Eight Years at Roblox | Hacker News Reader

Eight Years at Roblox

zeux.io

287 pointsmodeless100 comments

Wow, this is great. I'm bookmarking it as an answer to the question, "Why does development take so long/cost so much?"

As an outsider to games, it's easy for me to naively think, "After decades, getting stuff on screens should be a solved problem, right?" It isn't, of course. But there are so many good examples here of why. Visual improvements. Tooling improvements. Cleaning up old messes. And of course a bunch of "we're switching from thing X to thing Y" and "we have to keep up with the ever-shifting platforms we're building on top of".

So you end up with an obviously great engineer spending 8 years on things that neither the audience nor your investors would necessarily notice. But those things clearly matter, and a mere 14 years later contribute to a $1b IPO.

Graphics programming is coupled much tighter to hardware. Both CPU intensive calculations in tight loops and interacting with a proprietary GPU make graphics programming less abstracted than other forms.

What a remarkable walkthrough.

I think many people can related to:

"But the interesting part is that it looks like in 2017 I’ve done very little work that actually shipped to production in a meaningful way. This is because of a few things coinciding. One, I’ve started doing way more technical direction. Helping teams with the roadmaps, helping design solutions to some hard problems, doing code reviews, etc. etc."

It is always the pull away that is tough. It is needed, but when you look back and wonder.

Roblox is one of the screen-based things I really don't mind my kids spending a lot of time in. While they're not (yet) building their own world/games, they play lots of games where you build & customize something. One of my kids will spend hours designing clothes, or decorating a house, truly creative activities that simply happen to be mediated by a screen.

What I absolutely hate about Roblox are the micro-transactions, which frequently are not very micro at all. It's not at all uncommon to see mini "empire building" games where you make money, expand your base to make more money, and that's the play loop as you design your <whatever>. But there'll be intrusive micro transaction popups just for walking over a tile, that will ask for $5 worth of Robux for an amount of in-game $$$ you could earn by playing for 5 minutes. It took months of gentle denials to my kids & constant explanations about the relative value of spending their week's allowance on something that will save them 10 minutes to finally convince them these things aren't worth it.

> $5 worth of Robux for an amount of in-game $$$ you could earn by playing for 5 minutes

Probably not a good trade-off for kids who make less than $60/hour. Then there's the issue of game developers who make their game (or essential parts of it) so unpleasant that people are tempted to pay real money to avoid playing it. "Robux" sounds like a system that is ripe for misuse.

> It took months of gentle denials to my kids & constant explanations about the relative value of spending their week's allowance on something that will save them 10 minutes to finally convince them these things aren't worth it.

A lesson many adults should learn as well!

My 4-year old son just recently go into Roblox and I've been super interested in the platform since. The sheer quantity of games present on there—and the zeitgeist around some of them—is insane. Thank you Arseny for giving us an inside look at the platform.

Tangent: 4?! My son is 2 and a half and we have just gotten to the point where he will even pay attention to a tv for more than 10 minutes (and only for peppa pig of all things).

I'm really thought it was further away than that for any sort of gaming or real computer use, but I have no gauge from growing up in a house without anything but a tv till I was almost in middle school.

They grow up quick! And one of the super fun things about Roblox is most of the games are very simple and there are a practically infinite number of them. It doesn't take much more attention than your 2.5 year old has for a kid to drop into a game, walk around for a bit, get bored, and drop into something new.

As a 46 year old with what I suspect is undiagnosed ADHD, this is exactly what I tend to do with PICO-8

It depends on their role models. When I was a toddler I saw my older family members playing games and I wanted to do what they did. I learned how to load commodore games from the command line at age 5, maybe 4.

My kids had only a casual interest in games until age 6 when the older one discovered minecraft.

Wasn't that part of the intrigue when computers and games had cables and cartridges and you needed to crawl behind the TV to connect it when you wanted to play? The romanticism is lost. I wonder for me, getting involved back then was hardware related.

Thankfully Lego remains.

I had a few Super Nintendo games under my belt by age 4. I think the best thing you can do is surround your toddler with potential interests and hobbies and let them naturally gravitate toward what interests them.

When my kid was 2 ish I introduced them to TuxPaint. Turns the speakers on, pick a stamp of whatever their favorite is (dinosaurs? butterfly? fish?) Put your hand over their hand and select the stamp and then select where to put it. Once that gets boring show them pick color, pick stamp, place it. After that show them pick size, then color, then stam, and then place it.

