
Roblox hits 100M monthly active users, bigger than Minecraft - bookofjoe
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/04/roblox-hits-100-million-monthly-active-users/
======
integrii
Both of my kids played a lot of Roblox until we banned it. They easily became
obsessed and were violent when removed, even with a tightly controlled
schedule. They would try to connect to offer WiFi networks to get access and
would steal our phones to get access. We ended up having to detox them like it
was a drug.

Beyond that we found that the openly mod-able nature of the game allowed some
remarkably disgusting 3D models and game modes. Just Google it. It was not
hard to find a room with 50 kids holding adult store items and doing extremely
inappropriate things.

The system is also rife with predators. One game let them share pictures
somehow. Some guy was asking my daughters to send them pictures of their feet.
Try to censor that request in chat, I guess.

This if course sets aside the caste system that is built on their in-game
currency. Scammers can convince your kids to trade their favorite items away
in a "trust trade".

Roblox is not appropriate in my experience.

~~~
koonsolo
My own son had this period where he was obsessed with playing on the XBox.
When I tried to limit his time, he became agressive. So I said "Wow, if XBox
has this influence on you, maybe you should stop completely. What do you
think?". His smart reaction was to show that he could play a limited time, and
be good afterwards. Now I don't have any problems with him.

The thing with kids is that you will not be there all the time, especially
when they get older. So banning something they like, doesn't seem like a good
solution to me. They will have to handle such impulses themselves. So if you
can let them handle their own impulses, that is way better.

For example I will never tell my kids that they cannot smoke, because that
will be out of my control anyway. But when we walk to a hospital, there are
always patients outside smoking (who obviously look sick). Then I tell them
"look at those smokers, how sick they are. And it really smells bad too" etc.
When I ask them about smoking, they have very negative associations with it.

So if your kids are doing inappropriate things to play, maybe talk to them as
if they are adults, and make a reasonable deal. And show them how their
decisions will impact them.

Raising kids is not about enforcing rules, it's preparing them for the real
world where they need to make their own decisions.

~~~
sky_rw
I was only allowed 2 hours of Sega Genesis play, which was just enough to get
to the final boss in Sonic and die. Never beat it.

In hindsight this prepared me for the 2 constants in the real world: Never
having enough time, and constant disappointment.

~~~
wil421
Rookie mistake. You have to leave the Sega on come back the next day when you
have your allotted time. God forbid someone vacuums and uses your plug.

~~~
jonnydubowsky
This reminds me of when my brother and I beat Legend of Zelda and left the end
segment on the tv for a few days to bask in the glory

------
orliesaurus
Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft are the new social networks right? Well when I was
15 and we used to play Counter Strike and Quake 3 the "social network" was
hanging out on servers with maps just chatting and walking around the map
aimlessly or just hanging out on IRC. So I can totally relate to how kids
nowadays are going back to this sorta hangout. Text only can be boring (kinda
like IRC for many people who couldn't tolerate it) but hanging out in servers,
spinning around and doing stuff actively (albeit not productively for society)
is actually much more fun. Now couple this with discord and all the in-game
voice chat stuff + emotes and the ability to build anything. Yeah I can
totally see why young kids wanna hang out in video games all day!

~~~
Nextgrid
I miss the old first-person shooters and the concept of self-contained servers
(instead of a global user profile system). Games last for a couple hours, and
everyone starts at zero and gets weapons & perks as the game continues (so
newbies aren't stuck with bad guns while level 100+ players dominate the
server). In 30 minutes of playtime or so you'll have earned enough points (by
killing enemies, etc) to be able to afford any weapon you want, compared to
now where getting to the top takes months of grinding. There was also no
global profile system, so no need to worry about your rank, K/D ratio, etc.

As a result the games were pretty relaxed, there wasn't any rage and the chat
conversations were respectful and actually substantial (akin to an IRC
network). The game was Crysis & Crysis Wars (and unfortunately the developer
ruined all that going forwards with the sequel).

