CHAPTER 4
Kid Stuff: Minecraft, and the Rise of Roblox
On a cool spring afternoon in 2021, Richard Nelson finally stepped onto the tree-lined Roblox campus in San Mateo for the first time. He had actually joined the company in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, and had been working from home since then. Having left Linden Lab after a near 20-year stint as a developer of Second Life and later Sansar, this was his first time strolling the grounds that Roblox built.
It was quite a change. Where Linden Lab's San Francisco offices tended toward the cramped side, Richard found Roblox's corporate grounds to be sprawling, with a cafeteria and an on-site gym. Where Linden Lab staff would often break up the work day for impromptu chats at their desks or run Nerf gun battles through the office, Roblox employees were quiet, subdued.
But most notable, they were far more numerous. While Linden Lab peaked at some 300+ employees, Roblox's full-time staff had grown to well over 1,500 by 2021. To be amid so many people devoted to the same vision was exciting.
“I had a strong sense of déjà vu,” Richard remembers now. “When I joined Roblox, I had already helped build two metaverse platforms from scratch.”
On the surface, Roblox appears completely unlike Second Life and Sansar. Promoted as a game platform until very recently (for reasons I'll get into down the way), Roblox is bright, colorful, and simple, with blocky, LEGO-like avatars and an aggressively easy-to-use interface.
Despite those surface differences, Nelson says all three have many common themes.
“It felt like so many of the conversations around how to build a certain feature or how it might interact with user-generated content were retreading old ground. What I found over time, though, was that the small differences in the history and development of the platform can lead to completely different takes on the same problem.”
Rapidly recapping Chapter 2, the development of Second Life during Nelson's early tenure was often a whirlwind of individual projects that didn't always congeal, in the hopes that a “choose your own work” philosophy would contribute to a unified whole.
“Roblox feels like it takes a more measured approach to building the product, gathering feedback from users and making sure the functionality coheres and it is easy to use,” as he puts it. “It might take longer to ship, but the results are more polished.”
And, by very explicit design, more game-like:
“I think the focus on game creation has given Roblox a mainstream appeal as well as a diverse and powerful toolset that is helping it expand into many nongaming areas. I really wish Second Life had focused on games a bit more.
“I mean, I really love that I got to help Linden build a platform for people to express themselves creatively and build communities, but I always wanted the platform to be so much bigger. Gaming could have brought more users in the door and also helped us focus our development of the creative toolset around well-understood solutions.”
Richard is right. Then again, to this day, despite the platform's growing complexity, Roblox is often dismissed as a mere game platform for kids.
Roblox was cofounded in 2004 by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel and launched in September 2006 at the zenith of Second Life's media adulation. I remember hearing about Roblox back then only in passing. (Cassel died of cancer in 2013; Baszucki continues as CEO, known mainly among players by his user name, “builderman.”) With its pokey graphics and blocky avatars, it seemed to me more like an off-brand LEGO Online than anything even vaguely resembling the Metaverse that was unfolding before our eyes in Second Life.
After all, that very same month in 2006, Second Life was being featured on the cover of Wired magazine while Virginia Governor (now Senator) Mark Warner was on NPR, talking about his recent whistle-stop appearance in Second Life, widely seen as an early feeler for a 2008 presidential run. What could Roblox possibly have to offer anyone under 10 years old?
As it turns out, quite a lot.
Neal Stephenson has told me that he came up with the concept of the Metaverse by imagining an Internet medium that was so compelling, it could be more popular than television. From the sheer size of its user base, Roblox has already succeeded on those terms.
When Squid Game became an international phenomenon in 2021, for instance, Roblox players used the platform's creation tools to make hundreds of interactive experiences modeled after the Netflix series’ deadly games and locations.
When I visited one, I was promptly plopped into a re-creation of the series’ infamous dorm room, where contestants await their next deadly trial. The Roblox version, however, was filled with dozens of avatars in green jumpsuits, cheerfully bouncing around the room and chatting.
Within the first month of the Netflix series’ premiere, I calculated that Roblox creators had built 300+ Squid Game–themed experiences like these, which were visited over 80 million times.
