# Reason Behind Popularity of Roblox


[ Reading time : 5 minutes | Date : 21, February 2023 | Author : Teresa Brown]

## **Why Roblox is trending?**

Here's an interesting fact: In 2020, more than half of American children under the age of 16 played Roblox, but many people are still unaware of what Roblox is.

But [RobloxPlayer.exe](https://www.rplayerexe.com/) fever has now engulfed the entire planet. Major media publications are now writing about this item called Roblox, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CNN.

Roblox stock searches on Google have increased dramatically in March, and even well-known people like Reese Witherspoon are making fun about it. But it's possible that you're unaware of the reasons that Roblox has become so popular in 2023.

## **What is roblox?**

Roblox is an online platform and storefront where users go to play games. Roblox is not a game, it is a place where people play games made by other developers. In this sense, it is more similar to PC platform Steam than it is to any online children’s game.

What makes Roblox different from anything else in the games industry — including a storefront like Steam — is that all the games are made by its users. On Roblox, the fun doesn’t just come from playing games, it also comes from making games.

These games are not formally developed by Roblox Corporation, but by users of the platform. Currently, the official website boasts that its users have published over 20 million games on the platform.

## **Why is everyone talking about roblox right now?**

Because anyone, including kids, can make a ton of money on the platform. Some developers can earn as much as $1 million in a single year by monetizing their games. Although Roblox and all its games are freely available, many kids buy and spend a virtual currency called Robux on aesthetic items in Roblox games.

Roblox developers get to keep a portion of these transactions in the form of Robux. Once a developer makes enough money in Robux, they can use a program called the Developer Exchange (also called DevEx) to convert Robux to real money.

It’s not just individual creators who are cashing in. Roblox Corporation itself is worth a surprising amount of money. Roblox Corporation went public on Wednesday, meaning that it has opened up sales of its shares. Its stock ($RBLX) had a great first day, starting off with a $45 reference price and closing at $69.50 a share.

The company ended up with a market capitalization of roughly $45 billion, per a report from The Wall Street Journal. To give you an idea of how huge that is, Epic Games, maker of the ever-popular Fortnite and Unreal Engine software, was valued at $17.3 billion in late 2020. (Epic Games is still a private company.) Roblox’s success on the market, coupled with the fact that the Roblox economy is almost entirely run by young people who can make a lot of money, has intrigued many people.

## **How popular are roblox games?**

Incredibly popular, in some cases. Adopt Me!, a pet simulation game where kids buy and take care of animals, broke over 1.6 million concurrent players in April 2020, its developers said, and has been visited by players over 20.4 billion times. (Numbers for unique logins have not been publicly disclosed by the developer).

Another game called Brookhaven currently has the most concurrent users, with over 420,000 people playing it at the time of publication.

## **Who makes roblox games?**

Anyone can make games on Roblox. The platform gives young people a way to bring their own game ideas to life. It does this by providing a suite of game development tools that almost anyone can learn to use, including kids. If a game takes off, it’s possible for these developers to scale, since Roblox also makes it easy to turn your creation into an online multiplayer game.

The games use a scripting language called Lua, which is easier to learn than most other programming languages.

The company provides developer forums where makers can troubleshoot, as well as learn new skills. With Roblox, developers don’t need to worry about logistics like how to set up servers; they just make the game, and then players can play their game through online multiplayer. How deep you get into game creation is up to each developer.

## **What does the average roblox game look like?**

The most straightforward answer to this is that there is no “average Roblox game.” Roblox is a platform where people can make whatever they want.

There is a wide variety of games, from single-player platformers to first-person shooters. That being said, the most popular games tend to be simulators in which people can role-play different scenarios, like going to school or visiting a pizza shop.

## **Is roblox free?**

The platform and the games on it are free to download. However, Roblox games can offer in-game purchases of cosmetic items, skins, or other upgrades.

For example, in Adopt Me!, players adopt and care for pets, a child can buy an egg that will hatch a pet. Each game is unique, so in-game purchases will vary.

## **What is the future of roblox?**

The colorful and whimsical worlds of Roblox have long been siloed off from the games industry at large. Somehow relegated to the niche audience of “children’s games,” the company remained relatively unnoticed since its founding in 2006.

Over time, the company has continued to grow and support the young developers who distribute the games they make on the Roblox platform. By doing this, the company created a platform that has functioned like a parallel games industry. Roblox has its own games, its own developers, and its own conferences.

Now, the company’s current valuation has many makers on the platform feeling optimistic. Some developers are already talking about buying their own stock now that the larger company has gone public.

Alex Hicks, the cofounder of a Roblox studio called Red Manta, told Polygon that he’s excited about the public offering because it is “definitely bringing more attention to studios.” He continued: “Lots of kids already know what Roblox is, but they’re just scratching the surface with the older audience.”

Roblox has already been growing for a while, and its creators will likely get some more widespread recognition in the future.

## **How many children play it?**

Roblox doesn’t split its 100 million figure between children and adults, though it does say that 40% of them are women and girls.

In the UK alone, there are around 1.5 million children playing Roblox, according to research firm Kids Insights. Its data, based on an annual survey of 20,000 British children, suggests that 24% of 10- to 12-year-olds here are on Roblox – more than on TikTok (13%) and Snapchat (20%) and nearly as popular as Instagram (25%).

