I grew up playing Roblox games (and later scripting in Studio) and the most memorable aspect was how surreal everything was. Most of the games were mishmashes of pre-existing assets, puerile humor, and pop culture references.
I remember one game in which you started off on a massive platform full of food, and had to shovel the food onto a conveyor belt that led into a giant person's mouth. If you yourself fell onto the conveyor belt, you'd be treated to a grand tour of the person's digestive system before being turned to poop and dropped into the toilet bowl. Inside the toilet there was an obstacle course, and at the end of this obstacle course there was an array of fighter jets that you could use to get back onto the food platform. The jets didn't have throttle: they either went super fast or not at all. So the poop-people would bail out of their planes in mid-air, and the jet would crash into the baseplate, usually killing someone below.
This was back when there was no way for developers to monetize their games. Some games had "VIP T-shirts" that gave you tools or allowed you to enter a special room, but devs had neither the technical ability nor the incentive to "do it for the money". Most games were like the one I described: bizarre one-off projects created with the intent of showing something really cool. A few "classics" kept stable player-bases, but for the most part the front page was a constant churn of weirdness.
One further step: I sat there reading BASIC books in the library but never had the correct setup to actually try them, so I would play them in my head (we had computers, just not the BASIC interpreter).
They were not that much different than a choose your own adventure book.
We had radio shows that transmitted software over the airwaves... still think that was incredible! It wasn't very reliable, though (and not very fun to listen to).
Unless you bought a c64 and realized you can't use any old tape recorder, but had to buy a proprietary (albeit much more reliable) commodore tape deck.
I had one of those. Then I got a 1541 disk drive as a gift one year. Ah, the angry look on my dad's face in the wee hours of the morning having been awakened by that obnoxious clacking sound caused by the disk drive encryption methods of the day.
When the kids who grew up on Roblox start throwing around the word "old", that's how those of use who grew up on MUDs know that we're actually old now.
Ah yes, I remember the first time I was asked--with a tad of suspicion--what a MUD is, and explaining it in terms of its graphical successors, themselves now antique, which I never touched.
Roblox is the reason I'm a developer today. To be fair, I got in on it pretty early (late '07 I think), but its been around since 2004. There are high school students current applying to college that never knew a world without it.
This is actually how old Quake III-era FPS maps used to be. I played Star Trek: Elite Force (and Elite Force II), which were Star Trek-based Quake III games that supported third player multiplayer maps.
You had plenty of maps where the creators tried to match the game's feel, and so many that were completely unrelated. Giant bathrooms where you are the size of a mouse was one of the standouts I remember.
This level of customization is often just something businesses have moved away from allowing. And considering the "condo" problem with Roblox, it's understandable why: https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game... (The bathroom map I recall above, had a photo of a topless woman in a hidden area.)
Padman maps were the ones where you were shrunken. They are one of my all time favorite FPS experiences. The homogenized nature of modern games really makes me miss all the modding that went on. When I was a teenager we made our own maps in Doom1-3. I dabbled in Q1-3 maps but it got a lot less accessible due to learning curve. Doom was perfect because it was 2D.
The Doom mapping/modding community is still very active. I recently played an incredible 'megawad' called Ancient Aliens that includes this wild level that uses the Build engine trick of simulating a two-story level with silent teleporters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_WxLORClZg&list=PLFK2eL5cls...
I had no idea. Maybe I should pick it back up. I remember buying the Deth editor and it came on a few floppies. It was a lot of fun . We made our middle school and high school into maps (didn’t everyone?).
I am glad my kids have Minecraft, but there was something special about that era in my heart. It really taught me the joy of building things I intrinsically value.
The problem is many modern games are designed for maximum monetization and a shelf life. You want a community enough to keep people playing til [game name +1] but not past that so people all buy the next one. Allowing players to make custom maps and modes would let them bypass the carefully crafted progression and DLC systems put in place to extract more time and cash.
Now I'm having flashbacks to the Battlefield mod community from HS and college. Pirates, Galactic Conquest, Desert Combat, and so many other amazing ones that had a ton of players because of lack of server monetization and developer lock down.
I have an 11-year old daughter who finished or was able to play to the ending of MineCraft around 2016/2017. She's been playing it since 2014. She discovered that there is an ending and she did hers too. She began playing Roblox around 2016.
So, when I read “grew up playing Roblox”, I had to read up Roblox's history to understand my bearing.
This is surreal.
She's been asking me that she need to become a premium member to create Roblox artifacts/items. She is creative. I need to look into this. She meets her friends, hangs out with them there. She has even taught her 4-year old sister to play and wander around with her on Roblox.
I'm not a parent, and certainly not your child's parent, but...
Please help her with that. What's she's asking it basically what I asked of my parents at her age. I did things like run a BBS and write stupid programs, and today I'm a senior software developer with a job that pays quite well. And I still love programming.
While she doesn't technically need it to be creative, doing things that interest you is a huge boost in the creativity and learning departments. She probably won't learn what you or she expects to, and that's even better, IMO.
Of course, I don't know what else you're already doing for her like that, and there's certainly a point where you're just throwing money away at whims. But I just felt the need to put this out there.
I don't agree. My kids are into Minecraft and TikTok, not Roblox (so my opinion is very objective ;))
The fun in minecraft is creating. The fun in TikTok is both consuming and creating. I know you can create Roblox games, but most kids I see only consume.
I think all 3 can be fun for them, as long as they can limit their screen time.
Flash games and animations is basically what really got me into the design side of web dev. Before that I was all about the code, then making silly little flash games based around in-jokes between me and my friends is what got me into graphics, animations, etc.
The global hate for flash (which is fairly warranted) drowns out the absolutely colossal impact it had on pushing the web from a purely informational thing to a platform for entertainment.
I like Flash as an idea, its just the Adobe Flash Player that everyone had a problem with. It would have received a lot more love if there were alternate implementations available, especially open source ones. It's kind of similar to how you can often find Windows users complaining about "Java" when they mean the annoying Oracle JRE that sneaks into installs and is a security mess. Nobody ever complains about OpenJDK.
I've only had a brief play with Roblox and didn't get to the good/weird stuff. This year we've found some fantastically strange creations on Dreams, plus a lot of the models/audio/logic/etc. that people create are set to be reusable in any other project.
Well worth a try if you have access to a Playstation.
