Roblox grows up

“When you’re ready, feel free to take your seat with grace, landing into the body with ease, trusting whatever posture feels most supportive.”
My Roblox avatar—a blocky, smiley-face little guy with shaggy orange hair, plasticky-gray complexion, and hinged limbs—is rolling out his yoga mat. As a soothing voice coaches him, he kneels with palms outstretched, surrounded by other avatars seeking their own inner peace.
By the standards of Roblox’s 3D playground, this exercise in virtual mindfulness isn’t exactly action-packed—and that’s the point. “We wanted something calm and tranquil, where you can tune in by tuning out,” says Angélic Vendette, global head of marketing at yoga-wear maker Alo, which created the experience. So, apparently, did plenty of Roblox users: They’ve visited the virtual yoga studio more than 70 million times.
Yoga-wear maker Alo’s Roblox experience is peaceful, not action-packed. [Image: courtesy of Roblox]The Alo Sanctuary’s popularity isn’t just a marketing coup for Alo. It’s also a sign that the effort Roblox has been putting into transcending its roots as a vaguely educational, Lego-like digital construction kit for small children is paying off. The company’s aspirations now go well beyond entertaining and educating little kids: The long-term mission, says cofounder and CEO David Baszucki, is “bringing a billion people together.”
Before Roblox gets anywhere near that figure—at the end of 2022, the 16-year-old platform hit 59 million daily users, up 19% year over year and more than triple the figure in 2019—aging up its audience is critical to its business plan. The company, which went public in March 2021, brought in $2.2 billion in revenue and had adjusted earnings of $356.5 million in 2022. Its primary source of revenue comes via its virtual economy, which is based on “Robux,” the digital currency that users purchase to pay for gameplay experiences, clothing, and accessories for their avatars, and even new moves and expressions. (For $2.50 in Robux, I could teach my avatar to do jumping jacks; for $3.74, I could buy him a frowny face.)
David Baszucki [Photo: courtesy of Roblox]Since older players can spend Robux more freely than younger ones, their increased presence also opens up revenue streams, such as upcoming “immersive ads” that will envelop players in marketing messages. Kids being exposed to ads on the platform has been a source of controversy; the company recently announced that it would prevent ads and “sponsored experiences” from targeting users under the age of 13.
Recently, Roblox has been registering older users at an impressive clip. The fastest-growing age group is 17-to-24-year-olds, a demographic that grew by 33% year over year and now accounts for 22% of all users. A full 55% of its users are older than 13. The company is secretive enough about the exact breakdown of its membership that it doesn’t disclose stats such as the percentage of users who are over 21 or if people much older than 24 make up a significant constituency.
It only looks like a game
One basic fact about Roblox that not everyone gets: It isn’t a game. Instead, it’s a platform that lets anyone build experiences that any member can enter. And while those experiences generally have an entertainment angle, they aren’t necessarily games in in the classic sense. Many are about open-ended exploration rather than specific goals; others simulate real-world activities, such as attending a concert. Users have created more than 30 million such experiences to date.
That emphasis on creation dates to Roblox’s early days, when it described itself as “a big experiment at the intersection of gaming, authoring, robots, inventing, and FUN!” Technical fellow Arseny Kapoulkine, who joined the company in 2012, says that it quickly transcended classic definitions of gameplay such as there being well-defined goals: “Even back then, a lot of the popular titles on the platform were like, ‘It’s a game in the sense that you’re having fun. It is not a game in the traditional sense.'”
In their classic form, Roblox avatars have a Playmobil vibe, but the platform is adding new types—including ones that look pretty much like human beings. [Image: courtesy of Roblox]Today, the experiences that Roblox creators design using the Roblox Studio software and Lua programming language can express unique, self-contained creative visions that feel like worlds unto themselves. Take, for instance, TutuLand. It’s a ballet-centric environment within Roblox where the diversions range from taking dance lessons to collecting outfits to battling “ballet villains.” It’s racked up more than 12 million visits since debuting in December 2021 and is one of several dance-oriented Roblox experiences created by Mimi_Dev, a 25-year-old developer who’s been on the platform since 2008.
