Roblox (, ) is an online game platform and game creation system developed by Roblox Corporation that allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users. It was developed by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004, and released to the public in 2006. , the platform has reported an average of 85.3million daily active users. According to the company, its monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16.
The platform hosts millions of user-created games, created using Luau, a modified dialect of the programming language Lua and the platform's game engine, Roblox Studio. While Roblox is free-to-play, it features in-game purchases done through its virtual currency known as Robux, and game developers on the platform are able to create items that cost Robux. The platform hosts a large virtual economy centered around those items and Robux. Using the platform's Developer Exchange program, creators are able to exchange their earned Robux for real-world currency. The platform has been used to host virtual concerts and events, as well as advergames.
While Roblox started off small—both in playerbase and as a company—it began to grow rapidly in the second half of the 2010s. This growth was further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2020, over 5,000 games on Roblox had been played over a million times, and over 20 had been played over one billion times. Although critic reviews for Roblox have been positive, it has faced criticism concerning child safety and its content moderation, due to material pornographic or politically extremist in nature. It has been criticized for its alleged exploitative practices toward children and microtransactions. The platform has been restricted or completely blocked in several countries, including China, Egypt, Turkey, and Iraq.
Overview
Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system built around user-generated content and games. Games can be created by any user through the platform's game engine, Roblox Studio, and then shared to and played by other players. The games featured on Roblox vary in genre, from role-playing video games to ones centered around escaping prison, among others. The platform is made to appeal to a family-friendly audience, and has been described as a massively multiplayer online game (MMO).
While Roblox is free-to-play, it features a virtual currency known as "Robux" that can be purchased with real-world money. Robux can be used to purchase virtual items that the player can use on their virtual character (or "avatar") on the platform, or access games that require payment. As with games, avatar items on Roblox are mainly user-generated, though most items on the platform were made by Roblox themselves for most of the platform's history. Through the platform's Developer Exchange program, creators on the platform are able to exchange their earned Robux to real-world money. Roblox features a monthly service called Roblox Plus, with its subscribers gaining access to more features.
Virtual economy
Roblox features a large virtual economy centered around its virtual currency Robux. The currency allows users to buy, sell and create virtual items. Roblox has a service called Roblox Plus, a subscription that gives users discounts on Robux and in-game purchases, and allows members to upload user-created content on the market.
Many items on Roblox are user-generated. While only Roblox developers were able to create avatar items early on, the capabilities of user-generated content has expanded greatly over time. Since 2019, select users have gained the ability to publish avatar accessories, animations, bundles and more. Some items on Roblox have a "limited" status, with only a few being available and the price of the item based on supply and demand rather than a fixed price. These items function similarly to non-fungible tokens. The prices of limited items range, with the most valuable ones costing millions of Robux. After the original supply of that item runs out, players can resell them for a higher price. Additionally, users with an active Roblox Plus subscription are able to trade limiteds amongst each other. Limited items made by the community cannot be traded and this feature is restricted to official items.
Developers are able to create purchasable content through one-time purchases. Through the Roblox Developer Exchange program, users are able to exchange their earned Robux for real-world money, as long as they have at least 30,000 Robux. In 2020, Roblox reported that roughly 345,000 game developers on the platform earned money through the program. Avatar item creators have also been able to generate profit with the platform, with some individuals designing items as a full-time job. It has been reported that the highest-earning creators have earned over $100,000 a year from item sales.
A sizeable amount of scams are on Roblox, largely revolving around messages promoting websites and games that are designed to appear to give out free Robux. There are people in the community known as "beamers" who compromise Roblox accounts to steal and sell their items on the platform's black markets. They employ various techniques, such as creating phishing websites or create ploys in order to acquire a victim's session token. Once they gain access to the victim's account, these "beamers" steal and subsequently sell valuable limited items owned by the victims for real-world currency or cryptocurrency through marketplace sites or Discord chat rooms. The slang term "beaming" is commonly used to describe this entire process on Roblox. Roblox does offer hacking victims a "rollback" for their items, although this is only offered once per account.
Roblox Studio and game design
Roblox Studio is the platform's game engine and game development software. The engine and all games made on Roblox predominantly uses Luau, a dialect of the Lua 5.1 programming language. Since November 2021, the programming language has been open sourced under the MIT License. Some aspects of the engine were created using C++. To assist in the creation of games, Roblox Studio features multiple pre-made templates that users can modify.
