this point I would be surprised. If Facebook got some competition it would be good for long term VR development. But there's already a good amount of VR hype and great games and it won't be going away anytime soon.
I have a Valve Index ($1,000 + gaming PC + installing 2 lighthouses on my walls), and while my experience is definitely better (other than the cord), the Quest provides a comparable experience for beat saber, rec room, pistol whip, which comprise 90% of what I use my Index for anyway.
Can't answer this directly but recently the multiplayer VR games have had more 10-16 year olds than any other group
The App Store review guidelines prohibit this very clearly:
> Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not [...] download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app [...]
There is only one narrow exception which clearly does not apply to Roblox for several reasons; for example it's only for HTML5 content.
Tim Cook just testified to Congress that all developers are treated equally, but this seems like a clear case where an app that is "too big to fail" gets special treatment.
it's not them getting special treatment purposefully. it's been on the iOS app store since 2012.
apple's policy here is a bad one. if it were fully remove, true web browser diversity could come to iOS, and roblox could finally do JIT compilation of Lua, among so many other possibilities.
So they're grandfathered in? I wonder how much of their valuation can be attributed to the fact that it's essentially impossible for anyone to make a competitor available on iOS?
> We have experienced rapid growth in the three months ended June 30, 2020, September 30, 2020 and for a portion of the three months ended March 31, 2020, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic given our users have been online more as a result of global COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies. For example, our bookings increased 171% from the nine-months ended September 30, 2019 to the nine months ended September 30, 2020. We do not expect these activity levels to be sustained, and in future periods we expect growth rates for our revenue to decline, and we may not experience any growth in bookings or our user base during periods where we are comparing against COVID-19 impacted periods (i.e. the three months ended March 31, 2020, June 30, 2020, and September 30, 2020). Our historical revenue, bookings and user base growth should not be considered indicative of our future performance. We believe our overall acceptance, revenue growth and increases in bookings depend on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, our ability to:
> We have a history of net losses and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future.
We have incurred net losses since our inception, and we expect to continue to incur net losses in the near future. We incurred net losses of $97.2 million, $86.0 million, and $203.2 million for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, respectively. As of September 30, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $484.0 million.
This is boilerplate and isn't notable. [0]
2018: $97.2m
2019: $86.0m
2020: $203.2m
LTV models are really, really hard to get right though, and I've seen a bunch of startups go bust because of getting this wrong.
The big, falsifiable assumption here is that your acquisition sources will keep sending you users of the same quality. Because of the way that ML systems work, this tends to not be true, and if you are using long windows it will both take you a long time to realise this, and cost you a bunch of money.
This is normally how companies go bust/stop growing as a result of LTV models.
It's only not notable because if you've even skimmed the rest of the S-1, you already know whether they make money or not. If you haven't, it's possibly the most notable thing there. It's the single bit of information that tells you most about the company's historical financial performance.
Every investor is looking for a diamond in the rough.
It has 110MM MAUs + delivers an est 1.25 BILLION hours of entertainment each month
It does this not because it makes a good "game", but because players make games/worlds/experiences for and with one another
This only exhausts when imagination does"
--https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/1236773493372596224
they have an extremely high revenue business model off actual customers, so they don't really need to do advertising, there's plenty of other ways to get more profitable.
for example, they're at the scale where they might be able to do what Dropbox did by running more of their own infrastructure to save big.
https://www.roblox.com/catalog?Category=0
But I seem to recall in the past there used to be some regular ads. For example see this archived page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120427192637/http://www.roblox...
which has this embedded iframe:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120308000433if_/http://www.rob...
which has Adsense javascript embedded in it.
It was honestly quite jarring and this new approach is better for developers on the platform, as they can reach way more people.
So I played with him to check it, it ended with me uninstalling it: First time use and you’ll see tons of in-app purchases to build your character (all optional but kids that are starting to read cannot tell the difference), then the app is like the Wild West of ads and special offers.
The Apple store classifies the app as 12+, and I think they are right (as a father I started to see the appeal of the closed App Store and Apple Arcade).
The sad part is that it could be a great platform to experiment creating games and coding, is like the Alan Kay vision of Croquet but perverted by ads.