Even when Mimi_Dev was a kid, she was a creator, not a mere consumer. “I didn’t play games,” she explains. “I just had my own world and I built stuff. I built a rural city, and that game’s actually still on Roblox. It’s terrible!” Eventually she got her whole family involved in building for Roblox, including her dad, a software engineer whose nom de Roblox is DarthChadius.
That Roblox aimed from the beginning to make creating stuff so simple that a child could do it continues to redound to its favor. Mimi_Dev’s journey from budding Roblox enthusiast to Roblox developer whose creations draw a sizable audience isn’t unique: When I attended the Roblox Developer Conference in San Francisco last September, I was immersed in a crowd that was distinctly younger than the attendees at an Apple or Google developer conference. The odds are also pretty good that some of Mimi_Dev’s young fans will end up developing their own experiences. It’s a positive feedback loop that has helped the platform scale up to its current size.
[Illustration: Maria do Rosário Frade]As Roblox has gained that critical mass, it’s also attracted larger companies who see it as a business opportunity—whether it’s by collecting a percentage of the Robux that members spend on their creations or simply building engagement for a brand. (Depending on how digital items are sold on the platform, their creators receive 30% to 70% of the proceeds.) In 2022, for example, a Sonic the Hedgehog game called Sonic Speed Simulator—a collaboration between Sega and Roblox developer Gamefam—set a Roblox record by getting 70 million plays in its first week.
This growth spurt has happened amid (and even outlasted a slowdown in) the burbling hype for the metaverse, the 3D internet we might all theoretically choose to immerse ourselves in—maybe, someday, once the necessary technology exists. Nobody has talked up the concept more than Mark Zuckerberg, who underlined his commitment by changing Facebook’s corporate name to Meta in October 2021. A year after that, however, The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta’s Horizon Worlds, a proto-metaverse for its Quest VR headsets, was struggling to get visitors to return, leaving its population under 200,000.
Meanwhile, even if Roblox isn’t a full-blown metaverse designed for consumption via a high-tech headset, it has the benefit of actually existing at scale on devices people already own: PCs, phones, tablets, and the Xbox. Consequently, as consumers and businesses have become metaverse-curious, Roblox has arguably benefited more than anyone else, including two other major virtual destinations, Microsoft’s Minecraft and Epic Games’ Fortnite.
As with everything about the metaverse, Roblox’s precise relationship to it is a bit amorphous. The company has been known to refer to its platform as “the Roblox metaverse,” as if it’s already made a great leap forward. But Baszucki doesn’t seem to be hung up on definitions: “There’s no specific time when we say something’s a metaverse and when something isn’t,” he maintains.
Maybe the best way to look at it is that Roblox is still in the process of building a metaverse—one with distinctly different priorities than Zuckerberg’s vision or the wild-west frontier championed by NFT and Web3 enthusiasts. The platform’s history as an environment for kids shapes its goals, which go well beyond simply avoiding the metaverse’s most dystopian associations. Roblox wants to remain welcoming even as it allows its community to build out ever-more-ambitious virtual worlds.
“There’s the Snow Crash version of the metaverse,” says chief marketing and people experience officer Barbara Messing. “There’s Ready Player One. Our vision of the metaverse is the positives of when you get people who have the ability to create the world they want to create. And then we give them the tools to make it sure that it’s safe and civil.”
Barbara Messing [Photo: courtesy of Roblox]Like Disneyland, Roblox is trying to be a single place that speaks to a wide audience: “We’re not divided into Roblox Kids, Roblox Adults, Roblox Whatever,” explains chief product officer Manuel Bronstein. Still, with minors a core constituency of the platform, its expansion plans retain a family-friendly aura. Last September, for example, Roblox introduced movie-rating-like “experience guidelines” that indicate the appropriate age group for a particular creation. But in every context, wholesomeness prevails. Mild or moderate violence is permissible, but not gore. Even swearing violates the community standards, which stress civility as an overarching principle. Controversies caused by these standards not being met persist, as do other concerns about safety on the platform. But anything racy or offensive has managed to sneak by the moderation system.