The company adds that 19% of seven-to-nine-year-olds in the UK are playing Roblox, some way behind YouTube (43%) but ahead of TV brands like [CBBC](https://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/cbbc/) (11%), Nickelodeon (10%) and Cartoon Network (8%).

## **Why is Roblox popular?**

“We’re not a company that does a lot of marketing. The No 1 way that someone finds out about our platform is they get invited to play by a friend. And the second way is they’ll watch people playing on YouTube,” says Roblox’s chief business officer Craig Donato. “So it’s very much an organic phenomenon.”

He also suggests that one reason for Roblox’s popularity is its emphasis on “unstructured play” in an era when many children are more restricted in their physical-world activities than previous generations were.

“When I came home from school, I’d get on my bike, go out in the woods, do pick-up baseball. But we live in a world today where it’s hard for kids to go out and have unstructured play with their friends,” he says.

“Most of the experiences on our platform aren’t just about the object to win. It’s an experience you have with other people: a shared experience.”

## **How do people make games for it?**

Anyone can make a game (or “experience” – they can simply be virtual spaces) for Roblox by downloading its separate Roblox Studio software. The company says that it has more than 2 million “creators” – so around 2% of its players – with the most popular games being played by up to 100,000 people simultaneously.

For many children, creating a simple game or virtual room where they can hang out with friends is the limit of their ambitions, but others build bigger, more complex games, and even start to make money through taking a cut of in-game purchases using Roblox’s virtual currency, Robux.

The company expects to pay out more than $100m in 2019 alone to them.“We have these teams forming businesses, and making millions of dollars a year,” says Donato. Roblox is keen to foster this community: in 2018 it launched its own curriculum, available under a Creative Commons licence, for educators to use. Donato says it reached more than 500,000 children in its first year.

## **Are people really making businesses out of this?**

They are. Josh Wood is one of the British Roblox game-makers. He’s 18 now, but discovered Roblox in 2013, and started to make his own games for it a year later.

“From there I continued to learn and collaborate with other people on projects until I released my most successful game to date, Game Dev Life, which has so far had over a million play sessions,” he says.

Wood has now set up his own company to make games for Roblox, hiring other developers, artists and testers, and even launching a line of toys based on Game Dev Life, in partnership with Roblox.

“With the money from my games I have been able to pay for my university education, and continue to reinvest in my business,” he says.

Another young British developer working on Roblox games is Abbie Leigh. Now aged 19, she started playing Roblox in 2011, but took the leap into development in 2017, initially creating assets for other people’s games. She’s currently working on three games, including her own sports-themed title, and hopes to make a full-time career out of freelance development.

“It never feels like a job, which of course is the best part. I enjoy building and do so in my free time, and I’m simply rewarded when it comes to doing what I love.”

Game Dev Life by DoubleJGames. Players must try to build a successful game.

## **Is Roblox safe for children?**

When Roblox has made headlines in the mainstream media, they have often been negative: from reports of adults trying to groom children on the platform in 2017 to, most infamously, a virtual sexual assault in June 2018, when a seven-year old player’s avatar was attacked by two male avatars, whose players had hacked the game’s code to show explicit imagery.

The following month, the Sun published an investigation claiming that Roblox was “a haven for roleplaying as jihadis, Nazi leaders and Ku Klux Klan members”. The company says that it has been working hard to tackle wrongdoers and fix any loopholes in its platform.

“We’re not defensive if things have ever gone wrong. We hold our hands up and say, ‘This is what we’ve done to fix it, and this is what we’re doing to make sure it never happens again,’” says Laura Higgins, a British child-safety veteran hired by Roblox in January 2019 as its ‘director of digital civility’. Her job is to learn from those problems and prevent activities that could harm young players.

“We really do start with safety as our No 1 priority. We acknowledge that we have younger players, so you have to be as ahead of the game as possible in terms of safety,” she says.

“It’s an age-old thing: if people have bad intentions towards children, they’re going to gravitate towards where the children are. We’re constantly reviewing the tools that we have, and looking at ways to improve them.”

## **How can parents keep informed about it?**

Another measure taken by Roblox is to launch a section of its website called [For Parents](https://corporate.roblox.com/parents/), which explains its safety tools – from algorithms blocking swearwords and names and addresses in text chats, to its reporting system for inappropriate chat or content.

There’s even an algorithm detecting whether players’ avatars are wearing “appropriate attire”.Higgins admits that parents can get “very frustrated” when there’s a horror story around safety on a children’s platform like Roblox: “You think, how hard can it be? [to stop these things happening],” she says.

“And it’s very hard, is the answer. When things go wrong, it’s because somebody is trying very hard to break your systems.”She’s keen to make sure that parents also see the positive side of the games that children are creating on Roblox, citing the example of a game made by a teenager whose father had recently died.“He developed a game around managing mental wellbeing, mental health, as a journey for other young people experiencing those kinds of issues,” she says.

“It was an amazing outlet for him, but it also helped many young people who played it, and were able to explore their emotions.”That’s an aspect also highlighted by developer Abbie Leigh. “I absolutely love the developer community as a whole. We all stick together, support each other’s creations and help each other when we need it the most,” she says. “From feedback on games, to personal issues.”