As an example, I played Bee Swarm Simulator with my daughter and I really enjoyed it. I decided to buy some robux and spend it on the game.I did this not because it gave me something I needed to enjoy the game, but because I felt the developer deserved it for creating something that entertained me.
It's a pretty neat way of getting kids into game dev.
This is from my own experience >5 years ago, so it could be outdated.
The only problem with the collaborative editing (which is very very cool) is that it's really easy to click and delete/move/duplicate huge chunks of the game without realizing it. But, if you save often, the built in version control is really nice.
It's pretty neat though, except for the marketplace is absolutely filled with assets that contain malware. A script can be linked with any object in the game, used to give the object life. But, that script has nearly global control.
I think the scripting and standard libraries would really benefit from a huge overhaul, but it's pretty neat. There's quite a bit of friction getting started though. Much of it isn't intuitive, with magic undocumented names required, and you'll usually find well meaning, but very beginner, game developers providing colorful information in the forums.
Dreams, Vrchat, Roblox, neosvr and probably many others...
I hope there will be much more innovation in this space because it feels like powerful interactive content could be created in much more user friendly way than with lua scripting. Is it finally time for a visual programming language revolution?
The thing my kids most consistently spend their allowance on is hypixel (a minecraft curated multiplayer server with some scenario-based games is the best way I can describe it).
It seems that he taught himself to find the web browser, then find google, then search for Minecraft resources, then enter urls for Hypixel and Mineplex into Minecraft.
I was torn between pride and trepidation of what's to come.
Hypixel is pretty great (I actually still play sometimes!), and they have a good curse filter and it’s definitely family friendly.
To be honest, I spent a ridiculous amount of time on MineCraft over the past 10 years (definitely over 5k+ hours), and it’s taught me an incredible amount. It’s where I picked up my first O Reilly book, on Minecraft mods, where I learned for the first time how to self host a server, and also where I made some really great friends.
I’d be more worried about your kid finding something like social media FROM Minecraft - for example, I spent a ridiculous amount of time on Reddit, which I found through MC. As a kid whose parents don’t really care about what I do on the internet, unlimited access to viewing whatever I wanted wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Joining IRC a modding channel and talking to Mojang devs every now and then was a pretty interesting experience.
I doubt that this is possible nowadays, especially after Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang.
My memory is failing me but I also saw Drew DeVault on IRC using his former online nick and since I pretty much used IRC exclusively for minecraft related things he must have done something related to minecraft back then as well.
The appeal is that it is some sort of a Second Life or Metaverse for these streamer personalities who otherwise have no "physical" opportunities to interact outside of voice chat. In these worlds, they have towns, homes, pranks, disputes, wars, and lots of opportunities for highly entertaining roleplaying in general.
I mostly watch virtual youtubers (pekora from hololive in particular) but if you're not into virtual youtubers, the mod'd OfflineTV server is also great. Michael Reeves will probably appeal to the people on HN. Right now there's a nuclear war going on and Reeves thinks he can win by programming an army of self-replicating turtles using Lua: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/805937812 The guy with nukes is the dictator of the server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrtKTFZvK5Y
Exciting, because I've been waiting for these platforms for like 15 years, since I played Warcraft 3.
But also bittersweet, because I have already resigned to having to eventually make one myself, and now it's done.
It was such a great experience, had a lot of fun, thank-you to the original devs for the good times :)
Game dev was something that appealed to me when I was younger (mainly because of Roblox) but I never really considered a career in it.
My startup is over at https://propertyengine.co.uk if you want to take a look :)
The flowing banner of properties photos and short info makes me feel uneasy.
I'm assuming you are scraping the property pictures from a realestate sale site (in Australia the market is dominated by realestate.com.au). How are you getting around copyright issues?
Also, who is your target customer? I'm curious who requires $50 of property reports every month. Is it real estate agents using this a quick way to generate brochures/flyers?
For those not in the know, script builders were places that were just an empty map, but that allowed anyone in the server to load in their own scripts - so people would create and run custom weapons, power armor, admin commands, etc. and play around with each other. There was a very dedicated community of programmers that played them for years, and I'm still friends with some people I met through them like 7 years ago.
I think as a genre they're pretty dead, though - Roblox tightened security around loading arbitrary scripts that broke all the script builders several times, and now had replication filtering so that client-side scripts can't set properties. You probably could still make cool swords, but they'd need to use proper RemoteFunctions for client-server RPC, meaning all the old scripts are broken.