As of 2020, Roblox reported that more than 2 million developers used Roblox Studio to create more than 20 million games per year. They also reported that a majority of developers were minors.
Games
Due to its status as a user-created games platform, Roblox has a variety of games; by July 2020, at least 20 games had been played more than one billion times, and at least 5,000 have been played more than one million times. Games on Roblox greatly range in genre, and the content of these games effects its age rating. These ratings are broken into different age groups: everyone, and players over the age of 9, 13, or 17. Games that are restricted to players over the age of 17 require ID verification to access.
TechCrunch noted in March 2021 that Roblox games are largely distinct from established traditions in free-to-play video games, finding that successful Roblox games were geared towards immediate satisfaction, and finding that the addition of tutorials significantly decreased player engagement, contrary to established wisdom about free-to-play games. Many companies have used Roblox to host advergames promoting their products.
Communication and age estimations Roblox allows players to communicate with each other in a variety of ways, such as through in-game chat and direct messaging. Voice chat is usable for players over the age of 13 that have their age verified. Players can join communities, where users can send messages in an internet forum-like environment. Players are able to add other users as friends. An additional tier of this system, known as "Trusted Friends", allows users to send unfiltered chat messages and personal information to each other. If one of the users is over the age of 18 while the other user is between 13 and 17, then both parties must prove that they know each other in real life. This is done through either mutual QR code scanning, or importing their phone contacts.
Users can only communicate with each other after they perform an age check, which is done through either ID verification or having a video of themselves analyzed by age estimation software. Communication is further restricted to only allow users in similar age groups to communicate with each other. For example, a user who is twelve years old can only communicate with users aged 9 to 15. Age verification and estimations are handled via Persona, a third-party provider of age verification software. While the age estimation features can result in inaccurate age group assignment, the user can provide their ID to correct their age manually.
History and development 2004–2009: Creation and early history
Roblox was created in 2004 by co-founders and software engineers David Baszucki and Erik Cassel. Before its creation, Baszucki and Cassel worked for Knowledge Revolution, a company that specialized in creating educational and physics simulation software. After Knowledge Revolution was acquired by MSC Software, the two left the company and Baszucki began investing in earlier social media sites like Friendster. Around this time, Baszucki came up with the idea of a physics sandbox with creation tools and a social networking aspect. Baszucki and Cassel began development on Roblox shortly afterwards, modeled after Baszucki's vision, and also created the Roblox Corporation. Early in its development, Roblox was known as DynaBlocks. It was determined early on in development that the two would design Roblox to rely entirely on user-generated content, only providing the tools necessary for people to develop games, as well as the server hosting later in development.
Baszucki and Cassel worked alone while making the earlier versions of Roblox, and created their own games on the platform before the creation tools were completed. These early versions of Roblox were extremely basic, with player avatars having not been animated yet and various features only being present in their most simplified form. They advertised Roblox on some websites, leading to a few dozen players joining the platform as playtesters. In mid-2006, the first two employees were hired to work on the platform's other features. These employees were Matt Dusek and John Shedletsky, with Dusek being responsible for working on the platform's communication aspects.
Roblox was released on September 1, 2006, with Roblox Studio being made available that same year. Games that were made by the community early in the platform's history included paintball games, haunted houses and model trains that players could ride. In 2008, the Roblox Corporation stopped actively creating its own games to demonstrate the platform's capabilities, becoming entirely reliant on user-created games. During this time in 2007, Roblox introduced the "Builders Club" membership subscription, which allowed for users to create more games under their account, sell virtual clothing, remove outside advertisements from the site and gain Robux daily. They subsequently added two tiers: Turbo Builders Club and Outrageous Builders Club. Early in the platform's history, it had two separate currencies: Robux and Tickets, with the latter often being referred to as "Tix".
2010–2015: Early growth
Roblox's growth continued throughout 2010 and the following years. By August 2011, Roblox had about 6.8million active users monthly, becoming the second-most popular kids entertainment site. Its profits continued to increase, with the platform's profit that year up 75% from 2010; in June 2011, the company held a fundraiser that raised over $4million. By January 2014, the platform's monthly player count had increased 10 to 12million monthly players, although a majority of those players did not have registered accounts and instead played as guests.