Sounds like the internet when it was younger, and things like geocities allowed anyone to have a free website. People put up anything and everything, niche interests to fan sites, complete with animated skulls or torches or mailboxes, scrolling text, music players, and visitor counters.
I don't remember exactly, there were tons of games like that and a lot of them blended together in my mind. The most similar game I can specifically remember is the Human Body Obstacle Course:
Don't consider Roblox a traditional game. It's basically Gmod for kids and with official corporate support and a official way for developers to wring money out of its consumers with micro transactions.
More platform than game. It's really easy for developers to develop a game, easily implement real money transactions, and have an audience.
My 8 year old and 5 year old girls spend literally their entire allowance on Robux. They would spend literally the entire day playing if I allowed it. The developer toolset is crazy strong too, I bet they're not even 10% of the way with their market penetration.
Same here, with daughters 4 and 7! They beg me for Robux on a frequent basis and 100% of their weekly allowance goes towards it.
I have no doubt Roblux will continue to make mountains of money. The amount of people playing it is mind blowing and I’m sure there are additional ways to monetize their ecosystem.
As a side note - it’s cool to see them play so well together and I even play with them too to engage with them on something they enjoy. On the other hand, I sometimes get concerned with how much they play and how addictive the micro transactions are for kids their age. Then again, I spent most of my days growing up playing games like EverQuest, WoW, learning to program, etc. , so it’s hard for me to judge.
Remember arcade machines and scrounging up quarters?
If it's like that, IMO it's OK. If it's pseudo-gambling or dark-patterned squeezing all your money out, that's not OK. Roblox is more like the former, usually.
Oh, I remember 194x and Gauntlet being a bit abusive and pay-to-win. ;)
I disagree with you. I don't think that pay-by-usage is inherently bad, for adults or kids.
I also feel like... it's probably best if one doesn't encounter these kinds of things as an adult for the first time. What's better to learn moderation with?
My kids (11, 9, 6) have, so far, largely shrugged off microtransaction things and think they're kinda dumb... But they've spent maybe 10% of their discretionary money since birth on Pokemon cards, which scratches many of the same itches. I don't feel like A) it's bad for them, or B) that they're going to look back at the time and money spent and regret it. But they have regretted spending a little bit on Pokemon cards that they'd later rather have spent on something else, and that's a great lesson.
I mean, I'm not necessarily taking a side on GP's claim, but don't be disingenuous.
Should firearms for kids be illegal? Should driving for kids be illegal? Should gambling for kids be illegal? Should starring in porn for kids be illegal? Should data-mining the behaviour of children be illegal? Should paying children to work in mines be illegal?
Obviously the principle would be something along the lines of "games with microtransactions are potentially hazardous to the buyer in a way, or to a degree, such that while we should allow adults to make their own choices, we should protect children from the consequences of being partially-formed minds, and so we should avoid targeting children with that business model". Same as gambling, or selling your PII to get free services, or starring in porn. I'm not saying it's a slam-dunk argument, I'm saying the structure of the argument is obvious and straightforward. And I expect every adult to be at least partially sympathetic to it, even the ones who end the paragraph with "but, on the balance, freedom is more important, so it should not be illegal".
Well. I admit. I mostly agree with GP's claim. But not with high confidence.
The way micro transactions work in those games (effectively for skins, special privileges in games, etc.), I think the toy comparison isn’t terribly far off the mark. Guns, starring in porn, working in mines, etc. is extreme in comparison.
Whether it be tycoon games, social adventure games like About Me, Royal High, etc., it’s basically the new form of entertainment for kids. About the time my daughter became generally disinterested in toys was about the time she started liking Roblox.
A toy for a kid, as fleeting as they can be with new toys, is a physical object that can represent clearly some monetary value.
They know that their parents won't be buying many of them, if they have a lot they can see the toys peppered around and parents can point to those and say "no more toys, you don't play enough with all of the ones we got you already".
A skin, special privileges, etc., are quite abstract concepts for a kid to tie it to a monetary value, they buy a skin, they can use it in game and... That's it, they will want the next fix, a new skin, more privileges, it's a bottomless pit of purely virtual assets that are easy to detach from money.
That's my take at least, from being a kid in the 90s and comparing my experience when I got real toys vs when I got digital toys (MMO subscriptions like Ultima Online, for example). I can't imagine how much harder for my parents it'd have been if instead of a subscription I was asking for them to pay or give me enough allowance to buy every item I wanted in a game. It'd be hell.
True, but in a lot of ways their vbucks/robux/etc. thing is equivalent of anything else that is paid for that has no physical or value going forward. Do I really need to do anything ppv or movies on demand? It's fleeting enjoyment much like those are.
And in the case of Fortnite and Roblox, the games are free so it does make sense to pay at least some into it (there's no such thing as a free lunch) and thankfully none of the things you pay for give the player an advantage so it is mostly what elicits an "I want my avatar to look like this" reaction. Plus, it teaches limits and in the case of my daughter, she weighs what she really wants in the game vs just seeing something shiny. In Adopt Me, that is mostly ride/fly potions for pets she has raised and turned to neon via raising 4 and merging.
I do, however, think there should be limits on it. But I think lessons can be learned from the experience all the same.
Aren't the micro-transactions a bit beside the point? Those seem more harmful to parents' wallets. Surely it's the addictive nature of the games that is more harmful to kids?
If the principle is that anything hazardous for kids should be banned, it makes sense, at least in theory. In practice I think it might change a lot of what is currently considered "part of childhood", though.
My 9 year old brother plays Roblox and discusses the trade values of pets in the games Bubblegum Simulator and Adopt Me on Fandom all the time, but doesn't spend actual money on any microtransactions in the game. Still, I'm surprised to see that there are people that will charge and pay huge amounts of money for rare digital pets in the game.
I see this sentiment often from parents. It baffles me.
If you made decisions in your youth that you think were mistakes, you should be passing on the lessons of those mistakes. Not stepping back in non-judgment because "who am I to say". You are their parent!
Yeah, sorry for the confusion - that sentence likely could have been more complete. As others mentioned, I feel as though I turned out fine and I regret next to none of that time spent.
One thing parents discover is that if it's between dopamine and "lessons", dopamine wins 100% of the time. My 16 year old right now is playing games instead of doing his homework. He's going to have 2 "F"s this semester, just like the last, and one before that, and one before that. Doesn't give a shit - never experienced any hardship (yet).