Yep definitely had a lot of fun in those places. I remember loads of people logging on injecting admin command scripts (wasn’t it something like Person210’s admin commands that everyone used?)
One of my more vivid memories was making a script that would inject a train station that only I had access to, with a train that would take me to a distant planet with god-mode weapons and aircraft. Had a lot of fun with that! This must have been back in 2008/09
Games look boring AF to me, but tweens seem to love em.
It's gotten my eldest son into Lua programing and 3D modelling, so I have no problems with the platform as it currently is.
A few of the games/servers were interesting: Phantom Forces was a reasonably well polished FPS, and the Murder Mystery games (sneaky murderer vs sheriff and villagers, typical social deduction/betrayal game) were pretty fun.
Hoping it doesn't get completely and totally overrun with ads.
I find the platform very appealing even as an adult, as you can script in Lua, and then watch as hundreds of visitors interact with what you just wrote. This week I hacked the Bad Apple music video to run on Roblox, and then had a great time seeing people react to it.
So like flash games that a lot of us grew up with then. There is a lot to be said when the games load in seconds so you can jump from game to game and the novelty value is high.
In the current pandemic setup where my kids are so isolated Roblox has been a huge win as it's so much like a digital playground for them to hang out on.
Maybe this? https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse
I saw my nephew spend _hours_ in Roblox manning a virtual restaurant cash register for some incredibly minuscule amount of Roblox bucks (like, pennies worth). That’s when I knew this was going the be the biggest thing ever.
What do you mean by time-limiting mechanism? Parental controls?
Roblox has no real way to know, but I'd guess a not insignificant amount of their revenue is unauthorized charges. Better protections on parents' cards may cause their revenue to dry up a fair bit...
And that's before we get into the problematic nature of pushing a monetized game on kids as young as five years old, who might be incentivized to steal from their parents now at an early age. I could see this company's business model getting nuked by future legislation.
I'm not so pessimistic as you on the model, but those previous operating losses seem pretty big.
They lost more in one year than it took to build GTAV over 7 years.
For anyone who's done this dance before, is it a bad, good, or great idea to apply to a company, right when S-1 is released? Don't know if, e.g., companies do a hiring lockdown right before IPO. Also, just on the emotional side, I joined a company very shortly after IPO years ago, and it was always a sore spot to see the life-changing millions of dollars of those who joined the company not long before me, and the constant reminder of "pre-" vs "post-" employees.
Mostly just curious. Getting hired is a big hurdle anway, and it takes a long time, and hell maybe I won't even get around to submitting.
I would say that employees who were there right before or shortly after the IPO weren't all that different in terms of initial grants. The only difference is that pre-IPO employees could get ISOs which have slightly better tax treatment than NQSOs.
I would make the decision based on the work, the pay, and your overall feelings for the space rather than whether you applied 4 weeks ago or 4 weeks after IPO. You already missed the gains before the IPO, but most companies have a lot more gains after the IPO than before it.
If you're the type to be jealous that you missed on the pre-IPO gains, don't go, of course. Those employees who made "millions" in the IPO didn't do it because they joined 2 months before you. They probably joined 2+ years before you.
In my own case I described above, yeah I was actually very envious of the pre-IPO crowd (almost destructively so) when I joined, but my envy eventually calmed down out of exhaustion -- after the Nth meeting with a billionaire or centi-millionaire, and after you meet the Nth person like yourself who missed out on the rocket-ship, and after you turn down the Nth supposed rocket-ship that flames out (bullet dodged!) you kinda lose the ability to care much about what-could-have-been.
Does anyone have any?
It's only gotten more advanced since then, and if I were a parent, I'd love for my kids to be making games on the platform.
> I learned to program when I was 7. I started with LOGOWriter and QBASIC. What did I make? Games. It should be obvious. All kids want to write games. If your kid wants to write insurance software at age 7, you should stop wandering around aimlessly on the internet and find a good psychiatrist. Do it. Do it now.
> At its heart, ROBLOX is a game development platform. You can do a lot with it without writing a line of code. But if you really get into it, you’re going to want more power. You’re going to be very motivated to figure out how to program.
[...]