~~~
Kiro
How is that different from new shooters? In Fortnite, PUBG, Call of Duty etc
you also start from 0 in each match. Leveling up gives you cosmetics only.

~~~
Cpoll
CoD is the odd one out, as levelling gets you weapons. But I don't think
that's the issue, you unlock them all in a few dozen hours, a weekend for the
average teenager.

The issue is modern matchmaking doesn't have the same community-building
effect as joining the same few servers every day, getting to know the people
you're playing with.

------
skwog
As a Roblox programmer (Builder’s Club) scripting a game, the draw of
addressing this huge user base by way of simply coding Lua scripts to release
a product that invites In App Purchase is downright tempting!

Then you discover the apparently wide spread client side hacking (speed,
teleport, aim bots... you name it) and content theft (models, geometry,
Localscripts) and pervasive scam attempts so frequently reported. But that’s
the internet, and the cost of doing business, right?

After some success (proof of concept stage) building an unreleased game, I
started to notice pitfalls and inconsistencies in the developer docs,
including lack of documentation for methods and properties specifically out as
recommended or best practice approaches.

Chunks of the docs would suddenly disappear for days or weeks with no notice
and no explanation and may or may not reappear after some time. Didn’t see any
change logs that I could find.

And then one day this summer I could not access the developer docs site at
all, from any of my devices on different ISP connections. After proding
around, I realized this was only occurring on Safari (Mac and iOS). Too many
redirects (for Tracking)! Apparently Safari had gained additional privacy
checking after an update.

Got me thinking, if it’s the case that Apple effectively doesn’t trust the
techniques used by Roblox to add tracking to their developer documentation
site, is this effort something I want to continue pursuing?

Which segues to the question:

Given the active user base and gross cash flow of Roblox, how do you now frame
the new ARKit, RealityKit, Composer, and SwiftUI announcements from WWDC?

~~~
Cthulhu_
> Given the active user base and gross cash flow of Roblox, how do you now
> frame the new ARKit, RealityKit, Composer, and SwiftUI announcements from
> WWDC?

I'm not sure what the question is, the two are hardly related. I guess you can
use both to create games, but the thing is, you wouldn't have the network to
go with it. I mean you could create a video but unless you upload it to
youtube it might as well not exist. Or you could create a mobile game but
unless it's in the app store (or featured / in the top x) it might as well not
exist.

Roblox at least gives your content a chance of being discovered.

~~~
snazz
I don’t think your odds of being discovered on Roblox are _that_ much higher
than on the App Store. Roblox is full of a lot of content (most junky) that
you’d have to swim through to get to the front page.

------
SpaceLawnmower
I used to play Roblox when I was a teenager. The game has a scripting engine
that players can use to program their own levels/events in Lua. The code
editing/debugging was pretty tough to use when I was playing it, but it's one
of the reasons I got into programming. I learned about programming, viruses,
and hacking through Roblox. People write all kinds of amazing scripts on
Roblox that you can download and put into your own levels.

~~~
Ajedi32
Ah yes, the viruses; I remember those.

People would write scripts that would copy themselves into every object in the
game, sometimes renaming those objects to a constant string just to be
annoying. People who would edit their games in "build mode" (I can't actually
remember what it was called) rather than directly in Roblox Studio would
import an infected model from the store, get their place infected, and then
any models they shared on the store would _also_ be infected.

I wrote an "anti-virus" script that would search an entire place for known
viruses, delete them, and reset the names of any renamed objects back to their
default. Eventually Roblox themselves started clearing the source code of any
virus scripts they knew about, which I discovered when several of my "virus
definitions" files got blanked out.

Those were the days. I wonder if viruses on Roblox are still a thing, or if
Roblox managed to put a stop to them for good. (Less people editing their
places in build mode would probably make viruses _way_ less effective.)

------
jammygit
I have to doubt that TechCrunch understands gaming when they post about a game
without including a single screenshot.

------
jay_kyburz
Roblox has grown big on other peoples IP. My kids are only interested in it so
they can play a Minions game or a Spiderman game.

I guess that's how YouTube got big too.

~~~
sjg007
Its better than apps with in app purchases and ads.

~~~
bitdestroyer
I had to remove Roblox from our devices because all of the levels my daughter
would load were either not age appropriate or would put IAP purchase buttons
under the controls so you couldn’t avoid hitting them accidentally. It was
incredibly scummy. My kids are young so maybe they just don’t know how/where
to find decent levels but it felt gross and wasn’t something we wanted to
encourage. IAPs were absolutely everywhere in the levels I saw her playing
before we made the call.

~~~
ryan-allen
I'm considering banning Roblox for similar reasons. I would let my kid use
some pocket money to buy Robux, but then I found out his friends would log
into his account and spend any spare Robux he had lying around.

I've tried to get in to it myself to better understand it as a mechanism, and
I'm at a loss as how it's so popular.

My guess is that on the surface it looks innocent enough to naive parents but
in reality it's quite a bit 'elsagate' in nature.

I am happy that, right now, he prefers to spend time in Minecraft with his
headset, it's a much more positive game (making houses and exploring without
predatory in app purchases).

------
wyclif
My 8 year-old boy is a big Minecrafter. He went through a phase where he
switched to Roblox. I checked it out and he asked me what I thought, I said
"this is hot garbage—not nearly as good of a game as Minecraft is", but I let
him keep playing it for a few weeks. Finally he switched back to Minecraft and
got disgusted with the game quality of Roblox and dumped it.

I was relieved because if he hadn't, I was getting ready to ban it. I had set
up the account with parental controls to turn off chat because I knew adults
played the game, but I ultimately decided it was inappropriate for kids after
digging a little deeper and seeing what a toxic waste dump it is.

------
keithnz
My 8 year old son switched to Roblox from Minecraft a while back, he loves it,
he spends a lot of time in RobloxStudio making his own mini games. All seems
quite cool, just make sure you turn on all the parental/privacy controls,
there is a high amount of interaction with random other players.