Oh no, I'm not "waiting". I'm trying to convince him that he's making bad choices, that he's making his own life dramatically harder in the long run, and so on, trying to get him to actually think what he wants to be when he grows up and create a plan of some sort for how to get there, maybe. He even nods in agreement. The moment I turn around he fires up a game or YouTube and he's right back to his dopamine cycle. So I'm afraid the school of hard knocks it'll have to be.
There's this misconception among non-parents (or even parents of well behaved kids) that kids are robots and they will automatically listen to whatever "lessons" you give them. That may or may not happen, depending on the kid, and you really have little to no control over whether it does happen.
And gaming, social media, etc, companies aren't making any of this any easier, unfortunately. This is something we'll have to pay a heavy price for in 10 years or so, that much is pretty certain.
I'll play devil's advocate here: is he making a bad choice because of simple dopamine addiction or does he actually not want to go down the path that you want him to?
My 17 year-old cousin is flunking school because (in his parents' eyes) he was "addicted" to online gaming, yet strangely when with other family members his "addiction" symptoms would disappear and he would be helpful, diligent and talkative.
He'd even listen to advice and help out unprompted. As in, you literally take a phone call and come back and he's doing the dishes. Not playing Fortnite, not watching YouTube, scrubbing plates.
The reality of the situation, that's painfully obvious to everyone except his mum and dad, is that a) there is some sort of breakdown in the relationship that has nothing to do with online technology (he has his iPhone on him 24/7 and will go hours without using it outside the home) and b) he fully understands that dedicating himself to his studies will help him follow the path his parents want for him - it's just not what he wants.
Drug addicts disengage from society well before they become addicted. I don't see any reason why "Dopamine addicts" are any different.
I'd be happy to support whatever "path" he wants at this point, though it'd of course be much easier for me to support something related to STEM. Best I can tell, he doesn't have any plan or path. He just expects to ride on my coattails for the rest of his life, which I articulated to him many time is not something I'm willing to allow.
In contrast, growing up in rural Russia I had no coattails to ride on (and my father told me this countless times), so I'm a rather extreme example of social upward mobility.
My kids almost never do what I tell them unless they can see the point in it themselves.
To me, it sounds like the school is either bad or the match with where your son is right now is wrong.
I've always been curious, also as a kid, but I do remember most of the class mates spending most of their time staring blankly out in the void. The only reasonable conclusion is that those lessons were wrong.
Just like if you design a UI and 70% of your users can't use it. Then we blame the designer, not the laziness of the users.
As an adult, I've since learned that large parts of the establishment doesn't regard people as humans. They don't care.
I'm a middle school teacher. I try to create engaging, interesting lessons for a clear path for why things are worthwhile. I also only teach what many students consider "fun stuff": robotics, "How to Make Almost Anything," etc. My programs and classes have done pretty well in the past on metrics of engagement, learning, student satisfaction, etc-- partially because of the cheat code of having material that's pretty intrinsically interesting.
There is still a pretty big subset of students that without the threat of enforcement or bad grades leading to parental action, will do almost nothing. It's especially visible now with some of my students being remote-- it's a constant battle to avoid previously engaged, excited, and interested students from just popping a Fortnite window open and escaping the class discussion.
I can make 75% of my class time fun; I can make it pretty obvious why the skills we practice are extremely valuable stuff in both the near term and the long term whether or not they decide to be an engineer one day. But I can't make every minute of class time more immediately rewarding than playing Fortnite.
Case in point: one of my son's classes is video game design. That's one of those "F"s he's going to get. I've looked at it as I was helping him, the class is actually surprisingly good. If this is not sufficiently engaging, nothing will ever be.
And as far as parental action, parents can't really do shit nowadays. Nearly 100% of homework is done on a computer, which of course also runs games and YouTube, and provides endless opportunities for distraction.
re: nothing to be done: There's always spyware/locking down devices/etc. You -can- do stuff, but you need to really think about whether it's worth it.
I hear you saying the class is surprisingly good. Just for anyone else, though: keep an open mind and open ears about these kinds of classes. There is a whole lot of "fun STEM" out there that is really... not. Nothing is more soul-crushing than something that's supposed to be fun being mindless small steps way below one's ability.
I do my very best to -not- have my classes be in that category, most of the time.
Spyware or locking down doesn't really work in this day and age if the kid is using a Windows PC. In most (if not all) Windows PCs you have local access to you can create an administrative account not subject to parental controls or anything else. No admin access is required to create it. This is trivially discoverable through Google.
And I think the class I mentioned is genuinely good, actually. It's how I'd teach the subject - builds up from simple to complex, using an industry-leading game engine (Unity), interesting assignments, etc. Of course kids nowadays want to build an AAA 3D game right off the bat, but there's value in understanding that this doesn't work, and you have to start simple.
If your kid bypasses controls, though, that's something else you can address. Surely you have some levers you can pull.
My eldest is currently locked down on devices because he googled a couple of answers to the online advanced math class he was taking. (It was stupid; he had honestly completed much harder problems but for some reason decided to cheat on a couple of easy ones).
He's not going to bypass controls because A) he knows he will get access back (carrot), and B) he knows that if he further abuses trust that things can get much worse (stick)... and of course C) he knows that we will know if controls are bypassed.
Surely you have some degree of stuff you do for him that is in excess of what is legally required of being his guardian.
I'm not parent of a teen, yet, and I know things are difficult to implement (it caused enough angst to restrict and lock down my 11 year old -- it certainly wasn't the most painless option in the near term).
But you don't want to keep heading towards an inevitable cliff... fight the good fight. I wish you the best, and I'm sorry if this is tonedeaf and naive.
> The only reasonable conclusion is that those lessons were wrong
There's another reasonable conclusion: some kids just don't give a shit no matter what you do. That much is plainly obvious to any parent who has such a kid.
It is interesting to me that this is a commercial entity. It looks to me more like it should have been an open source platform. It kinda has that vibe to it.
Yes, multiplayer is a good point. Roblox is an easy way to make games that are
1) Multiplayer (skipping all netcode, account systems, and so forth)
2) Have a secured, safe, and trusted way to make transactions
If you were to try and make a multiplayer, microtransaction based game in Unity, that is a large amount of work, especially for a younger developer, and it's _critical_. Messing up payment code has huge consequences.