Kept my kid busy, she loved being creative, and it's way better than watching some video.

After an hour she looked at me, looked at her hand, and said "ow". I got her a smaller mouse ;-).

I’ve taught a 3 year old his first letters with “bambam” and “gamine”. I don’t know that’s it’s as healthy as off-screen play though.

As a counter point, why give them screens so young at all?

I am someone without children, so my point is much less valuable then the others already below. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/23/screen-ti...

https://www.businessinsider.com/screen-time-limits-bill-gate...

As someone without children you don't understand that parents need to rest after couple years of constant taking care of children :) I was the smartest about raising kids when I didn't have them yet :)

The only way to really keep your child away from screens is to keep them out of the house entirely. They are going to see your computer and your phone and want it. 4 year olds understand a lot about the world, so it's not like you can just pretend you don't have these awesome toys.

My 4 year old can unlock our phones, open the Roku app and put on a few different shows. She also has learned how to use Google transcription to send text messages to her cousins, although Google still hasn't figured out how to transcribe Armenian, so they are usually a little jumbled.

All kids are different, but our youngest (of four) started playing roblox at 2.5 — we have no idea how/why. Interactive stuff seems to keep them attentive longer, and most importantly: Engaged & thinking.

Now the house sounds like a perpetual LAN party.

I don’t really understand why Roblox is so successful - you can invent all sorts of reasons in retrospect but it’s hard to validate them, and if you came to anybody back in 2012 and asked for an investment to build a platform where all games are user generated and run on a custom engine with a custom toolset and all users participate in a giant virtual economy and …, I think you’d have gotten a blank stare.

Interesting that he writes this. I don't believe you'd have got a blank stare at all. Minecraft servers with custom games had already sprung up, Second Life had existed and people were playing around with these concepts. The idea is sound, just needed execution and luck.

Also very interesting because I used to play roblox in 2012 and it was very alive back then. Probably not as much as it is now but definitely enough to get investments

It should be noted that they just filed for an S-1 and the numbers they reported there show that the platform is far more alive than in was in 2012.

Going by the amount of roblox-related questions we get in the Lua communtiy, it seems to be doing pretty fine I'd say.

I never expected this sudden resurgence in users and I hope they continue to do well. I owe Garry’s Mod and Roblox a debt for getting me excited about Lua scripting, which is some of the earliest programming I did.

I hope these games or similar games stick around and continue to get kids excited about slinging bits and the miracle of being able to create something using just your computer.

I never played it, but as a kid in 2009 I would go to the computer lab in the children’s section of the local library, and Roblox was absolutely huge there. I’d be sitting there doing my own thing, surrounded by 20 kids noisily playing Roblox.

It’s impressive how they’ve managed to make a game with such staying power. Especially among young children, new things tend to flare up and then die really quickly. Persisting through generations of kids is a huge accomplishment.

Have you ever noticed, certain memes are enduring in kid culture? e.g. the floor is lava, Opposite Day. As I understand Roblox it’s perfect for slotting into part of kid culture as the virtual playground and neighborhood.

New things flare up and die but the basic thing or idea endures and Roblox is the base upon which things flare up and die.

The ability to jump from game to game and try so many games (often inspired by other games) seems to be a big draw for my 11 year old.

Rec Room feels like the VR version of this. I'm not sure if you can build games with it although

And to target children, secondlife mistake was that it was targeting adults

The execution part of it is pretty key.

I'd founded a startup in 07-08 that did basically the same thing as Roblox - it was a web-based game creation engine where teenagers could make their own games (with custom assets, physics, behavior, etc.) and then share them with their friends. Gave it up in '09 when the bottom fell out of the economy and my cofounder and I got scared. This year I was being heavily recruited by Roblox and on the "meet the executives" part of the process, ended up reminiscing with David about all the competition back then - companies like Sploder, Game Closure, etc. It was a crowded market even back in '06-07.

What Roblox had that we didn't was persistence. David Baszucki has been working on this problem since before I had a computer - he started his first company in 1989 with a recognizable predecessor of an idea, and sold it in 1998. It's that willingness to spend 30 years working on a problem that builds a multi-billion dollar company.

> It's that willingness to spend 30 years working on a problem that builds a multi-billion dollar company.

Yup. This is the investor mindset. I'm guilty of selling out too early in various things, stocks, companies, etc. Sticking things out with your "investments" can have a significant return.

