I remember one game in which you started off on a massive platform full of food, and had to shovel the food onto a conveyor belt that led into a giant person's mouth. If you yourself fell onto the conveyor belt, you'd be treated to a grand tour of the person's digestive system before being turned to poop and dropped into the toilet bowl. Inside the toilet there was an obstacle course, and at the end of this obstacle course there was an array of fighter jets that you could use to get back onto the food platform. The jets didn't have throttle: they either went super fast or not at all. So the poop-people would bail out of their planes in mid-air, and the jet would crash into the baseplate, usually killing someone below.
This was back when there was no way for developers to monetize their games. Some games had "VIP T-shirts" that gave you tools or allowed you to enter a special room, but devs had neither the technical ability nor the incentive to "do it for the money". Most games were like the one I described: bizarre one-off projects created with the intent of showing something really cool. A few "classics" kept stable player-bases, but for the most part the front page was a constant churn of weirdness.
I've still never seen anything quite like it.
Feel better now?
You had plenty of maps where the creators tried to match the game's feel, and so many that were completely unrelated. Giant bathrooms where you are the size of a mouse was one of the standouts I remember.
This level of customization is often just something businesses have moved away from allowing. And considering the "condo" problem with Roblox, it's understandable why: https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game... (The bathroom map I recall above, had a photo of a topless woman in a hidden area.)
So many weird and wacky maps. Maps built to look like spongebob's house, maps to look like mario, so many hours wasted on surf maps.
I'm sad newer games don't support custom maps or servers as much these days.
So, when I read “grew up playing Roblox”, I had to read up Roblox's history to understand my bearing.
This is surreal.
She's been asking me that she need to become a premium member to create Roblox artifacts/items. She is creative. I need to look into this. She meets her friends, hangs out with them there. She has even taught her 4-year old sister to play and wander around with her on Roblox.
Please help her with that. What's she's asking it basically what I asked of my parents at her age. I did things like run a BBS and write stupid programs, and today I'm a senior software developer with a job that pays quite well. And I still love programming.
While she doesn't technically need it to be creative, doing things that interest you is a huge boost in the creativity and learning departments. She probably won't learn what you or she expects to, and that's even better, IMO.
Of course, I don't know what else you're already doing for her like that, and there's certainly a point where you're just throwing money away at whims. But I just felt the need to put this out there.
The global hate for flash (which is fairly warranted) drowns out the absolutely colossal impact it had on pushing the web from a purely informational thing to a platform for entertainment.
Well worth a try if you have access to a Playstation.
https://www.roblox.com/games/334009/Human-Body-Obstacle-Cour...
More platform than game. It's really easy for developers to develop a game, easily implement real money transactions, and have an audience.
I have no doubt Roblux will continue to make mountains of money. The amount of people playing it is mind blowing and I’m sure there are additional ways to monetize their ecosystem.
As a side note - it’s cool to see them play so well together and I even play with them too to engage with them on something they enjoy. On the other hand, I sometimes get concerned with how much they play and how addictive the micro transactions are for kids their age. Then again, I spent most of my days growing up playing games like EverQuest, WoW, learning to program, etc. , so it’s hard for me to judge.
Making reliable multiplayer games is tough: I'd love to see a serious API service that does the same thing for "real" game engine/libraries!
1) Multiplayer (skipping all netcode, account systems, and so forth)
2) Have a secured, safe, and trusted way to make transactions
If you were to try and make a multiplayer, microtransaction based game in Unity, that is a large amount of work, especially for a younger developer, and it's _critical_. Messing up payment code has huge consequences.
The App Store review guidelines prohibit this very clearly:
> Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not [...] download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app [...]
There is only one narrow exception which clearly does not apply to Roblox for several reasons; for example it's only for HTML5 content.
Tim Cook just testified to Congress that all developers are treated equally, but this seems like a clear case where an app that is "too big to fail" gets special treatment.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/471710/Rec_Room/
It's Roblox for the next generation, and extremely fun even to me when I tried it out as an adult. I hope Roblox expands into VR or recroom will eat their lunch. VR is the future and people spend HOURS in there playing all sorts of official games and community made games.
Roblox has the userbase it does because it's on every platform and runs on potatoes.
How many kids (using a large range from ages 1-18) have VR setups in their homes?
> We have experienced rapid growth in the three months ended June 30, 2020, September 30, 2020 and for a portion of the three months ended March 31, 2020, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic given our users have been online more as a result of global COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies. For example, our bookings increased 171% from the nine-months ended September 30, 2019 to the nine months ended September 30, 2020. We do not expect these activity levels to be sustained, and in future periods we expect growth rates for our revenue to decline, and we may not experience any growth in bookings or our user base during periods where we are comparing against COVID-19 impacted periods (i.e. the three months ended March 31, 2020, June 30, 2020, and September 30, 2020). Our historical revenue, bookings and user base growth should not be considered indicative of our future performance. We believe our overall acceptance, revenue growth and increases in bookings depend on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, our ability to:
> We have a history of net losses and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future.