How do they get away with being essentially a platform itself for multiple games and not run afoul of the same restrictions that prevent cloud gaming platforms being sold in the App Store?
That's a very good question. Also it seems that Roblox games are scripted in Lua. How do they get away with running downloaded user scripts inside their app?
The App Store review guidelines prohibit this very clearly:
> Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not [...] download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app [...]
There is only one narrow exception which clearly does not apply to Roblox for several reasons; for example it's only for HTML5 content.
Tim Cook just testified to Congress that all developers are treated equally, but this seems like a clear case where an app that is "too big to fail" gets special treatment.
because most companies do not recognize roblox as a platform, they recognize it as a game. nobody realizes that the development of games on it is on a similar level to web development, it's like explaining social media to congressmen.
it's not them getting special treatment purposefully. it's been on the iOS app store since 2012.
apple's policy here is a bad one. if it were fully remove, true web browser diversity could come to iOS, and roblox could finally do JIT compilation of Lua, among so many other possibilities.
> it's not them getting special treatment purposefully. it's been on the iOS app store since 2012.
So they're grandfathered in? I wonder how much of their valuation can be attributed to the fact that it's essentially impossible for anyone to make a competitor available on iOS?
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. This seems like a reasonable question, and yeah Apple definitely breaks their App Store rules when needed if it will make them more money.
And I for one think it is very good that Apple does not require them to break Roblox up into multiple games. It is nice having one game that I generally know what its content is like and mechanics are versus the crap that my kids want to download from the App Store.
It's Roblox for the next generation, and extremely fun even to me when I tried it out as an adult. I hope Roblox expands into VR or recroom will eat their lunch. VR is the future and people spend HOURS in there playing all sorts of official games and community made games.
VR probably has a higher per capita usage among kids than 30 year olds to be fair. My first graphics card was bequeathed to me at the tender age of 11 back when GPUs were a niche thing
You can play recroom with an Oculus Quest, PSVR, or regular screen if you want. The Quest 2 base model costs $300 and is entirely standalone, no PC required.
I have a Valve Index ($1,000 + gaming PC + installing 2 lighthouses on my walls), and while my experience is definitely better (other than the cord), the Quest provides a comparable experience for beat saber, rec room, pistol whip, which comprise 90% of what I use my Index for anyway.
Yep. The time is upon us. My friends who aren't even big into games are getting quests because of super hot and beat saber. And Christmas is coming around soon.
If VR fails at this point I would be surprised. If Facebook got some competition it would be good for long term VR development. But there's already a good amount of VR hype and great games and it won't be going away anytime soon.
Quest 2 is $299, that's a barrier but not insane. Also, Rec Room is not VR only, there are clients for iOS, PC and PS4 that run in a mode with no VR (obviously VR isn't even an option for iOS). That's not as much platform coverage as Roblox, but it's not bad. Definitely worth checking out even if you don't have VR.
The only thing VR is going to eat in the next 5-10 years is (more) dirt. It’s still niche and I have yet to see any application to make it not niche. Including that.
VR is going to be as big as smart phones. It'll kill Hollywood, create new forms of entertainment, and entirely new economies will arise along the (Twitch, Patreon, OnlyFans)-axes.
Why do you think Zuckerberg cares so much? It might be the smartest bet he's made since Instagram.
It has the potential, but it is still so hampered by the physical constraints. You look like an idiot, you're not very comfortable, performance is meh, battery life is horrible and you need ample space to play in.
Even if all of this was fixed tomorrow, many people have been burnt by previous generations, and don't have much hype left for VR. I've mothballed my Go, my friends sold their Rifts. Fun as a gimmick but as a main gaming/media platform unthinkable.
While I agree that it's probably inevitable that it will become a staple device like a smartphone is today, I wouldn't hold my breath.
I get that Roblox is a platform and not just another game on the App Store. It appears to be popular and addicting to children, but most children don't have money. Is all of their revenue coming strictly from children's allowances or is this something that has potential to appeal to older people?
ha, you don't sound like you have kids. My kids love Roblox... You're birthday is coming up, what do you want? Roblox gift card. Grandma wants to get you a birthday, xmas, ____ gift, what do you want? Get me a roblox gift card or robucks as they are called. My kids now design shrits and sell them online and take the money and spend it on roblocks. Roblocks is also a way for kids to connect online. For example, mine talk to their cousins that live in another state and their friends from a neighborhood we moved away from.
> We have experienced rapid growth in the three months ended June 30, 2020, September 30, 2020 and for a portion of the three months ended March 31, 2020, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic given our users have been online more as a result of global COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies. For example, our bookings increased 171% from the nine-months ended September 30, 2019 to the nine months ended September 30, 2020. We do not expect these activity levels to be sustained, and in future periods we expect growth rates for our revenue to decline, and we may not experience any growth in bookings or our user base during periods where we are comparing against COVID-19 impacted periods (i.e. the three months ended March 31, 2020, June 30, 2020, and September 30, 2020). Our historical revenue, bookings and user base growth should not be considered indicative of our future performance. We believe our overall acceptance, revenue growth and increases in bookings depend on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, our ability to:
> We have a history of net losses and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future.
We have incurred net losses since our inception, and we expect to continue to incur net losses in the near future. We incurred net losses of $97.2 million, $86.0 million, and $203.2 million for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, respectively. As of September 30, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $484.0 million.
It's boilerplate for companies that lose money! Most IPOing companies outside of the tech sector certainly don't have this in their S-1.
It's only not notable because if you've even skimmed the rest of the S-1, you already know whether they make money or not. If you haven't, it's possibly the most notable thing there. It's the single bit of information that tells you most about the company's historical financial performance.
If you're spending more than you're making, then you're almost certainly projecting LTV.
The big, falsifiable assumption here is that your acquisition sources will keep sending you users of the same quality. Because of the way that ML systems work, this tends to not be true, and if you are using long windows it will both take you a long time to realise this, and cost you a bunch of money.
This is normally how companies go bust/stop growing as a result of LTV models.
While in a vacuum larger losses aren't painting the full picture, but then if you take their revenue growth only increasing by 70% into context it looks even worse!
They probably have investors who would rather they have net losses and grow top line growth as fast as possible. This is software, not a service provided by people or involving physical goods. So its hard to believe they can't tweak profitability when they want to. It could be bad for their growth, particularly if they have to monetize the game more. But that's a reasonable proposition for an investment.