Knowing when to bow out early is also a valuable skill. Skill, experience and luck; sometimes in any order and quantity.

"I want to make a massive user generated MMO" doesn't get blank stares because of market fit.

Its the video game equivalent of "I have a million dollar app idea!"

> The idea is sound, just needed execution and luck.

Honestly, I think sandbox games take way more "luck" than other means. There is a serious chicken/egg problem with them - meaning you need hardcore early adopters that will create content on your behalf...or simply fake it.

Yes, I think the success is pretty clear. It's kind of what I thought Minecraft might have (should have) developed into but it never really had the sort of accessible development tools that Roblox has. To the best of my knowledge there's still no official visual development toolset of that sort. A real missed opportunity. Seeing what modders had been doing with it for years should have lit a fire under Microsoft on that front. Heck I thought that was the whole reason they bought Minecraft.

So, is Roblox better than Minecraft? Technology-wise. I’m not too familiar with either. Although Minecraft was written with Java.

But, I’m surprised that a one-hit-wonder application video game, is filing to go IPO.

From a a tech standpoint, Roblox definitely has a dramatic lead over vanilla Minecraft's tools for creating arbitrary added content.

That said, if you factor in the tools the Minecraft community have built (namely the Force modloader, and the Bukkit multiplayer plugin system), it becomes a lot harder to say. On one hand, the barrier to entry in Roblox is practically non-existent (I remember screwing around with lua scripts while I was still in elementary school), while on the other hand I've seen far more technically impressive content come out of the Minecraft modding world.

it's all about knowing the right people to raise money from. anyone could have built this but not everyone has the right buddies.

As a parent with two kids who like minecraft - is Roblox safe for kids? I've heard yes and no.

Roblox covers several different things which is why the messaging is mixed. Also, parents have varying attitudes to risk.

The PC version is not safe for children.

The console platform versions are safer for children because they have controls over messaging. The quality control of the games is minimal.

Parents need to be aware that Roblox stuffs in-app payments everywhere and these can be excessive and in-your-face.

My child played Roblox on Xbox One but never found it a particularly enjoyable experience.

Thanks. My kids would probably play it on their iPads (we don't even have a PC). Most of their iPad games offer in-app purchases already or force them to watch commercials. It's the messaging that concerns me most.

My kid play on her tablet or iPhone (mostly). I notice there is a chat window, but don't think she pays much attention to it. She and her friends use facetime for in-game communication.

> The PC version is not safe for children.

I'm curious what you mean by this. What makes something safe for children or not? (This is an honest question from someone who doesn't have children and so doesn't really know.) It's interesting that a game would be "safe" on one platform but not another.

It's much more difficult to chat with other players on Xbox.

Maybe spam messages, cuss words, obscene figures and stuff

Games on PS4 are way safer. It's like a restricted platform.

Comparing Rocket League's chat on PC and PS4 is enough to know the difference. While playing on your PC, you can quickly abuse/spam the other player because you have a keyboard to type on. Because PS4 only has a virtual keyboard, you don't have enough time to use the controller to type whatever you want. You have to use some preloaded custom messages like 'Nice Shot', 'Excellent Save!'

Roblox isn't so much a "game" as a platform for making games. Think Gmod. As a result, the more "creative freedom" you have, the more the often teen+ aged developers do what people that age do with creative freedom.

Predators will attack anywhere that children gather. Children gather in Roblox, and predators targeted Roblox.

The features that make something more or less safe are the controls put around preventing that from happening, minimising the risk, being very clear to parents about what's expected of them, having excellent moderation, and having excellent reporting.

The PC version of roblox fails all of these somewhat.

Many parents today are simply a bit too trusting of products aimed at children. This thing isn't going to expose my children to predators; my kids aren't going to learn about gang rape from this game; this toy isn't going to record audio or video; etc.

I don't necessarily think parents need to ban Roblox, because that means you can't teach children about how to keep themselves safe or what to do if they're not enjoying something happening online. But I do think parents need to be aware of what happens.