Brands at play
As companies contemplate planting their flags in metaverse-like immersive 3D worlds, Roblox’s aggressively uncontroversial nature is often a selling point. “Most brands don’t want to be in Grand Theft Auto,” says Gamefam CEO Joe Ferencz, whose work on Roblox experiences ranges from the Sonic game and one based on the Kung Fu Panda franchise to a September 2022 concert experience headlined by the Chainsmokers that has more than 3 million lifetime visits. He adds that half-hearted forays don’t work: “There’s a pretty large graveyard of brands on Roblox that have somewhere between zero and 20 people in their experiences at any time.”
Success on Roblox is not about simply launching something and issuing a press release proclaiming that your brand has arrived in the metaverse. “You should be testing ideas,” says VP of global brand experiences Christina Wootton, a nine-year Roblox veteran. “You should be seeing how your audiences engage with your brand. You should be cocreating together.”
Christina Wootton [Photo: courtesy of Roblox]Many success stories involve brands you’d expect to be welcomed by Roblox’s still-youthful audience. Instead of building its own experience from scratch, NASCAR chose to partner with Jailbreak, a hugely popular Roblox cops-and-robbers game that’s been visited more than six billion times. Thanks to this collaboration, some of the vehicles in the game are now NASCAR stock cars: 24 million people engaged with them in the first 10 days.
In late 2021, NASCAR held a car-customizing contest whose winners saw their designs appear in Jailbreak. But it’s not just the community that appeals to the auto-racing organization; it’s also the community standards that keep the platform from devolving into a free-for-all. That helped NASCAR get comfortable with opening its intellectual property up to Roblox creators, explains Nick Rend, its managing director of gaming and esports: “Like all big brands, we have brand controls in place, and we pick and choose who we work with.”
Then there’s skateboard-shoemaker Vans, whose virtual skate park in Roblox has racked up 93 million hours of playing time. Along with skateboard-loving kids, “we’ve also seen strong engagement on the platform with the over-18 demographic,” says CMO Kristin Harrer. “And honestly, we built the experience to be truly inclusive and accessible for everyone.”
Earlier this month, Vans teamed with another brand that’s beloved on Roblox: Gucci. The two companies created a scavenger hunt that spanned Vans World and Gucci’s Gucci Town, letting members shuttle between the two branded experiences via shoebox-like portals to earn gear for their avatars to wear.
Vans’ Roblox experience, you won’t be surprised to hear, involves skateboarding. [Image: courtesy of Roblox]If you haven’t spent much time in Roblox, the fact that a high-end purveyor of fashion such as Gucci maintains a popular presence there may sound odd. But Gucci is one of numerous fashion brands on the platform, along with other famous names, such as Burberry, Tommy Hilfiger, and Givenchy. “With Roblox, you are expressing yourself through your avatars,” says Charles Hambro, CEO of Geeiq, a metaverse-data platform that’s worked with Gucci, H&M, and L’Oréal. “And for fashion brands, particularly luxury fashion brands, territories of self-expression are rather important.”
Gucci made its Roblox debut in 2020 with digital sneakers for avatars and has been ramping up its presence ever since. It opened a pop-up Gucci Garden exhibition in 2021 and, last year, the ongoing Gucci Town—whose store, café, and games have garnered more than 41 million visits. You can even pay the equivalent of $2.62 in Robux for an “exquisite Gucci hoodie” for your avatar.
Most brands in Roblox aren’t in it for the Robux, though. Hambro says the main incentive is “being culturally relevant and meeting people where they are.” Brands continue to stake their claims on the platform, including H&M, whose Loooptopia fashion game debuted in January and had 4.4 million visits by late March.
Gucci Town certainly has a real Gucci feel, but it’s about more than selling luxury goods, digital or otherwise. [Image: courtesy of Roblox]While it’s still unclear whether Roblox’s popularity presages an era when commerce in the metaverse becomes a big business, it could. And this time, companies that were slow to seize past opportunities would like to err on the side of getting in early.
“When social media started, a lot of the conversations they were having in big brands were like, ‘But are our customers really on Snapchat? Are people really going to buy from Instagram?’” says Alice Delahunt, CEO of Web3 fashion platform Syky and a veteran of Burberry’s and Ralph Lauren’s digital teams. “Now, we know that many of the biggest challenger brands of the last 10 to 15 years were those that created and cultivated Instagram audiences and did social commerce and DTC strategies that bigger brands were still trying to grapple with.”