My kids have access to some of the best games in their Steam library, but most of the time they prefer to discover new games on Roblox. I just hope they don't force advertising into the Roblox worlds, that would destroy the experience.
My daughter did that at first - now she has a private server where she and her friends (all 9 years old) build their own games to play with each other. They all build 3D models in the world builder, and even some Lua scripting to alter mechanics.
It's a pretty neat way of getting kids into game dev.
That's awesome. Feel like there's a new revolution of user created virtual world building unfolding. And the kids today are surfing the wave.
Dreams, Vrchat, Roblox, neosvr and probably many others...
I hope there will be much more innovation in this space because it feels like powerful interactive content could be created in much more user friendly way than with lua scripting. Is it finally time for a visual programming language revolution?
The owner of a "place" (game saved from the editor to the Roblox cloud) can set the permissions for who can participate in the live, collaborative, editing environment (invite basis), and who can play it (public, friends, or editors).
The only problem with the collaborative editing (which is very very cool) is that it's really easy to click and delete/move/duplicate huge chunks of the game without realizing it. But, if you save often, the built in version control is really nice.
It's pretty neat though, except for the marketplace is absolutely filled with assets that contain malware. A script can be linked with any object in the game, used to give the object life. But, that script has nearly global control.
I think the scripting and standard libraries would really benefit from a huge overhaul, but it's pretty neat. There's quite a bit of friction getting started though. Much of it isn't intuitive, with magic undocumented names required, and you'll usually find well meaning, but very beginner, game developers providing colorful information in the forums.
If I had to guess, they're using the "places" that every user gets allocated. You can have a bunch of them, but only so many active at once. Maybe you can adjust the privacy settings for a place to allow only your friends. Roblox does all the hosting and provides the IDE (Roblox Studio) and everything. All the games on Roblox are somebody's "place" that they've made public and developed into a fun game.
This is from my own experience >5 years ago, so it could be outdated.
I recently had a director reach out to me about joining their team to work on rebuilding an ad system from scratch, so unfortunately your fear may very well be valid.
Correct, they used to display regular ads on their website (but never in the actual games) for those users that did not purchase the Premium subscription. Users with the premium subscription would then see only user-created ads for user-created content.
It was honestly quite jarring and this new approach is better for developers on the platform, as they can reach way more people.
I think it would be naive to not imagine advertising as part of the long term strategy for a platform like this. After they go public, it's going to be a big tool in their toolkit for profitability.
exact opposite, they've made a 180 on advertising. there used to be external offsite ads shown on the website, which were removed. there used to be a developer API to show video ads for revenue within games, which was removed. they've cut down heavily on event promotions from companies (think movies that appeal to kids)
they have an extremely high revenue business model off actual customers, so they don't really need to do advertising, there's plenty of other ways to get more profitable.
for example, they're at the scale where they might be able to do what Dropbox did by running more of their own infrastructure to save big.
Sadly that’s true. I’m very careful with the screen time of my 6yo kid, but the pandemic made it very hard. Many of his friends in the school started to use Roblox.
So I played with him to check it, it ended with me uninstalling it: First time use and you’ll see tons of in-app purchases to build your character (all optional but kids that are starting to read cannot tell the difference), then the app is like the Wild West of ads and special offers.
The Apple store classifies the app as 12+, and I think they are right (as a father I started to see the appeal of the closed App Store and Apple Arcade).
The sad part is that it could be a great platform to experiment creating games and coding, is like the Alan Kay vision of Croquet but perverted by ads.
Minetest¹ is one game that I think in theory could be a great creative platform for kids, it’s kind of Minecraft + Roblox — a Minecraft clone except everything besides the most basic engine functionality — even mobs — is implemented as a mod — which is just a Lua script + (3D model, texture, and/or sound) assets. Edit: and each server can have any mods it wants and the client will load any it doesn’t have locally.
Honestly, it's not all that different from something like the Play Store. There's a LOT of games that are trying to get people (who don't know any better) to spend money. But there's also a lot of real quality games, too. Many of the best games have the option to spend money, but don't shove it down your throat.
As an example, I played Bee Swarm Simulator with my daughter and I really enjoyed it. I decided to buy some robux and spend it on the game.I did this not because it gave me something I needed to enjoy the game, but because I felt the developer deserved it for creating something that entertained me.
Why? Because of two things: you do not need to re-learn a UI (the same way people would play mods in W3, CS, etc.) and because it is hard/there is friction in starting a new game. Think about it, why do you spend hours thinking about what movie you're going to watch on Netflix just to re-watch a movie you've already watched? It's easier for your brain.
If my kids (late elementary, early middle school) and their friends are any guide, it's doing extremely well.
The thing my kids most consistently spend their allowance on is hypixel (a minecraft curated multiplayer server with some scenario-based games is the best way I can describe it).
I found my 8 year old playing hypixel. I know jack about Minecraft, so I couldn't understand how come he was having some kind of chat dialog with someone. The only thing I've ever shown him on his Fedora laptop was how to log in, open a terminal and and start Minecraft from the command line.
It seems that he taught himself to find the web browser, then find google, then search for Minecraft resources, then enter urls for Hypixel and Mineplex into Minecraft.
I was torn between pride and trepidation of what's to come.
As someone who’s 17 - this is exactly how I learned about computers, but when I was 7 (so 10 years ago yeah). I will say that my parents turned on a chat filter pretty quickly, as incredible amounts of obscene stuff was posted on lots of the random servers I played on.
Hypixel is pretty great (I actually still play sometimes!), and they have a good curse filter and it’s definitely family friendly.
To be honest, I spent a ridiculous amount of time on MineCraft over the past 10 years (definitely over 5k+ hours), and it’s taught me an incredible amount. It’s where I picked up my first O Reilly book, on Minecraft mods, where I learned for the first time how to self host a server, and also where I made some really great friends.
I’d be more worried about your kid finding something like social media FROM Minecraft - for example, I spent a ridiculous amount of time on Reddit, which I found through MC. As a kid whose parents don’t really care about what I do on the internet, unlimited access to viewing whatever I wanted wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
If you have any minecraft modding resources to recommend, I'd love to find some to do some simple, relatable things with the kids. (We're way past scratch, onto javascript [still plenty to do here to get the basics completed], but I like to bring in "more interesting" things like react-native or minecraft mods.)