This is a great question - and something that I think people need to be more aware of. As another commenter pointed out - safe for children could be an issues where blackmail and extortion / sextortion could be an issue -

for some parents, finding that on a PS3 while playing mine craft that another person created a giant penis on the screen would make that game 'unsafe'. (I had that happen some years ago - had not idea what to say)

I've heard kids playing call of duty online that cussed and degraded people worse than some x-rated movies.. (and I've also played and heard a kid say 'gosh darn it, they got me'.

anything with chat, anything with user generated content, can be abused to be 'unsafe' in some ways - determining what level of outrage one could encounter / and how uncomfortable one would be is a thing.

editing to add: what some others in the thread have mentioned about kill / guns / cops / etc in some of the games are also a thing for some parents and 'safety' - some might not see any of that in some games / levels that people play in roblox and assume it's not a thing.

I'd also mention some of my associates would have concern that some are based on things outside the game that may include certain levels of cross dress and other things. What is 'safety issue' for some may be a bonus issue for another - so yes, defining types of safety I think is important.

I think the focus needs to be on preventing blackmail/extortion/cyber.

I'm not worried about my daughter or son seeing a crudely constructed penis on the screen, I'm worried about someone sending them age-inappropriate or dangerous private messages. I was consuming sexually explicit content by age nine or ten, had my secret copy of Grand Theft Auto, etc. and at no point was I in any "danger" other than running against the Puritan sensibilities of my guardians.

I remember thinking that the fact that my male Sims couldn't wear female clothes as unnecessarily restrictive, but looking back if my guardians had seen me playing a game as a male wearing a dress, they would have destroyed the game in front of me immediately. "Unsafe" is a considerably relative term.

I think the point is that people have different ideas about what the focus needs to be on.

Yeah, I'm just adding a data point.

Good comment. We are very glad that Xbox/console has the chat and messaging (essentially Xbox has it disabled) controls. We only let our 8 year old daughter play Roblox on Xbox One for this reason.

Are the iPad versions in that 'console platform' category or PC category?

I have found it safe for the kids on all platforms. There seemed to be a fair amount of censorship in the chat to protect kids from most of THOSE awkward conversations.

That being said, some of the popular games are shooters, murder mysteries, that, while not gory, do have you shooting (lego-minifig-like) people.

I would say watch some gameplay videos and see what you think.

My number one concern is predictors so I'll address that part.

You can turn off "chat" with anyone other than your child's friends. You're kid can be in a group chat with their friend and other strangers, which I'm not delighted about.

Downside #1 is that anyone can send a friend request and your child can accept them. Whenever I go into my kid's account I do a friend review - "How do you know this person?". My child also always has a dozen pending "friends" requests from as-far-as-I-know complete strangers which I decline for her.

Downside #2 is that Roblox can have odd restrictions if "chat" is turned off - you can't give your pets names "Adopt Me" for example.

It looks like there are parental controls: https://corp.roblox.com/faq/

TBH I wished I looked this up a long time ago, by default if a child creates an account it doesn't put them through any kind of "get a parent" workflow. (Contrast with signing up for a child Xbox account or Google account).

Our autistic 11yr old could not handle it at all.

Our other two (younger) kids loved it... past tense here because we had to cut it off for all because it was too emotionally traumatizing for the 11yr old, plus some of the content was questionable.

You can turn off chat.

The games can be... err... interesting. People shooting guns at each other and other such things.

Just keep an eye on it. Remember the crap you saw/did on IRC as a kid.

No.

My daughter (now 12) played a lot of Roblox, and mostly it was fine. She seemed able to avoid the shadier parts and, as a parent, you trust the child-friendly features.

However, controls are subverted (for example, by using special characters to get through language filters), and my daughter fell victim to exploitation that moved from Roblox innocence, to instagram, porn, and one-on-one calls. Fortunately we caught it (in time?). Police traced it back to international gangs that prey on the innocent. The trail, at least for us, went cold as there is a request to police in a country (we were not told which) by ours (UK), that is unlikely to be followed up.

Roblox was a big thing for her, and the events that started there were traumatic for the whole family.

Roblox is extremely popular and a really good platform. I'm not going to go on a crusade to try and chance peoples' minds, but Roblox is not as kid-friendly as one would think. It suffers, as all digital social platforms do, with uncontrollable, mis-understood, and untraceable actions by bad actors, that are used for nefarious purposes.

Thanks. My eldest daughter is 11 and that's exactly the stuff I worry about.

You can turn off all ability to chat & lock it behind a pin # you choose so they can't turn it back on.

Sadly I believe these kinds of things happen and are increasing in frequency on all apps/games/sites that allow for user generated profiles / messaging.

I have seen an increase in the use of these methods the last 5 -6 years or so especially.