~~~
mastazi
I have to say that the parental controls are really strict, in particular the
chat auto-moderation, to the point that any word or sentence that could be
remotely considered inappropriate is censored. I suppose this is a good thing
considering that most players are young kids.

~~~
Causality1
Ah, interesting. That explains the Roblox memes I see from time to time with
very odd grammar. "Go commit neck rope", "I will un-alive you", and "Do you
are have stupid?"

~~~
TeMPOraL
When I read about companies implementing chat auto-moderation, I'm not sure
whether to be disappointed at the utter pointlessness (coupled with
invasiveness) of such exercise, or to applaud them for promoting kid
creativity.

~~~
Mirioron
The companies probably understand that it doesn't really work, but they need
to be able to show something. Parents won't accept "it's impossible" as an
answer.

~~~
Crinus
Which in turn makes me wonder, how home parents tend to forget being kids?

~~~
Mirioron
I have wondered about the same thing before. I think it's mostly an emotional
reaction. Society in general seems to be really accommodating to parents when
they have emotional reactions about their children.

------
danbmil99
I recall my child years ago playing this game (maybe age 8?) and explaining
how they communicated with words like 'socks' for 6, 'ate' for 8 etc. because
numbers were banned to avoid kids giving out sensitive info like their age,
address etc.

~~~
teddyh
Block-Chat™!

[http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-
of-t...](http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns-
speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/)

“ _By hook, or by crook, [people] will always find a way to connect with each
other._ ”

— Randy Farmer

------
hokumguru
So many negative comments here but nearly a decade ago now I was hugely
interested in Roblox - on their platform I found an amazing creative outlet
and made some lifelong friends. Their game engine is powerful while also being
simple for a 12 year old to pick up and learn - I taught myself the
fundamentals of programming on their platform and I doubt I would have gone
down the same career path without it.

~~~
justanothernoob
Frankly, Roblox is not the same as it was 12 or 10 years ago, when I played. A
few weeks ago I reinstalled it and perused the catalog of games. Most or all
of the top games have microtransactions in them, you can really feel the
influence of money in the games development. My money on when it started going
downhill was when Disney bought out Roblox, whenever that was.

------
Steuard
My 8-year-old daughter has paid a lot more attention to Roblox than Minecraft
lately. Being able to connect with friends there is definitely a factor, but I
think she's also drawn in by the seemingly endless supply of new content. One
game or genre getting boring or frustrating? There are dozens of not-bad
others waiting right there, clamoring for attention. And honestly, that makes
me a bit uncomfortable: it feels like it's actively encouraging a short
attention span and shallow engagement.

The thing that I miss most about her Minecraft phase is that as far as I can
tell, at least on a tablet (where she usually plays) Roblox is all about
consuming other people's content rather than creatively building your own.
That makes me sad. I'm sure she'll shift gears again eventually (in fact, she
and her friends have been occasionally picking Minecraft back up lately), so
maybe I shouldn't be so antsy waiting for that time to come.

~~~
mastazi
> at least on a tablet (where she usually plays) Roblox is all about consuming
> other people's content rather than creatively building your own

That's correct, if your daughter could access a desktop, then she could use
Roblox Studio as noted here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20621457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20621457)

However I have to say that, even then, the creative component in Roblox is not
as central to the experience as it is in Minecraft.

But then again, my daughter often plays on those Minecraft online servers that
offer mini-games (e.g. Hypixel) and those don't have a lot of creativity
involved either.

------
xrd
I'm reading all the threads here and wonder: is there a similar type of game
that is safe for kids to use? I'd love to have the collaborating with other
kids to build things, but I'm deeply concerned about the predatory aspects
other parents are describing here. Is there an open source version of Roblox
or Minecraft that you can run on your own server and only invite known people
(neighbors, friends, etc.) to play on it?

~~~
thecatspaw
while its not open source you can definitely run minecraft on your own server
with a whitelist. I dont know about roblox.

You might also be interested in minetest?

