The Skinny on Roblox
You may have heard the name before, but not many over the age of 30 know much about Roblox. In case you didn’t know, over half of kids under the age of 16 played Roblox in 2020. And recently, Roblox stocks have been a hot topic in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and CNN.
What Is Roblox?
Roblox is an online storefront and platform where users can play video games. Roblox isn’t the actual game, it’s where people play games. It’s more like Steam or GoG than Nickelodeon. The biggest draw is that the games are developed by fellow gamers on Roblox’s platform. Roblox has a catalog of user-developed games topping 20 million titles, with games as simple as frogger to as complex as your favorite dungeon crawler or GTA.
Why It’s Turning Heads
User-developers, including children, can make tons of money by monetizing their games on Roblox. Some developers have earned as much as $1 million in a year. The games themselves are free to play, but in-game currency, called Robux, is where the money is made. Each purchase nets the developer a percentage of the money, and once the developer hits a certain threshold, they can then convert Robux into regular currency.
Roblox recently went public, with a starting stock price of $45 and closing at $69.5 that same day, and it looks like that upwards trend is going to continue for quite a while. Some Roblox games are so popular that they break records of over 1.5 million concurrent players, and 20.4 billion visits.
The big draw is that anyone, literally anyone can learn to create Roblox games. The platform is so simple that young children can develop games themselves, and as popularity of a game soars, the game can be scaled to become a multiplayer game. The games can be updated, enhanced, events can be held, there’s no real limit to what can be created. Roblox uses a programming language called Lua, which is markedly easier to learn than other programming languages. Roblox provides developer forums, maintains the servers, and manages the logistics, so developers can focus on their passion and channel their creativity into just the creation of these games. Developers don’t need to be artists, as the platform stocks an infinite number of skins, designs, and functions, and developers are constantly upping their game and sharing what they’re learning on YouTube and other platforms.
Whether you’d like to try your hand at developing or are simply looking to invest, there is money to be made in the Roblox world.
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