Hi. I'm 16 and got into programming in a similar way but I can't in good conscience say that making Minecraft mods is a good way of learning programming. It's a pain in the ass. There's practically no documentation and you usually find yourself scrolling through deobfuscated game code trying to make sense of the thing and figure how the game works. I don't think it's a good way of learning. Don't get me wrong, getting started programming by making things that you want to make is an excellent way to make it enjoyable rather than a chore but trying to write Minecraft mods and figure out what to do is frustrating and grueling.
I got into programming with 12 with very little actual motivation to program anything. I read a book, did the exercises and understood pretty much everything on first try. It took me around a month to get through the book. After that I never used my programming skills until I was 16 and wanted to make Minecraft mods.
Joining IRC a modding channel and talking to Mojang devs every now and then was a pretty interesting experience.
I doubt that this is possible nowadays, especially after Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang.
My memory is failing me but I also saw Drew DeVault on IRC using his former online nick and since I pretty much used IRC exclusively for minecraft related things he must have done something related to minecraft back then as well.
I mostly agree but it can be nice to see your code doing something actionable and visual rather than the alternative more traditional approach to learning programming, printing to the terminal.
I have never actually played minecraft but have watched hundreds of hours of minecraft videos. It could just be my personal filter bubble, but it seems to be going through a huge boom among streamers right now.
The appeal is that it is some sort of a Second Life or Metaverse for these streamer personalities who otherwise have no "physical" opportunities to interact outside of voice chat. In these worlds, they have towns, homes, pranks, disputes, wars, and lots of opportunities for highly entertaining roleplaying in general.
I mostly watch virtual youtubers (pekora from hololive in particular) but if you're not into virtual youtubers, the mod'd OfflineTV server is also great. Michael Reeves will probably appeal to the people on HN. Right now there's a nuclear war going on and Reeves thinks he can win by programming an army of self-replicating turtles using Lua: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/805937812 The guy with nukes is the dictator of the server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrtKTFZvK5Y
My theory for making platforms that make money is: facilitate competition or creation. Any platform that facilitates competition or creation is ripe for $$$.
Roblox was a fairly big part of my childhood, it made programming exciting and got me learning. I remember reaching the front page with my game at no.1 with the most players online and reaching 350k+ plays. After that hanging out in script builders was a lot of fun also (is that still a thing?)
It was such a great experience, had a lot of fun, thank-you to the original devs for the good times :)
I also grew up playing Roblox, and it's how I learned programming. I probably logged thousands of hours in script builders. My life definitely turned out very different thanks to Roblox.
For those not in the know, script builders were places that were just an empty map, but that allowed anyone in the server to load in their own scripts - so people would create and run custom weapons, power armor, admin commands, etc. and play around with each other. There was a very dedicated community of programmers that played them for years, and I'm still friends with some people I met through them like 7 years ago.
I think as a genre they're pretty dead, though - Roblox tightened security around loading arbitrary scripts that broke all the script builders several times, and now had replication filtering so that client-side scripts can't set properties. You probably could still make cool swords, but they'd need to use proper RemoteFunctions for client-server RPC, meaning all the old scripts are broken.
Yep definitely had a lot of fun in those places. I remember loads of people logging on injecting admin command scripts (wasn’t it something like Person210’s admin commands that everyone used?)
One of my more vivid memories was making a script that would inject a train station that only I had access to, with a train that would take me to a distant planet with god-mode weapons and aircraft. Had a lot of fun with that! This must have been back in 2008/09
I never went into game dev. I started off as a junior in web development, worked my way up to contracting for some UK financial services companies working on some large projects. More recently I’ve spent the better part of a year on my own startup in proptech.
Game dev was something that appealed to me when I was younger (mainly because of Roblox) but I never really considered a career in it.
That's a cool looking startup. I can see from the sample report that most of the data is aggregated from publicly available info.
I'm assuming you are scraping the property pictures from a realestate sale site (in Australia the market is dominated by realestate.com.au). How are you getting around copyright issues?
Also, who is your target customer? I'm curious who requires $50 of property reports every month. Is it real estate agents using this a quick way to generate brochures/flyers?
It's a super interesting point: why are these games so appealing to tweens and are dismissed as shit to everyone else? I spent about 10 hours playing a game on the platform called Bee Swarm Simulator and some other game where you build a rocket and I think the answer is that it's actually a social platform first, then a game dev platform. In financial news everyone is comparing it to Unity in an attempt to price the IPO, but I think Roblox probably in a class of its own.
My kids FaceTime their friends and play Roblox together, the bee game and adopt me. And the obbys and piggy. All they want is Robux. They like Minecraft too but there are Minecraft like games inside Roblox too. It’s nuts. Definitely buying this stock.
This is exactly it - they're fairly simple games (in some cases) but the social dynamics are what makes them.
In the current pandemic setup where my kids are so isolated Roblox has been a huge win as it's so much like a digital playground for them to hang out on.
> Games look boring AF to me, but tweens seem to love em.
I saw my nephew spend _hours_ in Roblox manning a virtual restaurant cash register for some incredibly minuscule amount of Roblox bucks (like, pennies worth). That’s when I knew this was going the be the biggest thing ever.
Can you explain what this means for someone who is too old to “get” Roblox? Was he earning a minuscule amount of robux or was he spending a minuscule amount of robux? If he was earning them, how does that work? Where does that money come from? Are there ads? Or some sort of time-limiting mechanism?
Earning, I’m assuming paid by either the game itself or the virtual “owners” of the restaurant, ads are there, but “paid” for by USERS, for their in game services.
What do you mean by time-limiting mechanism? Parental controls?
I had the same thought when my 10 year old showed me the games he plays on Roblox. Absolutely awful graphics, gameplay, "story", etc, but they are _obsessed_ with them.
On the other hand the graphics are simple enough that it runs smoothly on phones, tablets, and hand-me-down computers from the mid-2000s, which is what many kids are running.
It's gotten my eldest son into Lua programing and 3D modelling, so I have no problems with the platform as it currently is.
A few of the games/servers were interesting: Phantom Forces was a reasonably well polished FPS, and the Murder Mystery games (sneaky murderer vs sheriff and villagers, typical social deduction/betrayal game) were pretty fun.