We had an influx of these types of social engineering / personal data collection with later demands of money or nude pics (and often times both) - some years ago.

Looking into negative link attacks to disrupt google search results found some sites teaching people how to use chat systems for ill gotten gains - from selling fake pics to blackmail, begging for money for sickness - all sorts of things - posted right on public forums and with links to dozens of sites in which these methods could be used quickly.

As to where I think there is less of this on fbook for some reasons - fbook is sometimes employed as part of the scams.

long stories short - I think roblox is not necessarily more dangerous for teens than discord / snap / IG / etc.

I've had several talks with kids about safety in using internet connected things - about how sending a pic can give up your location, and sharing articles from the news about sextortion and such. These got very detailed when questioned, and I don't think it should be a 'one time "the talk" either.

Explaining how some simple social engineering can take two seemingly innocent data points and locate someone for kidnapping or whatever - like casually throwing in 'what school do you go to' - and 'parents aren't home till Xpm' can lead to bad things - and one might not notice those inquiries / data sharing while in the middle of game.

technology evolves, the attack surfaces do too.

I've had the opposite happen with similar results - a kid extorting adults, that led to international request for police help - even with data proving ip and the ISP coordinating data - no resolve - and that kid keeps coming back and ruining stuff for others thanks to wealthy parents and unlimited VPNs, very hard to block.

In short I think roblox is no less safe than other portals aside from fbook. If 99% of [app/game] people are nice - and one percent are looking to leverage your honesty for ill gotten gains - the apps with the most people will yield extortion opportunities that are worth the time to exploit it seems. Especially from places where $20 goes a long way for some reason.

There is only so much you can do as a parent and it's not easy knowing the right answer without hindsight, but personally as a child who broke every firewall used to control my browsing habits, who engaged routinely with people 10+ years older, I have experienced more creeps in real life than online and most small communities I've been a part of would shut that stuff down immediately.

It's definitely a problem with scale as far as community moderation, however even when creeps made attempts at me online I knew to report, block and move on. I think our fear over exposing our children to topics of sexuality prevent them the chance to develop the appropriate sensibilities to avoid being targeted.

There's not an easy solution, but I hope that being open with my children about the kind of vile people in this world and the tactics they use to trick and manipulate others will instill enough common sense that I don't have to hover over their Roblox sessions. I'm curious if in hindsight you could have educated her better, or if you think it just didn't stick.

Assuming you're male... it's not that there are zero predators seeking male children, but the threat does seem to be asymmetric. (I may be wrong about this! It a supposition based on my experiences and what I've heard from others.)

> as a child who broke every firewall used to control my browsing habits, who engaged routinely with people 10+ years older, I have experienced more creeps in real life than online and most small communities I've been a part of would shut that stuff down immediately.

Same situation and I was groomed repeatedly (luckily mostly, though not entirely, ineptly). Perhaps not a coincidence that I'm a girl...

> I knew to report, block and move on.

Or that girls are often sexually precocious and may _want_ pseudo-romantic attention from older men, while being too naive to see the risks to them. That was certainly my case.

Overall I don't think it's as simple or easy as you're making it out to be.

I didn't mean to oversimplify, just didn't want to get too longwinded. I agree with the points you make. That's why I think it's a difficult problem, because I realize not everyone thinks the way I do and I want to learn how to distill that knowledge into others.

Assuming that sexual precociousness is a natural feeling, which as a male I certainly felt in my youth, is there a way you think you could have safely satisfied or otherwise dealt with those feelings appropriately, or did it come down to a misunderstanding of power dynamic or that you were being manipulated? Did it stem from a lack of closeness with the existing male figures in your life?

Clearly we both found that prohibition does little to stop the fortuitous, so instead of trying to control and track my children's internet habits I hope I can just address these issues directly and just raise them to be sensible.

It seems to me like there's a lot I can do as a parent. I control the endpoints. I can use certificate pinning and a proxy to read https traffic on the network. I can get passwords and accounts and monitor contacts.

Whether I should do that is more of a question. But I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that children will be able to escape digital surveillance.

My point is that I can't track my childrens' every moves, MITM them, while simultaneously teaching them about the dangers of the surveillance state and the value of cryptography. So I have to rely on the same means we used before the internet, which I feel is something of a dying body of knowledge.

What's a good way to detect this early? Just from the pattern you shared it sounds like a good idea to check who they're talking to on instagram to catch any new contacts and review them.