~~~
em-bee
there are plenty of minetest servers if you don't want to run your own, check
out a few and see how they are. several advertise a family friendly
atmosphere. go inside play a while and monitor the chat to see how the
moderators act. i found a great server right away, where my son and i are now
happily building away without trouble.

------
meddlepal
Does anyone remember Blockland ([http://blockland.us/](http://blockland.us/))?
It was arguably the precursor to Roblox and in some ways the building portion
of Minecraft... the creator Badspot just never embraced it and it fizzled out
around 2007.

Arguably he could be a billionaire these days if he had kept at it. He had the
right idea... but did not execute.

~~~
makerofspoons
I played it back in the day. It performed better and looked better than early
Roblox. My first exposure to programming was actually thanks to Blockland as
it inspired me to download the Torque game engine and mess around with it.

------
mintplant
It's a minigame-oriented Second Life for kids. With all the time I split
between that and Minecraft growing up, Roblox's popularity doesn't surprise
me.

------
spaceisballer
Well my anecdotal experience is that my kids saw videos on YouTube about other
kids playing it and then they wanted to play it. I have no desire to play any
of the games the popular games seem centered around nearly impossible
“parkour” maps. But they love it and switch between it and Minecraft. I wonder
how much of their playing base is just young kids.

~~~
jandrese
Roblox is overwhelmingly populated with kids. Much more so than Minecraft from
what I've seen. The one big advantage it has over Minecraft is that it's
easier to play together with friends from school. The kids all exchange their
Roblox handles and put them on their seemingly enormous friends lists.

~~~
ghostcluster
Seems like this type of brain-dead simple feature -- frictionless joining of
gameplay servers from a friends list -- would be something Mojang should
consider adding to up their engagement.

Minecraft is interesting because, according to Google Trends, it had finally
been slowly dying out in terms of search volume for years..
([https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=minecraf...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=minecraft))...
until a few weeks ago! It has suddenly been spiking almost up to almost where
it was in its peak of popularity in mid 2013. PewDiePie started playing it a
bunch recently in his videos, so maybe that is the reason.. or maybe there is
some other reason that it's been trending that Pewdiepie just picked up on. As
not a regular Minecraft player I can only wonder.

~~~
erklik
Minecraft as a game has never progressed from where it started. There is
nothing new in it (new items, new structures etc don't count, they provide the
same experience, just colored differently) while a game like Terreria is done
so well with fantastically structured gameplay and progression. After you've
gotten to a certain level in Minecraft, the game becomes pointless.

~~~
thethirdone
> Minecraft as a game has never progressed from where it started. ... Terreria
> is done so well with fantastically structured gameplay and progression.

I would say minecraft has progressed much more than Terraria. Minecraft
started as a building only game. It then added survival elements and redstone
which add two entirely new ways to play.

I didn't play Terraria in its early days, but it seems like the content added
is in the form of new items, bosses and areas rather than entirely new
concepts.

~~~
cferr
Don't forget about the equip enchanting system, potion brewing, fishing, The
End, treasure hunting maps, village raids, and most recently the villager
trading system overhaul. The game is so completely different now than it was
ten years ago, it's crazy.

------
howenterprisey
Honestly wish I'd known about this when I was younger. In my opinion this
could be a gateway for younger coders to start working on larger projects.

------
izzydata
The gaming world seems so foreign to me now and I used to play games several
hours a day growing up. I can't understand the appeal of this game or
Minecraft even if I try to imagine myself as a child again.

~~~
Yajirobe
> I can't understand the appeal of this game or Minecraft

You can do things from smashing zombies' skulls with a sword to building a
replica of your own house to building an ATARI emulator in Minecraft. How is
that not exciting?

~~~
izzydata
Possibly because there is no goal and your friends aren't there in person.
It's too open ended and over the internet.

Not feeling like I'm really with friends just from talking to them online
might be my problem because really anything can be fun when you are with
people you enjoy spending time with.

~~~
detritus
I'm an oldie, but I accidentally got caught up in Minecraft in the year or so
it came out and have fond memories of infecting a friend who came over with
his laptop so we'd play at my place, drunk as hell.

Entire days and nights disappeared one Christmas, 'til we decided it was
dangerous to keep on... . Suffice to say, if you wnated, you could play in the
same room, or across the internet. Or both.

------
ramblerman
I'm having a hard time understanding what roblox is, even when looking for a
gameplay video.

For an older analogy, would it be fair to compare it to something like
TinyMUCK with graphics?

~~~
ehsankia
Same here. I generally am fairly well versed in games and tech, even the more
obscure stuff, but I'm surprised about how little I've seen about this game
over the years. I've heard the name here and there but never really looked
into it.

