Roblox
by Roblox Corporation that allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users. It was created by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004, and released to the public in 2006. As of February 2025, the platform has reported an average of 85.3 million daily active users. According to the company, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16.
The platform hosts millions of user-created games (officially referred to as “experiences”), all created using a dialect of the programming language Lua and the platform’s game engine, Roblox Studio. While Roblox is free-to-play, it features in-game purchases done through its virtual currency known as Robux, and game developers on the platform are able to create items that cost Robux.
Furthermore, the platform hosts a large virtual economy centered around those items and Robux. Using the platform’s “Developer Exchange” program, creators on the platform are able to exchange their earned Robux for real-world currency. The platform has also been used to host virtual concerts and events, as well as advergames.
While Roblox started off small—both in playerbase and as a company—it began to grow rapidly in the second half of the 2010s. This growth was further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2020, over 5,000 games on Roblox had been played over a million times, and over 20 had been played over one billion times. Although critic reviews for
Roblox have been positive, it has faced heavy criticism for its content moderation, which in turn has led to a large amount of sexual or politically extremist material on the platform. It has also been criticized for its alleged exploitative practices toward children and microtransactions. The platform has been restricted or completely blocked in several countries, including China, Turkey, Qatar, and Jordan.
Overview
Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system built around user-generated content and games, officially referred to as “experiences.” Games can be created by any user through the platform’s game engine, Roblox Studio, and then shared to and played by other players.
featured on Roblox vary in genre, from role-playing games to ones centered around escaping prison, among others.The platform is made to appeal to a family-friendly audience, and has been described as a massively multiplayer online game (MMO).
While Roblox is free-to-play, it features a virtual currency known as “Robux” that can be purchased with real-world money. Robux can be used to purchase virtual items that the player can use on their virtual character (or “avatar”) on the platform, or access experiences that require payment.As with games, avatar items on Roblox are mainly user-generated,
though most items on the platform were made by Roblox themselves for most of the platform’s history.Through the platform’s “Developer Exchange” program, creators on the platform are able to exchange their earned Robux to real-world money.In addition, Roblox features a monthly service called “Roblox Premium”, with its subscribers gaining access to more features on the platform and a monthly stipend of Robux.
Virtual economy
Roblox features a large virtual economy centered around Robux, its virtual currency.The currency allows users to buy, sell and create virtual items.Roblox also has a service called “Roblox Premium”, a monthly subscription that gives users monthly stipends of Robux (with the amount depending on
the selected subscription tier), discounts when purchasing items, more Robux being granted per purchase, and access to the item trading system.
Similarly to games, many items on Roblox are user-generated. While only Roblox developers were able to create avatar items early on, the capabilities of user-generated content have expanded greatly over time. Since 2019, select users have gained the ability to publish avatar accessories, animations, bundles, and more. Some items on Roblox have a “limited” status, with only a few being available and the price of the item based on supply and demand rather than a fixed price.
These items function similarly to non-fungible tokens. The prices of limited items range, with the most valuable ones costing millions of Robux. After the original supply of that item runs out, players can resell them for a higher price. Additionally, users with an active Roblox Premium subscription are able to trade limiteds amongst each other. Limited items made by the community cannot be traded, and this feature is restricted to official items.
Developers on the platform are able to create purchasable content through one-time purchases.Through the Roblox “Developer Exchange” program, users are able to exchange their earned Robux for real-world money,as long as they have at least 30,000 Robux.In 2020, Roblox reported that
roughly 345,000 game developers on the platform earned money through the program.Avatar item creators have also been able to generate profit with the platform, with some individuals designing items as a full-time job. It has been reported that the highest-earning creators have earned over $100,000 a year from item sales.
A sizeable amount of scams are on Roblox, largely revolving around messages promoting websites and games that are designed to appear to give out free Robux. Furthermore, there are people in the community known as “beamers” who compromise Roblox accounts to steal and sell their items on the platform’s black markets. They employ various techniques, such as creating phishing websites or using other ploys to acquire a victim’s session token.
Once they gain access to the victim’s account, these “beamers” steal and subsequently sell valuable limited items owned by the victims for real-world currency or cryptocurrency through marketplace sites or Discord chat rooms. The slang term “beaming” is commonly used to describe this entire process on Roblox. Roblox does offer hacking victims a “rollback” for their items, although this is only offered once per account.
Roblox Studio and game design
Roblox Studio is the platform’s game engine and game development software. The engine and all games made on Roblox predominantly use Luau, a dialect of the Lua 5.1 programming language. Since November 2021, the programming
The language has been open sourced under the MIT License. Some aspects of the engine were created using C++. To assist in the creation of games, Roblox Studio features multiple pre-made templates that users can modify.
As of 2020, Roblox reported that more than 2 million developers used Roblox Studio to create more than 20 million games per year. They also reported that a majority of developers were minors.
Communication
Roblox allows players to communicate with each other in a variety of ways, such as through in-game chat and direct messaging.Voice chat is also usable for players over the age of 13 that have their age verified.Direct messaging is restricted to users over the age of 13, unless that player has received parental consent to use the feature.Messages that
are sent on the platform are subject to a chat filtering system that automatically censors inappropriate language. To verify their age, users can either use an ID or have a video of themselves analyzed by age estimation software.Players can also join ‘communities’ (formerly known as Groups), where users can send messages in an internet forum-like environment.
Players are able to add other users as friends (officially known as “Connections”). An additional ‘tier’ of this system, known as “Trusted Connections”, allows verified users over the age of 13 to send unfiltered chat messages and personal information to each other. If one of the users is over the age of 18 while the other user is between 13 and 17, then both parties must prove that they know each other in real life. This is done through either mutual QR code scanning, or importing their phone contacts.
Merchandise
In January 2017, toy fabricator Jazwares began producing licensed toy minifigures based on the Roblox platform. The sets included a code that was used to redeem virtual items, as well as blind boxes that contained random minifigures. In April 2021, Hasbro released Roblox-themed Nerf blasters and a Roblox-themed version of Monopoly.
Revenue
During the 2017 Roblox Developers Conference, officials said that creators on the game platform, of which there were about 1.7 million as of 2017, collectively earned at least $30 million in 2017. The iOS version of Roblox passed $1 billion of lifetime revenue in November 2019, $1.5 billion in June 2020, and $2 billion in October 2020, making it the iOS app with the second-highest revenue.
Several individual games on Roblox have accumulated revenues of over $10 million, while developers as a whole on the platform were collectively projected to have earned around $250 million over the course of 2020. It became the third highest-grossing game of 2020, with a revenue of $2.29 billion, below the Tencent titles PUBG and Honor of Kings.