To put that number in perspective: There were likely more visits to Squid Game experiences in Roblox than viewers of the actual show on Netflix.
How did it succeed? With an active user base of some 250 million monthly users, it's impossible to tell the complete story of Roblox in a single chapter.
What follows, instead, is one thread in the narrative of Roblox's rise and what it tells us about the future of the Metaverse—both for good and possibly for ill.
Minecraft, the Metaverse Generation, and the Rise of Metaverse TV
It's not an exaggeration to call Generation Z, people born roughly between 1995 to 2010, the Metaverse generation. In 2020, Roblox the company announced that more than half of U.S. kids 16 and under were active players.
I saw this trend throughout Second Life's rise in 2006 and subsequent years. While that virtual world's user base floundered at some 600,000 or so active users, virtual worlds designed for kids casually collected MAUs by the many millions.
Well before the pervasiveness of social media, Gen Z grew up with virtual worlds like Habbo (2001), Club Penguin (2005), and others, 2D web-based spaces largely lost to time. (And acquisitions, and layoffs, and controversies.)
The size of those virtual worlds was soon eclipsed in 2010 by Minecraft, which became a cult hit even in its early alpha stage. Developed by a four-person team led by Markus “Notch” Persson, Minecraft's blocky graphics confounded the game industry's traditional expectation for the most realistic graphics possible. (“I think the simple graphics helped make the experience feel more personal!” Persson told me at the time of launch.)
He was correct about graphics: Abstract enough to encourage kids to fill in the details of their characters and adventures with their own imagination, the immersiveness of Minecraft was kindled by its first-person perspective, and the richness of the world and its physics, and the sense of an unfolding natural world that seemed to stretch out forever.
“It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs,” design guru and TED futurist Amber Case once told me, casually explaining the secret to Minecraft's phenomenal success. “Kids go into the world and their first goal is surviving the Creepers. Then they need to find supplies to build a shelter, then once they learn that, they start playing together with friends on multiplayer servers, and finally, they start using the Minecraft tools to create art.” Thousands of collective art projects across as many Minecraft servers, depicting whole cityscapes and other staggeringly ambitious sculptures, up to and including a recreation of the entire known universe by a teen in San Diego, testify to their creators’ self-actualization as artists.
I have seen Maslow's hierarchy play out firsthand: My niece Gloria is a dedicated Minecraft player. Where once she might have been overwhelmed by the basic task of avoiding death by nightly Creeper incursions, she was, after much play, happily focused on creating beautiful, sprawling homes for herself, even though she was still playing in die-and-game-over Survival mode. Proudly showing me her creation over a holiday visit, she cheerfully walked me through an intricate garden she made, only briefly pausing to brain an oncoming Creeper.
Originally launched as a single-player game, Minecraft gradually took on metaverse features, enabling users to control and customize their own multiplayer servers and in 2017 adding a marketplace for Minecraft creators to sell their content (generating $500 million in sales in its first five years).
And as the game exploded in popularity, players took to YouTube to upload videos of their latest adventures or creative builds, or even to make short movies from edited gameplay footage. With little or no input by the game's actual developers, the Minecraft user community made YouTube itself a de facto facet of the experience.
As child sociology and digital education expert Anya Kamenetz noted in my Introduction, much of kids’ involvement in social media has shifted in recent years to watching and sharing gameplay videos on YouTube, led first and foremost by Minecraft.
In doing this, the user community brought a missing piece to the core Metaverse concept that its early visionaries missed. In retrospect, it should have been obvious:
The Metaverse cannot practically function unless it enables time shifting—that is, capturing real-time experiences for later access and enjoyment by its user base, and even the public at large.
Every day, wild and fascinating human dramas emerge in the heat of real-time gameplay in popular MMOs and virtual worlds, but few outside those who experience them firsthand would even know that they'd occurred.
Working on their own, the user community changed that. Turning to third-party streaming video, they created a kind of grassroots, public access news network for the Metaverse. I strongly suspect Minecraft and other metaverse platforms would not be as large or as active, were it not for streaming video.