We have incurred net losses since our inception, and we expect to continue to incur net losses in the near future. We incurred net losses of $97.2 million, $86.0 million, and $203.2 million for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, respectively. As of September 30, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $484.0 million.
This is boilerplate and isn't notable. [0]
It's only not notable because if you've even skimmed the rest of the S-1, you already know whether they make money or not. If you haven't, it's possibly the most notable thing there. It's the single bit of information that tells you most about the company's historical financial performance.
2018: $97.2m
2019: $86.0m
2020: $203.2m
It has 110MM MAUs + delivers an est 1.25 BILLION hours of entertainment each month
It does this not because it makes a good "game", but because players make games/worlds/experiences for and with one another
This only exhausts when imagination does"
--https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/1236773493372596224
It's a pretty neat way of getting kids into game dev.
Exciting, because I've been waiting for these platforms for like 15 years, since I played Warcraft 3.
But also bittersweet, because I have already resigned to having to eventually make one myself, and now it's done.
The thing my kids most consistently spend their allowance on is hypixel (a minecraft curated multiplayer server with some scenario-based games is the best way I can describe it).
The appeal is that it is some sort of a Second Life or Metaverse for these streamer personalities who otherwise have no "physical" opportunities to interact outside of voice chat. In these worlds, they have towns, homes, pranks, disputes, wars, and lots of opportunities for highly entertaining roleplaying in general.
I mostly watch virtual youtubers (pekora from hololive in particular) but if you're not into virtual youtubers, the mod'd OfflineTV server is also great. Michael Reeves will probably appeal to the people on HN. Right now there's a nuclear war going on and Reeves thinks he can win by programming an army of self-replicating turtles using Lua: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/805937812 The guy with nukes is the dictator of the server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrtKTFZvK5Y
It was such a great experience, had a lot of fun, thank-you to the original devs for the good times :)
For those not in the know, script builders were places that were just an empty map, but that allowed anyone in the server to load in their own scripts - so people would create and run custom weapons, power armor, admin commands, etc. and play around with each other. There was a very dedicated community of programmers that played them for years, and I'm still friends with some people I met through them like 7 years ago.
I think as a genre they're pretty dead, though - Roblox tightened security around loading arbitrary scripts that broke all the script builders several times, and now had replication filtering so that client-side scripts can't set properties. You probably could still make cool swords, but they'd need to use proper RemoteFunctions for client-server RPC, meaning all the old scripts are broken.
Yep definitely had a lot of fun in those places. I remember loads of people logging on injecting admin command scripts (wasn’t it something like Person210’s admin commands that everyone used?)
One of my more vivid memories was making a script that would inject a train station that only I had access to, with a train that would take me to a distant planet with god-mode weapons and aircraft. Had a lot of fun with that! This must have been back in 2008/09
Game dev was something that appealed to me when I was younger (mainly because of Roblox) but I never really considered a career in it.
Games look boring AF to me, but tweens seem to love em.
In the current pandemic setup where my kids are so isolated Roblox has been a huge win as it's so much like a digital playground for them to hang out on.
I saw my nephew spend _hours_ in Roblox manning a virtual restaurant cash register for some incredibly minuscule amount of Roblox bucks (like, pennies worth). That’s when I knew this was going the be the biggest thing ever.
It's gotten my eldest son into Lua programing and 3D modelling, so I have no problems with the platform as it currently is.
A few of the games/servers were interesting: Phantom Forces was a reasonably well polished FPS, and the Murder Mystery games (sneaky murderer vs sheriff and villagers, typical social deduction/betrayal game) were pretty fun.
Hoping it doesn't get completely and totally overrun with ads.
So like flash games that a lot of us grew up with then. There is a lot to be said when the games load in seconds so you can jump from game to game and the novelty value is high.
Roblox has no real way to know, but I'd guess a not insignificant amount of their revenue is unauthorized charges. Better protections on parents' cards may cause their revenue to dry up a fair bit...
And that's before we get into the problematic nature of pushing a monetized game on kids as young as five years old, who might be incentivized to steal from their parents now at an early age. I could see this company's business model getting nuked by future legislation.
I'm not so pessimistic as you on the model, but those previous operating losses seem pretty big.
They lost more in one year than it took to build GTAV over 7 years.
For anyone who's done this dance before, is it a bad, good, or great idea to apply to a company, right when S-1 is released? Don't know if, e.g., companies do a hiring lockdown right before IPO. Also, just on the emotional side, I joined a company very shortly after IPO years ago, and it was always a sore spot to see the life-changing millions of dollars of those who joined the company not long before me, and the constant reminder of "pre-" vs "post-" employees.
I would say that employees who were there right before or shortly after the IPO weren't all that different in terms of initial grants. The only difference is that pre-IPO employees could get ISOs which have slightly better tax treatment than NQSOs.