I'm personally trying to decide whether I want a digital panopticon for my children where I won't be surprised by anything like this, and being more laissez faire. I enjoyed unrestricted and unmonitored internet traffic growing up and quite enjoyed it. On the other hand, my wife did too but had a significant negative experience.

I’ve forbidden Instagram on my daughter’s phone. It condenses everything that is terrible about modern society: the incessant pursuit of (largely fake) outward success and related promotion of idiotic and unhealthy role models. I don’t know how long this will last (she’s 11) and there is only so much one can do (does she use filters to make tons of pics trying to look “cute”? Sadly, yes), but I’ll do what I can.

Obviously she’s also had all the spiel, both from parents and teachers) about not trusting anyone online who they’ve not met beforehand, about not sharing pics of private parts for any reason, and I’ve started pointing out that “the internet does not forget”, and that innocent-looking material passed to trusted parties might well be used against her later on.

In a way, it’s horrible: as a kid I was free to do anything I wanted, worst that could happen was prank-pwnage on the worst IRC channels; and I met a few interesting characters I may have not encountered otherwise. It’s the digital equivalence of letting 6-year-olds roam free outside, something that was natural 40 years ago and sadly could be very dangerous today. “This is why we cannot have nice things.”

I agree that instagram is too much for young people. Probably too much for some older people too. I also agree that there are some horrible implications from this technology - even though I'm generally more techno-optimist, it's harder when trying to think through how my children will interact with the internet.

One tip I've read regarding the spiel your daughter has heard from both parents and teachers, is that it's also important to let your child know she can come to you if she does make a mistake in this regard. Apparently some predators will, if they can get naked pictures or something like it in the first place, use that as leverage to exploit the child further. It's good to let your child know not to share naked pictures, but I think it also needs to be clear that if they do they can still get help from their parents.

This is terrible. But being 12 years old, she’s in the 6th grade. By next year, she’ll be in junior high school, and once you get her an iPhone, then there’s no more holding back the floodgates.

Porn is just a keyword search away.

How do you plan on sheltering her from that?

(I have a 10 year old daughter) While nothing is completely 'safe', I feel that Roblox does a better job than just about any other platform I've looked at in making a safe and still social online environment for kids. The biggest problem is players trying to scam each other in in-game trades.

The worst we've experience is that my daughter lost a pet worth about $5 in real money to a scammer. And while it was pretty traumatic for her it was also a very teachable moment that let us talk a lot about trusting strangers on the internet. We also regularly monitor what she does spend a lot of time talking about being safe on the internet.

Being scammed is kind of a right of passage on the internet right? I lost my Neopets account to a scam and sadly still fell for a scam on Runescape years later. I learned from both experiences though.

Roblox is not safe at all, no.

You need to stay on top of their Roblox activities and who they communicate with. We had a similar experience to the other commenter.

You can turn off all ability for the child to chat in games and lock those setting behind a Pin #. Then you don't have to worry about inappropriate messaging etc. After than, it's about as safe as an online world can be, which is to say there's assholes everywhere, and Roblox is no different. If you're playing a capture the flag game, it's possible to have another player grief you with spawn camping etc.

Roblox to me, aged 56: It's a fairly new game, for kids

Roblox to most HNers: Yeah, I played it when I was young, now I run a startup

Me: Where's my mug of cocoa, it's 9pm and it's bedtime

Is Roblox a kind of Minecraft + modding with better meshes and physics?

Honestly I'd find a "realistic looking by default" Roblox with good animations and lighting much more appealing.

Unreal engine is already almost there, gamify the UI, invest a few millions in creating good quality assets and you have it.

It's a massively, massively popular platform of games for the elementary school crowd. You can buy gift cards for it in grocery stores. Each game is different, but the look, feel, and controls are mostly the same. Most games are multiplayer.

Roblox is bigger than Minecraft. Just ask any 9 year old. Any!

Its 126 Million (minecraft) vs 150 Million (roblox) users at the moment. Though it seems roblox outgrew minecraft just this year, for obvious reasons. They were competing for a longer time now, but so far minecraft had the upper hand.

I guess minecraft is more popular with older people who grew up with it and there is some limit reached which slows down minecrafts success at the moment. It seems minecraft was also rather silent in the last year. Animal Crossing and now Among Us are the hottest games everywhere, but aroung minecraft it was rather silent, even though it should have been more succesful with people staying at home the whole time, giving people more reason to do stuff in Minecraft.