As it gained traction, the Roblox user community would follow in this path. But where multiplayer Minecraft is restrictive by design (you can access player-run servers only by permission, and the worlds are generally fiefdoms isolated from each other), Roblox offered young gamers a single world with unlimited experiences and many millions of fellow players to directly engage with.
Unsurprisingly, much of Roblox's rapid growth occurred during the pandemic, with schools shuttered and playgrounds empty.
“The immediacy of young people interacting in real time with their friends [in Roblox] using voice and playing made it a lot easier to have meaningful interaction while playing a game together as opposed to just voice chat,” Kamenetz tells me.
And like most virtual worlds, Roblox has an internal social network integrated into the game experience, with functions for friending other avatars or just following them. These connections, along with badges and other earned achievements, are displayed on a player's page on the Roblox website—effectively a Facebook for avatars.
It is not just integration with social media that has helped make Roblox successful. It's even presented on the Web to appear like a kind of streaming video:
Individual user-made Roblox games (later rebranded as “experiences”) are depicted on a web page of the official site, where teaser images are displayed alongside a giant green play button, almost as if it were a YouTube video. Clicking it, however, launches the actual Roblox software, or for first-time users, starts the download/installation process in the background. The world only launches, in other words, when the user is tantalized enough to enter. They are not presented with an entire overwhelming platform, as with Second Life, but a single simple game/experience to start with.
It's an elegant solution to an eternal challenge among metaverse platforms: bridging the average user from casual interest to immersive engagement, which usually requires a full client download. (Recall again how a vast majority of Second Life's first-time “users,” inexperienced with the downloading and installation process, usually quit before it was even finished.)
How Blocky Avatars Encourage Creativity
Someone should finally say something in praise of Roblox's simplistic avatars. In fact, it's actually a default avatar identity that wasn't intended to be what users would generally use but still went on to become a popular choice (and by default, is deeply associated with the Roblox brand). It has its origins in a very early version of Roblox, which began as a software tool for teaching and experimenting with physics.
Whether Roblox developers intended it or not, these blocky avatars, abstract cubistic humans at best, offer a liberating power to players that's not fully appreciated.
Virtual world researcher Nick Yee, who co-led the groundbreaking studies on the mirroring power of avatars known as the Proteus effect (see Introduction), concurs: “With Roblox and Minecraft in particular,” Yee observes, “you see a lot more creativity when [players] aren’t sociologically encouraged to be obsessed about their hair, because they can’t.”
The kids who play through them think less about what these avatars’ appearance says about who they are in real life and more about how they can express their interests and personality. Monitored offline by their parents and other elders at all waking hours about their appearance and behavior—how they are dressed, whether they are smiling enough, how disruptive they are being, and so on and on, into their teen years, when their peers join in on this endless scrutiny—kids finally have a chance on these metaverse platforms to simply be, and do. More realistic avatars would have only introduced heightened peer scrutiny into the virtual world.
Freed from these offline expectations, Roblox's player base can focus on the creativity of their peers.
And the hunger for user-created experiences is voracious: Adopt Me, a user-made roleplay pet care game experience on Roblox created by a small team of grassroots creators, regularly attracts peak daily concurrency numbers in the low to mid-six figures—making it roughly as popular as some of the most successful games on Steam, such as Electronic Arts’s Apex Legends and the latest installment of Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare from Activision, titles costing well over $100 million each to produce (let alone market).
Presented with these numbers, a common rejoinder among colleagues in the game industry is that Roblox games are simplistic and low frills, and therefore only popular with very young kids. There is some truth to this, but as the company adds new features to the development tools, this stereotype will rapidly change.
It's already changed quite a bit: In 2020, Roblox user “Homemade Meal,” who works part-time as an effects artist for a game studio, created Tunneler, an award-winning experience inspired by the brain-melting video game series Portal, in which you escape from a series of locked rooms through the use of a teleportation gun. Mr. Meal was able to create a similar experience with the Roblox SDK, and it's remarkable in its sophistication.
“When people think of Roblox, they typically think of a game where a bunch of kids play with simple basic blocks,” as he put it to me. His goal with the Portal tribute was simply to prove the platform's power—and freely offer it to his fans in Roblox.