I would make the decision based on the work, the pay, and your overall feelings for the space rather than whether you applied 4 weeks ago or 4 weeks after IPO. You already missed the gains before the IPO, but most companies have a lot more gains after the IPO than before it.
If you're the type to be jealous that you missed on the pre-IPO gains, don't go, of course. Those employees who made "millions" in the IPO didn't do it because they joined 2 months before you. They probably joined 2+ years before you.
In my own case I described above, yeah I was actually very envious of the pre-IPO crowd (almost destructively so) when I joined, but my envy eventually calmed down out of exhaustion -- after the Nth meeting with a billionaire or centi-millionaire, and after you meet the Nth person like yourself who missed out on the rocket-ship, and after you turn down the Nth supposed rocket-ship that flames out (bullet dodged!) you kinda lose the ability to care much about what-could-have-been.
Mostly just curious. Getting hired is a big hurdle anway, and it takes a long time, and hell maybe I won't even get around to submitting.
It's only gotten more advanced since then, and if I were a parent, I'd love for my kids to be making games on the platform.
> I learned to program when I was 7. I started with LOGOWriter and QBASIC. What did I make? Games. It should be obvious. All kids want to write games. If your kid wants to write insurance software at age 7, you should stop wandering around aimlessly on the internet and find a good psychiatrist. Do it. Do it now.
> At its heart, ROBLOX is a game development platform. You can do a lot with it without writing a line of code. But if you really get into it, you’re going to want more power. You’re going to be very motivated to figure out how to program.
[...]
> I don’t care what fancy private school you send your kids to. The only place your 13 year old is going to encounter a PID-Controller is in ROBLOX’s Body(Position/Velocity/Thrust) objects, which can be used to script motion for parts and models. That’s just one example.
Does anyone have any?
But boy do I wish there were decent tutorials on line. Learning Lua is fun I guess.
I suppose i need to open investment accounts for them to buy Roblox stock next :-)
[0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...
(btw, I'm just messing around, I had almost no experience in 2012 so I don't really blame them for not hiring me)
Here’s the game fyi:
How did their revenue grow 70% (9-mo 2019 to 2020) but their losses grew 5x?! I can see that there was considerable increase in total costs and expenses but I didn't get a sense of where that investment was going and what long term return there was going to be.
Overall I'm surprised by this as I expected the variable costs to grow with usage and revenue but didn't think there would be a cost of revenue %...
On the other as someone who doesn’t play and doesn’t have kids it’s a bit unsettling seeing some of these engagement numbers eg average daily play time is 2.5 hours per active user. That sounds like a massive time suck. Perhaps one could justify this as inciting creativity and there’s a social aspect to it but spending hours a day on this can’t be healthy long term.
I haven't noticed anything unhealthy yet. He has a learned a lot about scams, understanding valuations and trading (it's like a mini stock market around virtual goods), and just hanging out with his friends.
One of the most interesting things I've noticed is that in this virtual world -- boys and girls hang out together. He has about 12 core friends -- and it's almost an even split girl/boy. Which I think would not have happened in the "real world".
If you think this is some new phenomenon that kids spend a whole 2.5 hours/day on a game... well, I'm not sure how to break this to you.
Kids used to watch an insane amount of TV each day forever. Then they moved to console games in the early 90s.. and also computer games. It's been what 50/60 years of TV and 30+ years of consoles/computer games.
If anything, things in the last ~10 years are better because kids have a good option to not just sit in front of the TV and watch whatever is on and all these ads.. they can be into games that are mentally challenging. And they have all these options to have voice chats with friends, so it's way more social than ever.
So just in general the argument is "this can't be healthy in the long term" seems to imply that it's some new phenomenon..
I wonder how that number changed with the pandemic. Also, it sounds better than one-way TV kids grew up watching for similar amounts of time each day.
> is 2.5 hours per active user
This is only for users who are active in a given day. Maybe MAU is 10x DAU, and an average user spends 2.5 hours every week-and-a-half.
But I feel like every new fad has this. He spent all of his money on Pokemon cards years ago, that he never touches now.
What's amazing is how Roblox has made an actual marketplace and scarcity for virtual items that have no monetary backing.
I liked more how they did before where you would buy yearly subscription and they would put money to your kid account every week or month. Shame they stopped that.
They really missed $ROBUX?
All of the companies traded on the Nasdaq have four-lettered ticker symbols, which are representative of the actual company. For example, the ticker symbol for Nasdaq-traded Microsoft is MSFT. However, in some cases, a ticker symbol on the Nasdaq will have five letters, and the fifth letter is an identifier symbol that tells market participants something about the company
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/nasdaqfifthlette...
It feels like, anecdotally at least, most people switch to Minecraft once they get older as it's a more difficult/mature game with a higher skill ceiling.
It is a nice starting place if you don't know where to look in the docs to begin.