Hoping it doesn't get completely and totally overrun with ads.
I think part of it (as some other comments have alluded to) is that maybe the low quality production brings the kids closer to it because they feel like they could possibly build something if they wanted to. Or that someone like them built the game they are playing. It’s perhaps more relatable than some ultra polished AAA title.
Not even just a feeling - they really can build these experiences themselves. I just watched our 5-year old kitbash together a city full of cars in about 4 hours, which is now online for anyone to visit.
I find the platform very appealing even as an adult, as you can script in Lua, and then watch as hundreds of visitors interact with what you just wrote. This week I hacked the Bad Apple music video to run on Roblox, and then had a great time seeing people react to it.
Wow. Thank you for making that connection in my mind. I spent a lot of hours with Flash games growing up but have struggled to understand why teens like Roblox or mobile games so much.
So like flash games that a lot of us grew up with then. There is a lot to be said when the games load in seconds so you can jump from game to game and the novelty value is high.
This is probably a really risky investment: Every parent I know has a "kid stole my credit card and bought hundreds of dollars of Robux on it" story. While I've reversed the ones that happened in my own family, it took my tech expertise and some research to figure out how to do so (via Google Play, where the refund request button is deliberately extremely obfuscated)... many parents probably just accept the money is gone and move on.
Roblox has no real way to know, but I'd guess a not insignificant amount of their revenue is unauthorized charges. Better protections on parents' cards may cause their revenue to dry up a fair bit...
And that's before we get into the problematic nature of pushing a monetized game on kids as young as five years old, who might be incentivized to steal from their parents now at an early age. I could see this company's business model getting nuked by future legislation.
My 7 year old daughter has stopped asking for (very pricy) American Girl accessories, and now asks for Robux. The coding schools around us are advertising Roblox Studio classes for kids.
I'm not so pessimistic as you on the model, but those previous operating losses seem pretty big.
What would be costing so much I wonder? The platform has been around for 15 years and whilst I understand it's a platform not a game per se, surely most of the work is done? I wouldn't expect it to get -more- expensive to maintain than it was to build in the first place year over year.
They lost more in one year than it took to build GTAV over 7 years.
I was just putting together my resume to send them (and the thought crossed my mind that an IPO might be coming in the next year), then I see this.
For anyone who's done this dance before, is it a bad, good, or great idea to apply to a company, right when S-1 is released? Don't know if, e.g., companies do a hiring lockdown right before IPO. Also, just on the emotional side, I joined a company very shortly after IPO years ago, and it was always a sore spot to see the life-changing millions of dollars of those who joined the company not long before me, and the constant reminder of "pre-" vs "post-" employees.
Looking back at our timeline, we filed the S-1 about 3.5 months before the first day of trading. (I'd been there a little over 2 years before that, so well after it was clear we had a legitimate chance, but well before it was clear we could IPO.)
I would say that employees who were there right before or shortly after the IPO weren't all that different in terms of initial grants. The only difference is that pre-IPO employees could get ISOs which have slightly better tax treatment than NQSOs.
I would make the decision based on the work, the pay, and your overall feelings for the space rather than whether you applied 4 weeks ago or 4 weeks after IPO. You already missed the gains before the IPO, but most companies have a lot more gains after the IPO than before it.
If you're the type to be jealous that you missed on the pre-IPO gains, don't go, of course. Those employees who made "millions" in the IPO didn't do it because they joined 2 months before you. They probably joined 2+ years before you.
All you say is true. I suppose except if IPO has a big pop then obviously you can miss out on that but for a few days here and there.
In my own case I described above, yeah I was actually very envious of the pre-IPO crowd (almost destructively so) when I joined, but my envy eventually calmed down out of exhaustion -- after the Nth meeting with a billionaire or centi-millionaire, and after you meet the Nth person like yourself who missed out on the rocket-ship, and after you turn down the Nth supposed rocket-ship that flames out (bullet dodged!) you kinda lose the ability to care much about what-could-have-been.
I've had two "good" exits in my career, a purchase by a public company of a game studio and an IPO. Both of those gave me barely six-figures at the moment of the event, so they were decidedly positive, but not even "gosh darn you!" money, let alone "FU!" money.
i joined an early stage co that will go public within the next year and got very lucky in a junior role with a life changing amount of money. the compensation at private cos is so whacky depending on when you join. it’s just the nature of working in early stage cos.
> I learned to program when I was 7. I started with LOGOWriter and QBASIC. What did I make? Games. It should be obvious. All kids want to write games. If your kid wants to write insurance software at age 7, you should stop wandering around aimlessly on the internet and find a good psychiatrist. Do it. Do it now.
> At its heart, ROBLOX is a game development platform. You can do a lot with it without writing a line of code. But if you really get into it, you’re going to want more power. You’re going to be very motivated to figure out how to program.
[...]
> I don’t care what fancy private school you send your kids to. The only place your 13 year old is going to encounter a PID-Controller is in ROBLOX’s Body(Position/Velocity/Thrust) objects, which can be used to script motion for parts and models. That’s just one example.
I always believed tools and games like these had great potential, and always wanted to make something like Roblox, but it's too capital intensive for my situation. I learned the basics of computing and programming by modding games in the early 2000s, with custom Starcraft maps being the most instructive. The web offers the possibility of authorship and distribution that simply don't exist in any other platform.
I am trying to use Roblox to teach my kids to code - my middle daughter loves the idea (we are trying to figure out how to build Hogwarts). Basically the hype machine for roblox is doing half my job for me.
But boy do I wish there were decent tutorials on line. Learning Lua is fun I guess.
I suppose i need to open investment accounts for them to buy Roblox stock next :-)
Damnit, those jerks wouldn't hire me back when I applied in 2012; I'll bet if I had gotten a job back then I'd have a relatively healthy stock package by now.
(btw, I'm just messing around, I had almost no experience in 2012 so I don't really blame them for not hiring me)
Hmmm... I really appreciate all the posts that express confidence in this product but I'm really suspect of the financials.
How did their revenue grow 70% (9-mo 2019 to 2020) but their losses grew 5x?! I can see that there was considerable increase in total costs and expenses but I didn't get a sense of where that investment was going and what long term return there was going to be.
Overall I'm surprised by this as I expected the variable costs to grow with usage and revenue but didn't think there would be a cost of revenue %...