Tunneler has so far been played over five million times. At retail, the two Portal games have only sold about four million copies each.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jamaican Woman
Known as “LAGurlz” in-game (“LA” for short, from here on out), she calls herself the first Black female developer to hit the front page on Roblox's official site. While not an official title, it sure seems plausible.
“The only big female developers are Fierzaa and Callmehbob,” LA points out, “so I know for sure I'm at least the first Black female to hit the front page. The demographic of Black female devs on Roblox is basically nonexistent.” (The demographics of Roblox creators in clothing design and other in-game UGC are more varied, she allows, but she hopes the company can do more to foster more diversity among fellow experience developers.)
“[Roblox the company does] encourage diversity for sure,” she adds. “But since coding already, and tech, is such a male-dominated industry, it's just kinda the way things are. But I do wish Roblox had more initiatives to get more underrepresented communities interested in game development.
“I've had so many Caribbean people and Black people come congratulate me and tell me how it's inspiring to see a Black developer hit the front page. And it's really sweet to see, but sad how there aren't more.”
LA first discovered Roblox as a 10-year-old girl from Jamaica who a few years earlier had moved with her mother to be with her stepfather in a small Virginia town. But her parents subsequently divorced; her mother struggled to provide for the family. (“My mom has worked so many jobs, I can't even count how many there were.”)
LA was about 11 when she had an epiphany and logged into the platform's developer site. “I was looking at the Devex rates out of curiosity and saw how you were able to convert 100,000 Robux into real money…. Back then 100,000 Robux was so much to me.” The Developer Exchange is where creators cash out their virtual currency for real money, and given the exchange rate at the time, she estimates that was about $250.
At 18, with the success of her first game, Throw People Simulator (“just a meme-y game about throwing people around a map, into black holes, really anything”), LA cashed out her Robux for the first time: $14,000.
She gave her mother a solid cut of those proceeds. And on a recent Christmas, she cashed out enough Roblox earnings to buy extravagant gifts for her family.
“It was actually the first time my mommy has ever gotten a gift on Christmas before, so that made me feel really good, how everyone was super happy.”
It also shifted her mother's perception of what her daughter was doing, not simply wasting time when she should be focused on schoolwork.
“I think she really started to get it and take it seriously when the money started coming in. She understands I make games, so she tells everyone I run a video game studio, but I still don't think she fully understands what Roblox is or how it works.”
LA does, in fact, co-own a game company: Double Bandit Studios is a registered LLC. Her work partner is known in Roblox as “Intrance.”
“It's funny because I absolutely hated him at first,” LA remembers. “He came off as someone who just didn't care about anything but his work and his projects. I remember I'd DM him good morning and he'd respond nine hours later.” She laughs at the memory. “I've blocked him at least four times.”
She reconnected after noticing he'd got into her game and bought one of her shirts.
In the first two years as a couple, their relationship was exclusively online, as they'd not yet met in real life. (They were both 20 years old when I interviewed them in 2022.) “We called every single day until the day we met up in person.”
They finally did meet on Intrance’s way back to the East Coast from a Roblox accelerator internship in California. It went rather well: “My mom really liked him and actually let him stay with us for three months until we moved out together.”
The Roblox game experience they created together, Starving Artists, is bright and cheery, dropping players into a sunny courtyard with a circle of art kiosks they can choose. The creators managed to script an entire drawing and painting system within Roblox, so that players can create simple images within the virtual world—and then try and sell them to passersby.
“Once we released it, it basically just went viral! Within a couple days of releasing we were hitting 40,000 concurrent users. It was such a unique concept, so players really liked it.”
I have to wince at that number when she gives it to me: For Second Life, 40,000 is often the entirety of the world's concurrency; on Roblox, it's just for this one game experience.
FIGURE 4.1 Intrance and LAGurlz in their Starving Artists experience in Roblox.
And while there are some quirky indie games about artists on Steam and other platforms, I can't think of any that immediately attract that many players at once. Then again, very few mainstream commercial games are that popular, let alone so instantly.
The most compelling hook of Starving Artists, however, is the ability of players to not only sell their pictures for Robux to other players but also then resell them to other patrons.