So far, it looks close to VR chat? I'd also like if someone could explain:

1\. What the appeal is (I'm guessing mostly community?)

2\. How do they monetize (purchasable cosmetic content?)

3\. Where most of the demographic is (country, age, gender)

~~~
abrookewood
So it's a browser based gaming 'portal', that includes chat, profiles,
cosmetic items etc and which allows users to create their own basic games. The
appeal is that the games are fairly simple, often social and don't require a
ton of investment (i.e. casual). They make money on in game currency which can
upgrade both cosmetic and non-cosmetic items in both a users profile and in-
games. Demographic is probably pre-teen, both genders.

~~~
ehsankia
Ah, did not realize it was a browser game. I can see how that really increases
the demographics, thanks!

------
Animats
Wow, they finally made it. I knew the CEO years ago, when he was doing physics
engines.

------
sebringj
Roblox is like the internet in its flexibility and its lawlessness. My 3 sons
have ipads and play together but in a restricted time setting. My oldest (10)
started playing with lua scripting and all 3 like to create on roblox studio.
There will always be weirdos on that but it's part of life and you must parent
and educate them that people are sometimes evil morons but its something they
all love to do together and in some sense its making them more prepared for
the online world.

------
shmerl
Too bad they never implemented Linux support, and can't fix their network code
to work in Wine either.

Minecraft despite being controlled by MS now, still has a working Linux
client.

~~~
quaquaqua1
Not only does Minecraft work on Linux for me... on the same machine with some
weird old intel integrated graphics drivers, opengl flat out doesn't
work/isn't supported on Win10!!

Nothing a jump drive and a .deb file can't fix! Thanks MS for having a heart.

~~~
shmerl
For MS it's a major exception though (and only because they bought it already
with Linux support). Their general gaming attitude is still quite anti-Linux.

~~~
earenndil
It's more because it was written in java, and would be more work to not
support linux than to support it. (Granted, it wouldn't be java if they hadn't
bought it that way.)

------
CrossWired
My kids (7f/9m) work quite well together in it. My 7 year old daughter took to
it much more than Minecraft, mainly with her brothers direction.

------
stevefan1999
I remember people arguing which one of them two games in the title invented
the meme "oof". It turns out now Roblox is winning.

------
ausbah
This is amazing! Speaking as someone who played from ~2011-2013, seeing this
type of growth in something I loved brings me nothing but good feelings. It
also speaks a bit to a type of business model centered around tech that
doesn't try to have completely explosive growth.

------
houzertuch
Denying your child access to an internet connected computer in 2019 would put
your child in a very disadvantaged position in life. It has become necessary
to be fluent in computer operating system GUIs and the ways of the internet.
For school, work and now for socializing. There was never a centralized
decision to make things this way. Nobody was ever asked if they were ok with
this. It just happened.

Imagine that neuralink tech starts to become normal. Inevitably, some parents
will opt to have their child linked. Many children will be linked regardless
because it is medically necessary. The linked children perform five times
better than the linkless. They socialize by electronic telepathy, even though
they only have threads in their motor cortex in the early days. Being linked
also enables them to engage in wildly addictive and inappropriate behavior
that had never been widely anticipated before. You become a parent in the
midst of this. Do you imagine that you would opt out? Do you imagine the
parents of yesterday thought they would opt out of allowing their children to
do what children do now?

------
KaoruAoiShiho
So roblox is what second life wanted to be? Any insight into why it worked out
so much better than SL?

~~~
rnotaro
It's targeted at kids.

------
stesch
Last time I wanted to give it a try they wanted to install on the small system
drive. :-(

------
ejz
"In other news, Microsoft announcing its acquisition of Roblox today..."

------
techntoke
Unfortunately neither Minecraft: Bedrock Edition or Roblox really works in
Linux.

~~~
t0astbread
I don't know how it compares but Minetest is always a thing

~~~
mastazi
Thank you for mentioning Minetest, I didn't know it existed!

~~~
techntoke
I tried it, but unfortunately it is no where close to Minecraft. Crafting
items is a pain from what I can tell, unless I'm just not recognizing some
shortcuts.

~~~
em-bee
i only play minetest so i can't compare. for complex items you have to craft
the ingredients first, so it can end up in a chain from raw materials until
you got your actual item done. it can be a bit tedious, but on the other hand
if you need an item many times, bulk crafting works well, it is just as easy
to create a single item as it is to create hundreds of them.

------
gameswithgo
doesn’t run on linux. non starter for my kids

~~~
em-bee
yup, i'll stick with minetest

