If you’re over 15 you probably never heard of Roblox. But they just paid out $30 million to developers for games made with with their in-game game-engine.
Should we all be ditching game engines like Unity and making games with Roblox?
Compared to Steam which probably paid out about a $billion last year to developers. Still that means Roblox paid out about 3% as much as Steam which is not bad.
Until their game creation tools stop sucking absolute ass? Absolutely not.
But those sucky ass games seem quite popular.
No, no, the end product is fine, but making that product is like pulling teeth. It is very specifically the creation tools I take issue with. They’re extremely high friction.
Ha! No.
Steam paid out well over 4billion. With the top game at 600mil alone. Not to mention that is only through the Steam channel, real games you can sell in multiple places. Roblox can only sell through Roblox, and if a developer is having a hard time selling games elsewhere, it is pretty unlikely you can switch gears and sell and market to tweens. You can do well if you are already part of that ecosystem, but trying to enter that market is a fools game. Also bear in mind any future is dependent completely on the robolox platform… they are a social network for kids, there is sketchy material there and who knows what will happen long term. Some bad press and it can crumble.
Definitely not.
While I second the ‘No’ option, I do say that we should show the games created with the Roblox platform with respect, especially given Murgilod’s account of the tools as ‘high-friction’. Obviously, people are enjoying them. While the tools might be akin to getting a massage from a cactus, it appears that there’s some lessons it’s possible to learn from the platform.
@JamesArndt1 has knowledge on this topic - what relation do you have with Roblox?
I’ve attempted to kindly nudge my son (age 10 now) into engineering/coding/programming because in my mind I’d like him to have knowledge that has eluded me for over 4 decades, and I believe programmers are the current and future ‘manufacturers’ of the world.
I’ve shown him scratch, tynker and several other abstract, kid focused programming tools that are presented as gateway tool for programming. He hasn’t picked up on any of them not for lack of trying.
Until he started piddling around with Roblox and the (creator/designer?) where he has been able to “program” some elements into his world. He enjoys it quite a lot, messing with the ‘code’ to change colors, directions of animated objects, animate elements, triggers, events, var, bool, etc. and pretty much most ‘common’ game dev elements.
He’s also taken an interest in the animator features within the creator/designer. It is terrible - but functional at the basic level.
Although I agree with @Murgilod completely - I’m glad my son has found that one ‘thing’ that has sparked interest in engineering/programming/design.
Hi everyone. So yes I’m an official employee contracted to work for Roblox. I’ve been with them for maybe 4 or 5 months now. I create the 3D model avatars, hats, weapons…basically anything you can think of that a player can buy in-game I make the official Roblox versions. I’m on a team of about 20 of us who work remotely and produce all of the official Roblox content. We do all kinds of licensed content in the game as well, Disney, Marvel, Nickelodeon, Universal Pictures, etc. I can give a bit of my take on the platform itself, but I am not a world builder in Roblox nor do I play it very often. I happened to get connected because I have three children of varying ages who all play it.Their friends at school also play it. Roblox isn’t the future of “making” games, but it is most definitely part of the future of “playing” games. It’s uptake with the youth from ages 5 to about 14 is unbelievable. It’s unbelievably popular with children which in turn is why I think it will end up maturing and growing into something more. The players will age out of it, but they will have spent several years playing it and will carry that influence with them. If you’re familiar with Ready Player One, Roblox is pretty much a very early shitty version of the Oasis. You can be anything you want and go anywhere you want to. As a side note and a technical observation, one thing that BLEW my mind was something I thought was impossible. A player on a mobile phone can go into the same world and room that a player on an Xbox One is playing in and they can play together seamlessly. This goes for a Mac and a PC as well. I didn’t think that kind of realtime cross platform play was possible until I saw it with my own eyes.
Anyways there is definitely money to be made in the Creators program where you pay a small fee and can deploy content into the platform and be paid for it. Like someone else mentioned though, the sandbox tools for creating the content are an abomination. Say you want to rotate a point light…there isn’t a handy gizmo for that. You have to look in the X, Y and Z axis boxes and manually type in rotations. No you cannot just mouse drag slider style over those boxes either. This is a very small thing, but it’s representative of the entire editor experience. Just horrid. I am sure the editor and tools will soon see a major upgrade however. There has recently been a major influx of funding to the platform and there are upgrades coming. No it’s not the future of making games, it’s editor is one of the worst I’ve ever used. Is it part of the future of playing games? Yeah, absolutely. These kids don’t want rules in the virtual world, they want to be surrounded by 100 people in a world in real time, they want to do anything with any item they can, complete customization. They want to play experiences and puzzles that change every week. It’s showing us a partial end to “static” games, single player games, at least for very young people. Us adults will always want that epic and cinematic “The Last of Us” experience I am sure. The industry is going to break apart even more the next few years and polarize with these different ways of playing games.
I’ll just second what JamesArndt said. I have triplet 9 year olds and they love Roblox. Some of their favorite games are pure roleplaying such as being in a wolf family, working in a daycare facility, going to high school (really!?), being a my little pony. There is nothing to do in those games but roleplay, almost no mechanics, and they love it. One thing to understand, that took me awhile, is that they do not care about good graphics, controls, etc.