“We've had art sell for 1 million+ Robux.”
That's roughly $10,000.
When I get over my shock, something occurs to me:
“Did you two kinda create NFT art in Roblox that aren't really NFTs?”
“A lot of people call it an NFT simulator,” Intrance agrees. “We've been considering incorporating it into a web3 platform too.”
LA and Int show me some of the most successful drawings made by their players, and the best are quite impressive cartoons—as high quality as many of the NFT artworks that actual adults recently paid millions of actual dollars for.
In 2022, Starving Artists earned a Builderman Award of Excellence, selected by CEO David Baszucki himself, given out at the annual Bloxy Awards in San Francisco. To maintain their anonymity, LA and Int did not attend in person but sent in a Thank You video:
“Growing up in Jamaica,” LA said in it, “there weren't many opportunities. But Roblox allowed me to turn my dreams into reality. And I hope I can inspire others to do the same.”
At press time, Starving Artists has been visited nearly 270 million times, with 7 million monthly active users—well over twice the entire population of Jamaica.
Despite or because of all this success, they're not interested in becoming employees of Roblox the company, even though they'd probably be offered salaries of some $200,000/year along with amazing benefits and relocation costs to California.
“We'd rather just be doing what we do now,” as LAGurlz puts it. “Making and being in control of our own games and projects, and if we make a game big enough, then we'd hire a team to help us out.
“And honestly with the way Roblox is going and the potential this platform has, and even from our experiences with it, that $200K could easily be a million a year if not millions from just doing our own thing.”
The Trouble with Children in the Metaverse
Roblox's success is also its most keen vulnerability: It is overwhelmingly popular with children.
Like any Internet platform frequented by minors, it is also a frequent target for child predators. Even beyond that critical concern, the heavy presence of children introduces a whole host of limitations and controversies.
Starting with Roblox's metaverse ambitions. In October 2021, still flush from its successful IPO six months earlier and grand proclamations by Baszucki that his company was indeed building the Metaverse, updates to the platform rules included an odd addition:
- We value friendly debate about issues and topics that matter to Robloxians. However, to maintain a civil and respectful environment, we prohibit the discussion or depiction of: Current candidates running for public office, including their slogans, campaign material, rallies, or events … [s]itting real-world elected officials. Roblox is a safe space for meeting online friends, chatting, and collaborating on creative projects, but we prohibit content that seeks or portrays romantic relationships, including: Animations of kissing, hand holding, or other romantic gestures … [e]xperiences that depict romantic events, including weddings, dates, and honeymoons.
The ban against real-life politics effectively blocked a key bridge from the Metaverse to the offline world. The prohibition against virtual romance, even of the most wholesome variety, excises a whole reason people find metaverse platforms appealing, even essential: avatar-based romantic relationships that often carry over into the real world and which are certainly an important part of the virtual world. (Virtual wedding planners are a whole cottage industry on most metaverse platforms.)
If Roblox's user base demographic becomes more centered around teens and young adults, presumably some of these restrictions could be lifted, at least in experiences that are not accessible to kids. The company reports that over half of its daily active users are over 13, and that its fastest-growing age cohort in recent quarters is 17-to-24-year-olds, accounting for 22 percent of hours spent on the platform. Roblox's strategy for maturing its user demographic depends on enhancing its graphic engine and development capabilities and enabling more sophisticated experiences, which hopefully will in turn attract and retain older users. (More on all this in Chapter 11.)
But the biggest challenge for Roblox the company is probably this one:
How to manage the reality that on Roblox, children are quite literally creating monetizable content for a for-profit company.
It is why in 2021, while most of the mainstream media was still attempting to explain what Roblox even was, an independent game journalist uncovered a far more fraught story. On his popular People Make Games YouTube channel, freelance UK reporter Quintin Smith explored how Roblox monetized its user creators—most of whom are minors—with mechanics that he depicted as grossly exploitative.
XR security expert Kavya Pearlman bluntly describes it as “child labor.”
A Roblox spokesperson strongly disagrees with that depiction.