My daughter has almost completely switched from Minecraft to Roblox (and she was heavily into Minecraft) simply because Roblox makes it really easy to play with her friends and Minecraft doesn't.

roblox is designed to let other people write server-side code in a way that minecraft isn't. yeah, it's possible to mod a minecraft server, but the engine isn't built around making that easy, so it's a lot more involved in minecraft than it is in roblox.

> Unreal engine is already almost there, gamify the UI, invest a few millions in creating good quality assets and you have it.

Far from it. Roblox solves the multiplayer part of the equation very well. Authentication, social graph, transactions for players; game server hosting and API for creators. It took me 5 minutes from starting up Roblox Studio to having my own game live and discoverable by all other players - this is huge.

Few differentiating facts about roblox that aren't immediately obvious:

* All games play on all platforms. You can play cross-platform on any game.

* You can buy "robux", the in-game currency, in every retail store under the sun

* There are 2 million content creators alone in roblox

* Nearly every kid under 10 knows about roblox

* You can run it on a potato

* You can spend 1000 hours playing it while never playing the same mini game twice

* It is still growing and has since 2006

Both of my kids, on their own initiative, have made their own roblox games (it even uses Lua!). The incentive is that if other people play them, they can get Robux and use that in yet other games to buy cosmetics and so forth.

I have been blown away by Roblox. I thought this kind of tinkering no longer existed, but it's still there.

The same author has done a lot of work on the lighting of Roblox. https://medium.com/roblox-tech-blog/the-future-is-bright-upd...

If you are referring to the blockiness, the blocks are a major factor in the game’s appeal -and not just as a reference to Minecraft. Because everything is blocky and nothing can look super detailed, no one need be too embarrassed to make crappy art. You can go ahead and just make stuff that looks crappy without feeling judged. That way, instead of leaving most players sitting around watching a few elite fine artists, pretty much everyone has fun contributing.

The biggest selling point is that Roblox solves multi-player and multi-platform out of the box and is completely free. Unlike Minecraft, Roblox in itself doesn't actually do anything, all you can do is play games you or other users have created.

In many ways it closer to the old Second Life than Minecraft. My daughter treats it as equal part social network and multi player gaming platform.

Think the hmmm lets say "homely" look of Roblox is one of its strengths, content people build on the platform doesn't have to be polished in looks to be successful it just has to be fun or interesting.

It's like cruising Kongregate or New Grounds was for Flash games. Sometimes they looked like trash but were fun to play.

Means Roblox games can load in seconds too.

> I don’t really understand why Roblox is so successful - you can invent all sorts of reasons in retrospect but it’s hard to validate them, and if you came to anybody back in 2012

Nah. You could point out to Second Life, which had a huge spike in 2007 and 2008 and then slowly faded away, and explain why Roblox will be different.

p.s. I got hired by Amazon Web Services in 2008, thanks to Second Life! [0]

[0]: https://medium.com/@simon/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com...

BTW, Second Life recently moved their servers to AWS.

Ah, I didn't know that. Back then they were using colo, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, all servers that represent land were on AWS as of yesterday.

Second Life isn't gone. At peak, it had about average concurrent users, and today it has about 40,000-50,000. That's about where GTA V Online is.

> At peak, it had about average concurrent users

How many?

Oops. 80,000.

Roblox has all this money, and they never contributed anything significant back to the OGRE project?

I'm not really interested in game development, but what stood out in this article is that this is essentially the author's brag document. It would be very easy for him to continue to update this article and send his manager a link any time performance reviews come around.

I'd love to see Roblox supported on Linux. I think it would help add developer interest and get some unique perspectives and talents.

Roblox is really culturally interesting for kids. So much of my TikTok audience plays Roblox and I tried making some games in there but the tooling and UX has a lot of friction. I loved reading this post though and feel happy that things will improve in the future. Roblox is huge!

How did Roblox solve the chicken and egg problem of getting developers to build games on their platform and getting kids to play them — did they launch with their own games first?

It pays to consider that Roblox has been around for more than a decade. Afaik they exploded 2-3 years ago, but they had a lot of time to get there. Over that timeframe, it’s relatively easy to build up a decent library. Some of their game-modes are effectively prebuilt, like the “obby” which is just a linear platformer.

How Roblox makes money?

In-app purchases thrown into children's faces. Children buy 'robux' (their currency) to buy stuff on the platform.

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