When compared to Fortnite or Minecraft about the popularity for children’s gamers, Roblox may not be dominated, but it recently revealed that it has over 100 million monthly active users.
The game has started to draw the attention of the media rather than its competitors, leaving parents in search of a primer if their children have been demanding to play it (or practicing it without permission).
What is Roblox?
It’s not a specific game only, but rather a series of over 50 million games generated by its user community. The most straightforward analogy is to YouTube: a massive user-generated-content library, except instead of videos, the material is games.
With any devices such as PC, laptops, gaming consoles, smartphones, and tablets, Roblox app could be downloaded by users including children and adults to access and enjoy the Roblox game list. The point of the game to attract users is its social-interaction features, such as making, adding friends, and talking with them while playing.
Roblox isn’t a new concept: it was first introduced in 2006 and has been slowly growing ever since.
The number of children playing it
Roblox doesn’t break down its 100 million users into children and adults, although it does state that women and girls account for 40% of the number.
According to the polling company Kids Insights, about 1.5 million children in the United Kingdom play Roblox. According to its statistics, which is based on an annual survey of 20,000 British children, Roblox is used by 24% of 10- to 12-year-olds in the UK, which is higher than TikTok (13%) and Snapchat (20%), and approximately as common as Instagram (25 percent ).
According to the agency, 19 percent of seven-to-nine-year-olds in the UK play Roblox, trailing YouTube (43 percent) but ahead of TV brands such as CBBC (11 percent), Nickelodeon (10 percent), and Cartoon Network (10 percent) (8 percent ).
Reasons for the Roblox popularity
Mr. Craig Donato, Roblox’s chief business officer said that they made no promotions at our firm.d The most common way for anybody to engage in our platform was from a friend who invited them to play. In addition, the second approach is through Youtube – watch other people play it. He also considered it as an organic phenomenon.
He further indicates that one explanation for Roblox’s success is the game’s focus on “unstructured play” in an age where more and more children’s physical-world experiences are more limited than in past generations.
He shared his memory that when he got home from school, he got on his bike and pedal through the city, playing pick-up baseball. However, in today’s culture, it’s difficult for children to go outside and engage in unstructured play with their peers. Most of the interactions on his website aren’t purely based on the prize. It’s a common bond that you have with various individuals.
How do people make games for it?
By installing the Roblox Studio program, anybody can create a game (or “experience” – they can literally be virtual environments). According to the firm, it has over 2 million “makers,” – approximately 2% of its gamers, with the most famous games being played by up to 100,000 people at once.
Many kids’ goals are limited to making a simple game or virtual room where they can spend time relaxing or enjoying with friends, but others create larger, more complicated games, and even start making money by taking a share of in-game sales using Roblox’s virtual currency, Robux. In 2019, the corporation plans to pay them more than $100 million.
Donato says that their company owned game making teams and the revenue could be millions of dollars per year. Roblox is committed to growing this culture, and in 2018 it released its own program for educators, which is available under a Creative Commons license. According to Donato, the service served over 500,000 children in its first launched year.
This is a business opportunity or not?
Josh Wood is a Roblox game creator from the United Kingdom. He’s just 18 years old, but he first found Roblox in 2013 and began making his own game apps for it a year later. He claimed that, in the beginning, he started to learn and work on projects with others until he launched Game Dev Life, his most popular game so far, which has over a million play sessions.
Wood has since formed his own business to create Roblox games, employing numerous producers, designers, and reviewers, as well as releasing a toy line based on Game Dev Life in collaboration with Roblox.
In a share about this plan, he said he was willing to pay for his graduate education and continue to reinvest in his company with the profits from his games.
Abbie Leigh is a young British game developer who works on Roblox games. That 19-age girl began playing Roblox in 2011, but only began improving in 2017, initially by making assets for other people’s games. She’s now working on three games, including her own sports-themed version, and plans to turn freelance production into a full-time job.
She said it never seems like a career, which is the best aspect, of course. She loves creating and does her interest in her spare time, and if it is what she enjoys, she feels a sense of reward.
Question about the Roblox’s safety for children
When Roblox has made waves in the mass media, it has generally been for controversial purposes, ranging from allegations of adults seeking to groom children on the site in 2017 to, most infamously, a simulated sexual harassment in June 2018, in which a seven-year-old player’s avatar was assaulted by two male avatars whose users had tried to hack the game’s code to reveal pornographic imagery.
The Sun conducted an article the next month, alleging that Roblox was a platform for roleplaying as jihadis, Nazi officials, and Ku Klux Klan participants. According to the organization, it has been working hard to fight wrongdoers and close any holes in its network.
Laura Higgins, a British child-safety expert hired by Roblox in January 2019 as its director of digital civility. Her task is to benefit from these topics and to avoid behaviors that could threaten young players. And she said that when something goes wrong, they would not get defensive. With as much as possible effort to reverse the situation, they tried to resolve it, and that action was what they’re doing to make sure it would not happen again.
“We start with protection as our number one goal. We recognize that we have younger athletes, so you must be as prepared as possible in terms of safety,” she explains.
She said that it’s an old concept that if anyone has negative intentions toward children, they’ll gravitate toward where the children are. They are continuously analyzing our resources and searching for opportunities to improve them.
How can parents keep informed about it?
Roblox has also launched a part of its website titled For Parents, which outlines its protection features, including algorithms that block swearwords, names, and addresses in text chats, as well as a reporting mechanism for offensive talk or information. There’s also an algorithm that detects when the avatars of participants are dressed appropriately.
When it comes to safety on a children’s forum like Roblox, Higgins acknowledges that parents can get “very irritated.” “You say to yourself, ‘How tough will it be?’ [to prevent these occurrences],” she continues. “And the answer is that it’s very difficult. When things go bad, it’s because someone is attempting to bring the processes down.”
She wants to guarantee that parents recognize good aspects of the games that their children make on Roblox, referencing the example of a game created by a teenager whose father had recently passed away.
He built a game about balancing personal stability and mental fitness as a journey for other young people coping with related issues. It was a wonderful outlet for him, but it also aided numerous younger people who played it and were able to express themselves.
Abbie Leigh, the producer, also stresses this argument. “I am a huge fan of the developer community in general. “We all stay together, promote each other’s inventions, and lend a hand when we’re in need,” she says. “It varies from game reviews to personal relationship matters.”