“We don't agree with that characterization of Roblox,” they told me in a statement. “The core of the Roblox vision and philosophy is that we support as much creation as possible throughout the community. ‘Respecting The Community’ is one of our core values at Roblox, and we are proud of the positive difference that building on Roblox has made in the lives of many within our developer community. We work hard every day to continue to create an even better environment for them and all of our users.”
I leave it to the reader to evaluate that statement related to the characterization.
Whatever the case, it's a mystery that the topic hasn't been discussed by the U.S. Congress or the White House as yet.
Roblox happily boasts that roughly one in two children in the United States plays Roblox, and many of them are surely sons and daughters of major American politicians. Indeed, Donald Trump's own son Barron is widely rumored to be an avid Roblox player named “JumpyTurtlee,” playing games like Rage Runners in a White House bedroom while down the hall his father raged, attempting to win the somewhat more difficult game of Happy Fun Time Insurrection.
“We haven't had a mishap, a terrible mishap happen in virtual reality or in metaverse technologies,” Kavya speculates. “Until that happens, a bunch of the support from Congress is not going to happen.”
Even beyond the question of children creating monetized content for Roblox the company, another, larger question looms: whether Roblox can share more of its revenue with its user creators who make the platform possible. As of this writing, Roblox user creators make only 30 percent of the sales they collect from the experiences they create, with Roblox the corporation claiming the rest.
Creators like LAGurlz and Intrance are impressively successful, but the hard economic fact is that creators only begin to see decent revenue if they can attract players in the many millions.
For that reason, very few Roblox creators earn significant income.
It was Philip Rosedale who first pointed this out to me. In Roblox's S1 stock filing, a passage states that only 1,050 community developers earned over $10,000 per year from their Roblox content.
“I asked the team at Second Life to [research] exactly the same number—how many people in Second Life are making over $10,000 a year? And the answer was 1,600 people. So more than Roblox by a good bit.”
That's notable in itself. It's even more so when you recall that Second Life only has about 600,000 monthly active users, compared to Roblox's more than 250 million. Yet somehow, Roblox's creative community is making much less revenue to benefit a much larger user base. (Linden Lab only takes roughly 20 percent of sales from its Second Life user creators.)
Through a spokesperson, Roblox defends the 70/30 split this way:
“A Roblox developer on average takes home about 29 cents per $1 spent by a user in their experience on Roblox—this is after all expenses tied to building, storing, testing, and maintaining an experience have already been paid. Unlike platforms that only provide a venue to find and download content, Roblox allows developers to express themselves creatively—immediately and for free.”
The spokesperson also noted continued improvements to benefit developers, including a January 2023 lowering of cash out minimums, from 50,000 Robux to 30,000 Robux. (Another common complaint, since 50K in Robux equals $175 USD, an astronomical amount for most creators.) “By lowering the amount of earned Robux needed to DevEx, more developers may be able to convert earnings into cash to reinvest in themselves, their studio, and their community.”
Part of this disparity, in fairness, is due to Roblox's dependency on the App Store and Google Play for their large user base, most of which accesses the platform via mobile—a benefit Apple and Google make the company pay dearly for. (As it does with Epic's Fortnite, a whole other spectacular, courtroom-thrashing drama in itself.) Roblox the company now describes its user-made games as “experiences,” apparently to avoid the stricter scrutiny Apple places on games in its App Store.
These issues will likely come to a head in the next few years. Kavya Pearlman recommends that Roblox the company be more proactive around them, if only out of self-interest:
“[Roblox] should change their business model immediately to go from code for engagement and code for profiteering to code for well-being.
“It is counterintuitive, but it is a long-term winning game. Because yeah, sure you can keep a bunch more people and children in the game by getting them addicted. But you could flip this and say, ‘Hey, we are the most trusted company, and we are restructuring, reorganizing so that you could send your children to school in Roblox. You can trust us to parent them. Because we literally consulted scientists; we have studied the impact on children's brains and [have found] the extent of technology that you should expose them to.’”
“So that's what they could do. They could actually take a leadership position on safeguarding the children, and they would totally win the game.”
