If you haven't heard of roblox, you will soon.
It's one of the largest growing video game market sites,
with a 46%* increase in members since last year.
Some stats:
Monthly amount of Roblox engagement: 1.2 billion hours
Roblox's Monthly Active Users was reported to be 100 m in Aug, 2019.
| Date | Monthly Active Users |
|---|---|
| Jan, 2012 | 7 m |
| Mar, 2017 | 48 m |
| Apr, 2019 | 90 m |
| Aug, 2019 | 100 m |
They are becoming more and more promident in the video game market each day but
the question remains:
Is this a good thing or a bad thing for game developers?
And is it the future of making games?
I'll be hiding in the comments, looking forward to your replys!
I myself am a roblox Game Developer (amongst other),
if you have any questions feel free to drop them below!
And as always, Many thanks and happy dev'ing!
*Was unable to find the source for this since first read.
Take with a grain of salt. - If anyone can correct me that'd be great.
Top comments (19)
I'm not so hot on the addictive nature of the game itself, but I'm super excited that it's gotten my niece into software development! She genuinely is so excited to be learning to code so she can interact with the game.
Agreed, It's very good at drawing kids into its ecosystem and getting them hooked. Which isn't a great thing in it's self and then you have Robux...
Nice, I too got into Software Development (Back-End) then on to Game Developing due to roblox,
It's what sparked my interest in coding, that and Scratch.
As well as my father being a Software developer, so I could always go to him if I had any issues with my code (and still do occasionally to this day.)
Mad probs to her, I wish her all the best on her Development journey.
May she live long and prosper - (Star trek). 😂👍
p.s Is that a Mac? Eeeewwwww. (jk..kinda 😁😂)
It's my machine, she actually doesn't have a proper development computer herself so I'm going to get her one, but it won't be a Mac because she doesn't need to be spending all that extra money on a computer 😄
I don’t really know anything about it, but I keep hearing the name. Can you give us a rundown of what it is and why we should pay attention to it?
Sure, I have so much to say I think I may do a seperate post on it. Especially as Roblox seems to have had little impact on the dev.to community, Thank you for the idea.
dev.to/search?q=Roblox - Hardly any references.
Yeah I definitely think you should make it a whole individual post. That way you can easily reference back to it any time you need to.
Mhm, Good point.
Also allows me to do some more intensive research on it.
Here goes my first proper dev.to post 😬!
Hey Garrett, finally got around to making that post, been a busy year.
Link: dev.to/teotcd/what-s-roblox-and-wh...
Any and all feedback appreciated.
Definitely not bad. Although the game could not keep me hooked for long (maybe the age), its a fun build-your-own-level MMORPG with minecraft-like graphics.
The reason I say its not bad, because those steep number's are mostly from the countries where gaming is not cheap, be it the equipment, games or even add-on packs. School going Indian and Chinese kids with almost low or no pocket money are being introduced to gaming because of this.
And the one thing I know about gamer's is that they will get bored someday.
And they will want something new ;)
Oh two things I forgot to comment on in my last comment, My Apologies.
Personally I disagree with this as Roblox Studio is a fully fleged development envirement complete with a high level IDE and fast and widely used programming language for game development. And state of the art services such as ServerScriptService and ReplicatedStorage.
That said it also allows complete beginers to jump right in and start building their game.
They do allow for Meshs but I think the limited amount of triangles allowed is absurd, restrictig developers and leads many developers to focus on making low poly games.
Thanks Theo, this changed my perspective a little. Because of this post my interest level has peaked and I am definitely going to try to make a game, study the ecosystem, and learn lua.
GGWP :)
Hey Nishant, you may find this interesting: dev.to/teotcd/what-s-roblox-and-wh... also love to hear how your time in Roblox is going!
I loved the game as a child, it's what go me into game development! I don't play the game much myself now as I too am getting a bit old for it as it's certainly based for kids; Roblox has started to expand its age range of games with games like Phantom Forces and Polyguns for the big kidys!
While I can not comment on where the majority of the traffic is from though from what I hear its mainly US and UK and France. That said I can certainly agree with you that it is certainly fills in that area of the market for lower spec PC's this is one of the reasons I got into the platform when I was young. THey have certainly filled the market just right for younger kids who aren't dishing out big bucks for a decent gaming experience.
The video game market and especially tech market at large is moving at great speed but I think Roblox is going to be around for the long haul. Remember old studios and games are still around today (Nintendos been going since 1889!).
I love Roblox so much. The possibilities are nearly endless. There are SO many interesting ideas out there made by young folks that aren't available in the traditional market. There's tons of nostalgia, excitement, and innovation. Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 is such a great love letter to its namesake. There's roleplaying games (like MUD roleplaying with graphics, holy moley), any kind of clicker type thing you can imagine, and thousands of iterations of things you've never even thought of. Creation can be strictly code or drag and drop assets. Total beginner to seasoned pro. Their tutorials are fantastic, and they actually reward you for completing them with cool stuff, which is an incredible way to get kids into STEM.
I was thrilled and saddened equally when they started allowing people to monetize. I WANT devs to get paid for their work. I want people to want to create games! There are SO MANY games on there right now though that it's nearly impossible to sift through. I just keep thinking about my 10 year old releasing a little parkour game or something and no one ever playing it and I get a little misty, lol. There are a lot of adults trying to break into the game here, because it's userbase is enormous, which is flooding the library with even more junk to sift through. So many duplicates and blatant rip offs of other hard worked on games too. I don't know. I'm so torn about it. I think it's a really unique space in the game world though, and I absolutely love how they try and keep kids' best interests at heart with a lot of their dev rules.
Thanks for bringing this up, btw. I've been thinking about Roblox a lot lately as it seems to be the way for me and my kid to be able to jump into coding together!
Really glad to hear and sorry for the late response, it certainly is quite saddening to see how individuals are diluting the roblox market by creating blatant ripoffs for monetization sake but, hopefully, as roblox continues to grow we'll see this change.
I created a post if you're at all interested about why professional developers should keep their eyes peeled on roblox, dev.to/teotcd/what-s-roblox-and-wh.... Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
One of my nephews was really into it a few years ago, didn't realize it had gotten so much bigger since then. Also had no idea it was associated with programming in any way. Maybe I'm just not good at knowing things....
It's finally up there with the big players now it's reached 100 million monthly active users and its only started to rapidly grow in the last few years, i'm really exited about its future but also anxious.
If I could have one wish for Roblox is that it turn open source, that'd just be amazing but not going to happen, I can always dream...
Roblox often gets the "Oh its a proper game engine" or "You can code on it, huh" which is understandable and this is why its a bit of an unknown goldmine in the dev landscape, too often I've gotten "Oh you work on Roblox???" and "You can make a living on that??".
Right there with ya!
(Sorry for the late response and thanks for the comment.)
I've always wanted to make a Roblox game of my own with many ideas, but I can never get myself to make anything even though I went through tutorials online. Can you give me some tips or something to start?
100% - I think my main advice for developing games on roblox is to start simple and build up, find a cool, fun game mechanic and build off it. If you're new to scripting there are some great tutorials all over the place, some of my favourite game dev related places:
studioplus.io/en - Learning Game Development On Roblox
developer.roblox.com/en-us/quick-s... - Getting Started
youtube.com/channel/UCWwi752JNTUKZ... - Everything Frameworks
roblox.github.io/lua-style-guide/ - More Technical Stuff.
youtube.com/channel/UCmtyQOKKmrMVa... - Great Watching, unity game development.