Roblox is one of the biggest games of 2016 that you're not playing

Roblox is one of the biggest games of 2016 that you’re not playing Roblox is ten years old. It runs on PC, VR systems, smart phones, tablets, and the Xbox One. It has 30 million active monthly players, with a regular 900,000 concurrent user count. It’s a Lego knock-off. It’s a game creation system. It’s a storefront for user-made in-game content. It’s a social sandbox playground. It’s a massively multiplayer juggernaut. It’s a gigantic hit and you’ve probably never even looked at it. Co-founder and CEO Dave Baszucki spoke with GamesBeat to reveal some surprising information about the game’s success. _Top creators are now pulling down $50,000 a month in revenue._ Baszucki is bullish on VR, predicting that gamers will embrace the social aspects of the technology. Roblox is free to play and available [here](https://www.roblox.com/).

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2016/12/21/roblox-one-biggest-games-2016-youre-not-playing/

Somebody erase this spambot.

My daughters play this

Is it good? I ask because, honestly, it looks a bit janky.

Looks pretty horrible but the kids like it, they haven’t asked me for my credit card yet so I am happy.

My son has mentioned it to me a number of times. Apparently there is some place you can go where Snoop Dogg is rapping in an elevator. So there is that.

To add another anecdote: my 10-year daughter and her friends play this. It’s super janky, but they like browsing the catalog and jumping in to random games made by randos.

I’d seen ads for Roblox and dismissed them because it looked like a poor toddler f2p Minecraft ripoff.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that it came out years before Minecraft, and has a Steam Workshop-style in-game content store that racks up megabucks for some creators.

Unfortunately my kid’s favorite youtubers play it extensively (although god knows why), so my daughters play it too. It’s terrible. And they have spent money on it, and I cannot figure out what they are getting for their money. I hate it and I wish they wouldn’t play it.

It’s all user-contributed content. Roblox itself is apparently just a construction box which people use to put together game worlds to try to get people to pay RoBux in because they get a cut. I think. So it’s mostly just bad platforming and half-realized worlds with microtransactions.

Also, it has open chat (it appears that bad words are ####'d out, although I’m sure that’s easily defeated), but so far I haven’t seen anything inappropriate in the chat or in the game worlds. So it isn’t really safe for little kids, but I guess the community is pretty positive.

My daughter plays it very regularly. My older boys played it regularly years ago. Roblox has been huge forever. And it might be janky, but there is a near infinite variety of games catering to all kinds of tastes. So they never get bored jumping from one to the next.

In fact, it even got my daughter editing her own level and learning how to program NPC’s with me.

Adults can look at it dismissively (I wouldn’t play the games myself), but a lot of kids enjoy the platform and even try their hand at creating content in it.

Without looking, this sounds like second Life.

Does second Life exist any more? If so, is it populated entirely by furries?

This. It’s the king of jank. What’s super, super annoying is my little guy will get stuck in some horrifically designed 3d platform game and ask for help. It’s literally impossible to beat it because some 10 year old spent 10 minutes designing it.

Sometimes i can divert him towards something that doesn’t suck but freaking Youtubers keep pushing it.

My 11 year old plays a lot on his PC and Ipad. He has created some levels for fun and I’ve played with him…gives him a sense that he’s creating a game and gets all excited about that…so I go with it.

My 6 year old plays the crap out of this… hey it makes him happy.

My kid played the crap out of this when he was younger. It’s kind of a shitty game, but they like it because they can play dress-up with their toons and it’s kid-friendly and colorful. Plus there’s a million and half different levels to play in. Most of them suck as you’d expect, but some are pretty well-realized (presumably those are the ones making the 50 large).

And it doesn’t cost anything, so whatever.

One of my co-workers asked for my help in setting up his home PC so that his son could record himself playing Roblox. Turned out that his PC was a toaster, some Dell all-in-one POS that was probably as old as the kid, and not powerful enough to handle OBS or Fraps. I’m pretty sure it didn’t meet the minimum specs for something like Minecraft either, but it ran Roblox fine.

Too bad it’s not real LEGO but the framerate would fall through the floor.

I have some experience with LEGO CAD and the situation is not pretty.

You’d never expect it, but roblox has one of the most interesting development platforms. You can throw together some lua code and test everything very quickly. I’ve even seen someone program a star wars space sim where you can join either the rebels or imperials and fly an xwing, etc. to destroy the other team’s capital ship.

I was messing around with the developer studio and copied some lua code to generate a roguelike floorplan and create an actual roguelike level generator in the game in no time.

It also seems to be like F2P developer’s wet dream. I was playing that star wars game and there was an option to pay 50 roblux or whatever for “luke’s x-wing” - in game.

My daughter plays Roblox like crazy. Her friends come over and play on the iPad while she is on her computer. Mostly they do ‘role play’ things like Five Nights at Freddy’s, Star Wars, Mario, etc. It’s not much of a game, she just likes to run around and explore.

From Thomas The Train to Star Wars Roblox is just lousy with infringing content.