Her suggestion is plausible. Without much effort, Minecraft: Education Edition has been downloaded over 50 million times; teachers around the world use it as a powerful teaching tool for math, programming, and beyond. A Roblox with an emphasis on well-being could become a successor to that audience while also growing its own consumer base.
In the immediate term, however, Roblox's future is most challenged by the relatively recent rise of a competitor in what's effectively a battle royale for the future of the Metaverse. But that's for the next chapter.
Getting Started in Roblox
Creator notes:
Intrance, cofounder of Double Bandit Studios, creator of Starving Artists:
“My advice to creators who want to get started would be to figure out what aspect of development you're most interested in, such as 3D modeling, environment design, programming, UI/UX, graphic design, etc., and learn as much as you can about it. Then you can find a small studio or team on Roblox that's looking for your skillset. That'll allow you to contribute to projects without needing the funds to hire a team yourself.
“Once you meet other passionate developers who have complementary skillsets, you can then work on your own projects. Lots of developers on Roblox are willing to work on a project in exchange for a percentage of any potential revenue generated by the project. And don't be afraid to fail!”
As for finding other developers, Int recommends searching Twitter via the hashtag #RobloxDev, and the Talent Hub on Roblox's site.
Because so many Roblox creators are minors, it's recommended to confirm a prospective collaborator's adult age before working together. (“Most of the larger studios that hire developers full-time require you to be 18,” Intrance notes.)
As for the kind of experience to create, popular genres are one route, but Int argues that the user base is large enough to encourage experimentation:
“There are a few tried-and-true game models that players are familiar with, such as tycoons and simulators. But the beauty of Roblox is that any game has the potential to become popular. I can't count the number of times we've seen a game become popular and think, ‘I never would've expected players to play that.’ Building a community is fairly easy once you have a game with enough players.”
As a way of driving interest even before the game is ready, Int recommends posting progress screenshots. “[That] really helps grow a loyal audience to look forward to your game.”
Roblox developer notes:
For developers interested in following Roblox's approach to metaverse platforms, Roblox senior engineer Richard Nelson has these insights into the workflow:
There are several things about the release process at Roblox that are worth emulating. We follow a regular cadence of shipping a new release every week. This makes it faster to get new features and bug fixes in our users’ hands. We combine this with the discipline of using “feature flags” for all functionality, which means we can immediately disable any new code we ship if it turns out to have problems. This safety net is incredibly valuable in that it allows us to avoid most emergency releases and keep the platform stable and reliable.
I also think there is a lot to be said for a dedicated creation tool targeted specifically at the portion of users who want to create, like Roblox Studio. One of the immediate benefits as compared to the Second Life approach is that it allows you to streamline the client interface for non-creators. It also makes building a dynamic experience a lot easier, as you don't have to worry about objects changing state underneath you as you edit (like that physical object that rolled to the bottom of the hill).
That also means Roblox Studio doesn't enable multiplayer dynamic creation like Second Life, a trade-off he acknowledges:
“I loved the experiences I had collaboratively building with friends in Second Life, and there is something magical about being able to jump into build mode mid-conversation to demonstrate something or just mess around.”
Notes for parents of underage Roblox users:
I asked Roblox if there are any upcoming changes in 2023 and 2024 that will address parental concerns about the platform. A spokesperson sent me this statement:
We have a safety-first culture at Roblox and work tirelessly to maintain a platform that is safe, civil, and welcoming for all. That includes zero tolerance for behavior that doesn't meet our Community Standards and a robust set of safety features, including rigorous, industry-leading chat filters that prevent users from sharing documents or links to third-party sites.
Today, more than half of our daily active users are over 13, with our fastest-growing cohort being the 17–24 user group. As our audience grows, we introduce age recommendations so all users can make informed decisions about the content they interact with. These age recommendations are grounded in our mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility. We call them “Experience Guidelines,” and they were informed by child development research and industry standards.
Over time, our discovery systems will recommend experiences that support age appropriateness and safety. Based on these age recommendations, parents will be able to use our new Parental Controls that restrict account access by age recommendations, ultimately deciding and managing what is appropriate (thus playable and recommended) for their children.
While we continue to guard the safety of our users, we want to empower them with the freedom to make their own informed decisions.