A large part of this appears to be non cash expense associated with stock compensation that was recognized due to an investment round where they let employees and investors sell shares at above “market value”. Can helpful to look at cash flow.
On the one hand I think this will do really well in public markets and will probably buy some on the first day.
On the other as someone who doesn’t play and doesn’t have kids it’s a bit unsettling seeing some of these engagement numbers eg average daily play time is 2.5 hours per active user. That sounds like a massive time suck. Perhaps one could justify this as inciting creativity and there’s a social aspect to it but spending hours a day on this can’t be healthy long term.
For a lot of kids this is their social time during Covid. My son hops on after HW, has a Discord for talking, and they all meet up in Roblox or Fortnight. Mostly Roblox.
I haven't noticed anything unhealthy yet. He has a learned a lot about scams, understanding valuations and trading (it's like a mini stock market around virtual goods), and just hanging out with his friends.
One of the most interesting things I've noticed is that in this virtual world -- boys and girls hang out together. He has about 12 core friends -- and it's almost an even split girl/boy. Which I think would not have happened in the "real world".
My daughter has played a bunch and the platform admittedly does a pretty good job catering to all genders. I've seen her play fashion games, and on the same platform she's invited me to also play zombie shooters and gun-games. It's a good lesson in inclusive design.
Games like Roblox and Minecraft have an inherently social aspect to them in addition to being mostly creativity-based. Not only they allow to emulate some of the social contacts that are currently impossible due to the pandemic, they also make some things possible at all due to the flexibility of the game engines that does not exist in reality. (Compare e.g. asking the question of "Do you know how to make TNT? I need some for an experiment" on a Minecraft server and on a busy airport.)
there’s a balance. 2.5 hours spent on average means there’s kids spending much longer on this each day. i get there’s a creativity aspect to it but it still seems like a lot of time, to the point where it’s likely bordering on addiction level.
I feel you haven’t played MMOs or online games in general. Yes, they can become a time sink, but there are worse time sinks out there ;)
Edit: Note that I and others from my generation grew up spending hours playing MMOs, and we turned out fine. As responsibilities come up to the forefront, the majority of people adapt.
I think the more concerning trend is social media addiction. With games, there is at least an interactive element. Social media use is as passive as you can get.
>but spending hours a day on this can’t be healthy long term.
If you think this is some new phenomenon that kids spend a whole 2.5 hours/day on a game... well, I'm not sure how to break this to you.
Kids used to watch an insane amount of TV each day forever. Then they moved to console games in the early 90s.. and also computer games. It's been what 50/60 years of TV and 30+ years of consoles/computer games.
If anything, things in the last ~10 years are better because kids have a good option to not just sit in front of the TV and watch whatever is on and all these ads.. they can be into games that are mentally challenging. And they have all these options to have voice chats with friends, so it's way more social than ever.
So just in general the argument is "this can't be healthy in the long term" seems to imply that it's some new phenomenon..
yeah dunno. honestly i’m a little terrified of what growing up in the age of social media and hyper addictive gaming does to someone. pretty glad I grew up at a time when the biggest thing was just Myspace.
The S-1 mentions many times (i) DAU, (ii) total hours. But a quick skim didn't find either (iii) MAU, or (iv) # registered users.
The statement to which I replied ("average daily play time is 2.5 hours per active user") would only be true if DAU/MAU (aka 'stickiness') is over 95%.
For comparison, leading messaging apps that you imagine every user using every single day (like WhatsApp and WeChat) have DAU/MAU ratios of ~70%.
If we assume stickiness of 40% (still high!), then average daily usage per (monthly) active user is more like 1 hour.
There are "minor" brokerage accounts that are co-signed by the parents and ultimately end up on the tax forms of the parents[0]. I had one at 16, but unsure if there's a lower age limit.
It would be a much better ROI then converting real money to Robux. All my daughter wants now is Robux (even her allowance) so she could buy crappy 3d items in the crappy 3d game she plays. People are actually selling/buying these items on eBay like they did years ago for Everquest/WoW.
Yeah, I get we see it as crappy but it is essential for them.
I liked more how they did before where you would buy yearly subscription and they would put money to your kid account every week or month. Shame they stopped that.
They still offer monthly subscriptions, 10% more Robux for the same price if you're willing to subscribe. I am glad I didn't, my son still plays a lot, but after a few months of him blowing every dollar he got on Robux, he has stopped bothering. Partly I think he came to the conclusion that games which allowed players to easily buy their way to supremacy were less fun to play (who wants to be cannon fodder?)
All of the companies traded on the Nasdaq have four-lettered ticker symbols, which are representative of the actual company. For example, the ticker symbol for Nasdaq-traded Microsoft is MSFT. However, in some cases, a ticker symbol on the Nasdaq will have five letters, and the fifth letter is an identifier symbol that tells market participants something about the company
Roblox has seen massive revenue growth in the pandemic, but by far biggest question is which costs can they get leverage on as they scale. A lot of existing costs seem to increase linearly with revenue/usage (e.g., app store fees, infrastructure, trust & safety).
What are the average age demographics between Roblox and Minecraft?
It feels like, anecdotally at least, most people switch to Minecraft once they get older as it's a more difficult/mature game with a higher skill ceiling.
Do a lot of companies sit on their S-1's until the market swings up? Like how quickly is the turnaround on an S1 filing and actual listing to take advantage of short term market moves?
I remember one game in which you started off on a massive platform full of food, and had to shovel the food onto a conveyor belt that led into a giant person's mouth. If you yourself fell onto the conveyor belt, you'd be treated to a grand tour of the person's digestive system before being turned to poop and dropped into the toilet bowl. Inside the toilet there was an obstacle course, and at the end of this obstacle course there was an array of fighter jets that you could use to get back onto the food platform. The jets didn't have throttle: they either went super fast or not at all. So the poop-people would bail out of their planes in mid-air, and the jet would crash into the baseplate, usually killing someone below.
This was back when there was no way for developers to monetize their games. Some games had "VIP T-shirts" that gave you tools or allowed you to enter a special room, but devs had neither the technical ability nor the incentive to "do it for the money". Most games were like the one I described: bizarre one-off projects created with the intent of showing something really cool. A few "classics" kept stable player-bases, but for the most part the front page was a constant churn of weirdness.
I've still never seen anything quite like it.