> I don’t care what fancy private school you send your kids to. The only place your 13 year old is going to encounter a PID-Controller is in ROBLOX’s Body(Position/Velocity/Thrust) objects, which can be used to script motion for parts and models. That’s just one example.
But boy do I wish there were decent tutorials on line. Learning Lua is fun I guess.
I suppose i need to open investment accounts for them to buy Roblox stock next :-)
[0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...
(btw, I'm just messing around, I had almost no experience in 2012 so I don't really blame them for not hiring me)
Here’s the game fyi:
How did their revenue grow 70% (9-mo 2019 to 2020) but their losses grew 5x?! I can see that there was considerable increase in total costs and expenses but I didn't get a sense of where that investment was going and what long term return there was going to be.
Overall I'm surprised by this as I expected the variable costs to grow with usage and revenue but didn't think there would be a cost of revenue %...
On the other as someone who doesn’t play and doesn’t have kids it’s a bit unsettling seeing some of these engagement numbers eg average daily play time is 2.5 hours per active user. That sounds like a massive time suck. Perhaps one could justify this as inciting creativity and there’s a social aspect to it but spending hours a day on this can’t be healthy long term.
Edit: Note that I and others from my generation grew up spending hours playing MMOs, and we turned out fine. As responsibilities come up to the forefront, the majority of people adapt.
I think the more concerning trend is social media addiction. With games, there is at least an interactive element. Social media use is as passive as you can get.
I wonder how that number changed with the pandemic. Also, it sounds better than one-way TV kids grew up watching for similar amounts of time each day.
> is 2.5 hours per active user
This is only for users who are active in a given day. Maybe MAU is 10x DAU, and an average user spends 2.5 hours every week-and-a-half.
The S-1 mentions many times (i) DAU, (ii) total hours. But a quick skim didn't find either (iii) MAU, or (iv) # registered users.
The statement to which I replied ("average daily play time is 2.5 hours per active user") would only be true if DAU/MAU (aka 'stickiness') is over 95%.
For comparison, leading messaging apps that you imagine every user using every single day (like WhatsApp and WeChat) have DAU/MAU ratios of ~70%.
If we assume stickiness of 40% (still high!), then average daily usage per (monthly) active user is more like 1 hour.
I haven't noticed anything unhealthy yet. He has a learned a lot about scams, understanding valuations and trading (it's like a mini stock market around virtual goods), and just hanging out with his friends.
One of the most interesting things I've noticed is that in this virtual world -- boys and girls hang out together. He has about 12 core friends -- and it's almost an even split girl/boy. Which I think would not have happened in the "real world".
If you think this is some new phenomenon that kids spend a whole 2.5 hours/day on a game... well, I'm not sure how to break this to you.
Kids used to watch an insane amount of TV each day forever. Then they moved to console games in the early 90s.. and also computer games. It's been what 50/60 years of TV and 30+ years of consoles/computer games.
If anything, things in the last ~10 years are better because kids have a good option to not just sit in front of the TV and watch whatever is on and all these ads.. they can be into games that are mentally challenging. And they have all these options to have voice chats with friends, so it's way more social than ever.
So just in general the argument is "this can't be healthy in the long term" seems to imply that it's some new phenomenon..
[0]https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/can-someone-not-yet...
But I feel like every new fad has this. He spent all of his money on Pokemon cards years ago, that he never touches now.
What's amazing is how Roblox has made an actual marketplace and scarcity for virtual items that have no monetary backing.
They do have monetary backing[0]. The proceeds from item sales usually go to the item's creator - and if you have enough R$ you can convert it to USD.
I liked more how they did before where you would buy yearly subscription and they would put money to your kid account every week or month. Shame they stopped that.
They really missed $ROBUX?
All of the companies traded on the Nasdaq have four-lettered ticker symbols, which are representative of the actual company. For example, the ticker symbol for Nasdaq-traded Microsoft is MSFT. However, in some cases, a ticker symbol on the Nasdaq will have five letters, and the fifth letter is an identifier symbol that tells market participants something about the company
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/nasdaqfifthlette...
It feels like, anecdotally at least, most people switch to Minecraft once they get older as it's a more difficult/mature game with a higher skill ceiling.
It is a nice starting place if you don't know where to look in the docs to begin.