In all probability, you have never heard of Roblox. There is nothing to be ashamed of: we ourselves, in writing, have carefully ignored it for years. And yet, Roblox attracts millions of people every month. Or more precisely millions of children and adolescents.
Before you knock out numbers (no worries, it will come), it may be necessary to explain what this thing is. Roblox, which has been around since 2006 (but has only really grown for two years), is not a game in itself, but a platform for creating and distributing games intended primarily for minors. Everyone, once registered, can freely play what they like and create their own titles (Roblox uses LUA, a relatively simple programming language and used everywhere, especially in the CryEngine and countless games created by professionals ). To access it, simply go to the dedicated website and install an extension for its browser or download a mobile application, Oculus Rift software or, for masochists, a Windows 10 application. From there, we can launch all the games.
It's simple, easy, fast, free, and maybe that's part of why it attracts people. And saperlipopette, how many people are there! As an example (and here we enter a tunnel of numbers, sorry ...), Roblox has recently reached a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous users on all of its games (taken individually, they rarely meet more than a few thousand players at a time). Next to Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, which alone is more than 1.6 million on Steam, it may seem like a slapstick, but it still indicates that a large crowd is playing Roblox games.
A million here and a million there ... Officially, every month, 64 million "active players" connect to Roblox (with impressive growth or pipeauté, since in March, the site announced 48 million and 55 million in June), and 15 million accounts are created. That's a lot (in comparison, Microsoft announced in February 55 million monthly players for Minecraft), especially for a platform that, although Western and popular among young people, remains virtually invisible to most adults. Even more amazing: Roblox announces hosting a total of 29 million games (against just 22 million in March, a misery).
So, of course, not all of them are played by hordes of players (and I concede I did not go to see them all one by one, but I'm willing to bet that a good part of those 29 million are not quite finished, or maybe even just started and immediately abandoned), but it's still a nice number. More credible: the site announces to have 1.7 million game creators, and have already paid a little over 18 million (the company aims $ 30 million to the creators for this year). This is where
The creation tool
If so many kids are able to create games and take them out on Roblox, it's not because the site attracts an abnormal number of little geniuses, but because it chews them up. Roblox Studio, the development tool provided for free (and automatically), offers environments already created (city, suburbs, castle, map with flags to capture, terrain for a western ...) with suggested game modes (race, runner, FPS, etc.). Once its prefabricated, it can be filled with objects and scripts that are also preconceived and integrated into the interface of the tool. In short, it is relatively simple and in a surprisingly short time, you can get something safe. Admittedly, it's ugly, devoid of all depth and without great interest, but it is playable, and therefore publishable. At this rate,
Learn free-to-play from an early age.So be careful, actually, it's a little more complicated than that. On the one hand, to earn money, you must subscribe to Roblox, and therefore pay between six and twenty dollars per month (the 1.7 million "creators" therefore provide a regular income to the platform). On the other hand, very few creators dare to sell directly the product of their imagination: after all, everything has the appearance of free on Roblox. No, most create their game with room for microtransactions, and it's a part of the revenue from these sales that will go into the developer's pocket. Let's admire the cynicism of the maneuver: miners design games filled with microtransactions so that other children spend their money there.
And it works : some teens or young adults have earned tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a handful of them have passed the million mark. As in the professional world, a network of subcontractors has even developed in the community of Roblox players, with graphic designers and 3D modeling specialists working infreelance for several games. As David Baszucki, the founder and boss, says: "It's a free market economy that works remarkably well. " It is well placed to know, since the company reserves between 30 and 90% of revenues on sales, according to the objects and the accounts concerned.
Pro Simulator Copyright Infringement 2017. Of course, that does not make you want to express unbridled creativity: what works elsewhere, in the world of big people and commercial games, is often the same, at least for the concept, in Roblox, where respect for copyright does not always seem essential. And as long as you do, some Roblox hacked games are pumping between them: if you thought there were too many games in Steam and find an interesting title was difficult, imagine what gives a search among tens of millions cloned games.
Research on " Pokémon " , " Mario " , " Sonic " or" GTA " release an astronomical amount of results. What to play in this case? How to navigate? Obviously, the regulars do very well: most titles that work best on Roblox are original creations, or about. Of course, there are one or two Pokémon , Dragon Ball Z or Counter Blox games in the pile, but overall, the popular games show variety and inventiveness.
Abuse of blocks. Some examples ? Welcome to Bloxburg (one of the few to offer paid access, but for the equivalent of only 25 cents, and with microtransactions integrated thereafter of course) offers a kind of MMO of real life, where one buy his little house and find a job. Jailbreak , by far the most popular game of the platform, opposes police and escaped prisoners in cards rather large and filled with people. Adopt MeAnother role-playing game (in the sense that we play a role, not in the sense of filling bars of experience) puts you in the shoes of a child or one of his parents. There are also games of boxing, racing, management, survival, aviation, football ... Of just about everything, in fact.
All have only two real points in common: they share the same abominable controls (the camera is managed by leaving the right click down, it requires a lot of learning time) and especially the same catastrophic artistic direction, made of big blocks badly textured and characters that resemble the failed fusion between a Lego man and a Playmobil man. That Roblox has survived for more than a decade is one thing, but it looks like a 3D game from almost twenty years ago,
Positive spiral. It's not quite a surprise if Roblox has attracted more and more people in recent months, after a decade of privacy: since the end of 2015, the game was released on Xbox One, Oculus Rift and Windows 10 , attracting new customers every time (well, maybe not on Oculus, the market for kids equipped with VR does not have to be huge). Roblox has also gradually changed its image and its economic model, to the current situation. And since the beginning of the year, the company continues positive announcements (a fundraiser estimated at $ 92 million, teens who become millionaires, a small money collection among the community for the victims of the hurricane Harvey ...), which gives him a media exposure and in return attracts even more people.
Everything is well orchestrated, and it works: in a short time, Roblox went from lousy gadget used by a handful of minors to one of the biggest platforms of the PC game, though still ugly. According to Superdata analysts, Roblox as a whole has been hanging around tenth place among the most profitable games on PC, at the same level as titles likeCounter-Strike: Global Offensive , Dota 2 and Overwatch . The difference is of course that in these games, unlike Roblox, it is mostly adults who slam their cash.
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