As for the IDE, yeah it’s not great. It took me a year of off and on playing with it and getting pissed off at how bad it is to finally put some time into it so I could make the girls a little world they had wanted. Now it’s not so bad.
Lastly, I read that about half their user base is under 13. Now, I thought ‘and how much are they really going to be spending on the platform’. Well, getting them in-game currency is one of my kids most request reward/gift/present.
It’s been interesting watching them use the platform and seeing what they find to be fun without all the shiny polish.
You nailed the whole thing. All of my kids role play in it, even the seven year old. That’s it’s biggest allure. The last three Christmas’s the kids requests are Roblox cards, which they promptly run home and buy Lamborghini’s or helicopters or pizza hats. My son spends his days making and selling pizzas in a shop, building out his billiards room or disco room in his house, surviving a freezing winter in a bunker, escaping a prison while guards chase him, sitting in a high school learning math or something, sailing around the lake avoiding a Jaws-like shark. All of this stuff is in the same game!
I think you should totally be ditching Unity and you should try Roblox. That’s your suggestion and I eagerly await the results. I am mid dev so sadly I won’t be joining anyone.
LOL, all of those with the exception of the bunker sound very familiar. I’ve enjoyed playing Shark Bite with them quite a bit. It’s got one of them interested in trying to program, just need to work through her severe lack of patients due to Autism.
Games as a service has/have been sweeping the “adult” industry for a number of years now, so it’s not all that different. Microtransactions, weekly updates with new content, strong focus on repetitive gameplay (with stuff like loot shooters–Destiny, Division, soon Anthem, etc.). EA makes 800 million dollars per year from sports game microtransactions.
Yeah the bunker one is called “Dead Winter” and it’s actually a really good premise for a standalone game. So you are placed on a wide open world map. There are cars and gas placed sporadically around the map, but they are very rare so most of it is on foot. It’s winter and it’s snowing. There is a countdown to nighttime and a freeze that’s not survivable. The only way to survive is run for the closest bunker and be inside of it when the time runs out. The doors to the bunkers close up at that point, so you better be inside. It’s a free-for-all mode and in some spots I think only so many people can fit into a bunker, so in a dash for one, you stand a good chance of getting whacked by someone.
I’ll have them try that out. Sounds like a PVP take on The Long Dark.
As a father of a 12 year old, I would say no. According to her, Roblox games are so, so last year!
What are kids playing now? My 15 year old daughter plays Fortnite exclusively. My 12 year old daughter is back on Minecraft, not the base game but things like Murder Mystery, and a whole bunch of other server based games I don’t pretend to understand.
Yeah that age can be the early start of “aging” out of Roblox and by 15 kids won’t play a “kiddie” thing any more. Fortnite only recently stole the thunder from Player Unknown Battle Grounds, and both were the advent of this recent battle royale game popularity craze. It’s YouTube and the influencers on there that are driving kids, tweens and young adults to play Fortnite. Shoot it’s a craze with a lot of adults too. I feel like this eventually vaporize on it’s own after a long tail (like Team Fortress 2).
Roblox isn’t as much a game as it’s an evolving platform. I always kind of saw it as Second Life for children. One thing is for certain, it’s user base has been on a steep upwards trajectory the last few years. They will need to do some work on the current issues with adults pretending to be children in the virtual worlds. That recently started to make the news and it’s a big problem for the platform. How do we know if our child is talking to another child or a 45 year old man?
Okkkkay let us talk about roblox… I’ve screwed around making a little obstacle course for that game - and I gotta say - the tools are downright junk.
If you are familiar with unity - the roblox editor is ohhhh so broken. Which is unfortunate, I know kids who play, and I even enjoy the silly user made levels of that game, but its just far too broken to get any serious work done in that editor.
I won’t even start about how the modders/devs who make money on there have to make really ridiculous numbers of plays (from what I’ve read) to even make it profitable, because I never tried releasing stuff, so couldn’t say that is all true or not.
With that rant over, I sure hope future games follow in roblox’s footsteps, as I think devs who put in the extra effort to not just allow modding, but really build a game concept around the idea, that is great stuff. It puts the seed of development into young gamers minds… and it means future generations will become more and more familiar with working on games, which I think is cool about that game.
Well I’m finishing a “proper” Unity game by May for Steam so I thought about doing something a bit easier. But apparently roblox isn’t that simple. So there goes my plan.
What I thought was I could use assets from my proper game and import them into Roblox. But I wonder if it is easy in Roblox to steal someone else’s models?
I was thinking if its just kids making games with Roblox with the experience of using Unity maybe I could make quite a good game in it. But then again, I might feel bad at trying to market a game to kids. My usual market is probably 20-30 year olds and I don’t mind taking their money!
The obvious bad thing about Roblox is the blocky Lego/Minecraft rip-off characters. So its not really a threat to ‘proper games’. Maybe it should be thought of as the nursery school (kindergarden) and primary school of games until people graduate onto grown up games.
I think the lesson I would take away from this is, market your Unity games at the over 18 age group. Because (1) they have more disposable income (2) you can make more interesting games and (3) all the young folks are playing Roblox anyway.