A metaverse in the making
If the flat social media we’ve known does give way to a brave new 3D world, Roblox’s long history and present momentum offer it a formidable head start on other platforms. But its to-do list remains at least as long as its record of accomplishments. At the moment, even an avatar decked out in luxury threads can give off a toylike Playmobil vibe. The company is playing catch-up on technologies that help developers create richer experiences with realistic graphics and physics akin to those in high-end video games—an investment that is “constantly leveling up,” according to chief scientist Morgan McGuire, who contributed to Roblox’s development in its earliest years and joined full time in 2021 to focus on research.
Morgan McGruire [Photo: courtesy of Roblox]Already, the company has enabled the creation of more human-like avatars. It’s also allowed them to wear layered clothing—a feature that permits more personalization and syncs nicely with fashion brands’ enthusiasm for the platform. “If every avatar on Roblox works exactly the same, I can assure you that all the experiences will look exactly the same,” says Bronstein. “And as we have been opening up the gamut of things that can be created on the platform, we’re also going to see that the experiences are going to look different in style. You’re going to have things that look more cartoony. You’re going to have things that look more humanoid and photorealistic.”
For Roblox, making meaningful progress toward its billion-user ambitions also has a large technical component. And even though the company has a sizable head start on many others with visions of the metaverse dancing in their heads, it won’t be easy.
“You could say, well, Roblox has tens of millions of players at any time,” says McGuire. “And the answer is, yeah, but they can’t all interact with each other. They’re in different virtual worlds. If you go to a concert in the real world, there’ll be 10,000 or 20,000 people, or, if you’re in the U.K. at Glastonbury, 50,000 or 100,000 people. There’s no technology today that can deliver that.”
Whatever Roblox builds will need to run well on typical consumer-grade devices, not just high-end hardware such as gaming PCs. “We have an idea of how we’re going to get to 50,000-person experiences,” says CTO Dan Sturman. “Do we know how to get to a million yet? No. That’s okay though. The whole idea is that some experiences are still going to be best if it’s you and 10 of your closest friends.”
Roblox has thrived in part because it runs on a variety of gadgets people already own. [Image: courtesy of Roblox]The good news is that the billion-user target is such a long-term goal that the technology at Roblox’s disposal should get exponentially better as the journey progresses. One recent development with vast potential is the emergence of generative AI. Along with all its other applications from web search to office suites, the tech could transform Roblox by allowing users to create experiences simply by describing them—no coding required. That could greatly expand the available content on the platform, which would in turn give even more people even more incentive to spend even more time in Roblox.
Though the company is just beginning to experiment with generative AI, it’s already whetting appetites for what it hopes to achieve. In a February blog post, Sturman described a scenario in which a user could type, “A red, two seater, convertible sports car with front-wheel drive” to generate a vehicle that not only looks like such a vehicle, but also drives like one in virtual experiences.
For now, the fact that Roblox doesn’t require a fancy VR headset is key to its popularity. But it’s already thinking ahead to the possible era when some form of head-worn device becomes a mainstream way to consume content. “We maintain a VR [version] internally, and we put a lot of work into both the performance but also the user interface side of it,” says McGuire, adding that both he and Baszucki are “huge VR enthusiasts.” One big problem the company knows it needs to solve: making sure that Roblox content that wasn’t created with VR in mind translates onto a headset in a way that makes sense.
If a far larger contingent of people end up spending even more of their lives inside Roblox, it could also have profound implications for the platform’s dedication to remaining a place where people treat each other with empathy. The company doesn’t claim to have all the answers yet, but senior director of community safety and digital civility Laura Higgins says that it’s already thinking about how to “make Roblox, and then the metaverse and [other] online spaces, safer and more civil than the real world in five years’ time.”
With more than 2,100 employees—up from 830 in fall 2020—Roblox is still girding itself for all the challenges ahead. Even as the currently intimidating economic climate is prompting other tech companies to hunker down, it has 188 open positions listed on its careers site.
“We’ve been working on this for 15 years, making radical innovations all along the way,” says CEO Baszucki. “We’ll be working on it for another 15 years. And it’s going to get better and better and more engaging as we go.”