On August 02, 2019, Roblox surpassed 100 million monthly active users (MAU) on PC, Mac OS, iOS, Android, and Xbox One. It was a surprise for the entire industry, but Roblox has really become the most popular creative sandbox, outpacing Minecraft with its once phenomenal 91 million MAU. Freepps.top experts explored the title in detail to explain such a resounding success.
Long Road to The Top
Building on the April report by TechCrunch, the company jumped from 90 to 100 million in just 4 months. However, such a high growth rate didn’t follow the franchise during its early years on the market. For 11 years after the initial launch, Roblox MAU has been slowly crawling to the 9 million marks. And only in the comparably small gap between February 2016 and August 2019, it added a whopping 91 million audience.
Roblox was released 13 years ago, 3 years before Minecraft, influenced by Lego sets. It’s a sandbox game-making platform that lets players build worlds and script game rules to play custom scenarios. Now there are more than 1.5 million user-created games. Players can launch any of them for free, create new ones, share them with the community, and even make a living doing that.
The first reason for the delayed popularity boom was caused by the lack of technology available to customers. Smartphones that were manufactured between 2005 and 2011 just couldn’t run it! The growth of the platform was rather slow because of the huge hype wave around Minecraft, as well. The situation started to change only 3 years ago when more streamers and lets players started joining the Roblox community on YouTube and Twitch. Even Kanye West has a clip where he parodies clumsy Roblox characters.
Education? Why Not!
For quite a long time, Roblox used to receive thousands of complaints from angry parents. They hated the platform for tolerating cyberbullying in chats. Almost every parental review on Commonsensemedia and similar websites blamed Roblox for bad language, virtual violence, and even harassment in chats. Developers managed to change the situation dramatically at the end of 2016 and modified the moderation of all communicative means in the game to make it more appropriate for the key audience, over half of which are children and youth.
Next, they went even farther. Now Roblox can be used not only for entertainment, but it’s also a powerful educational initiative. Following Minecraft’s footsteps, Roblox started to spread free coding tutorials based on unlimited creative flexibility and technological opportunities hidden in the game.
Do What You Want
The final version of Roblox that we love at Freepps.top, allows you to implement your most creative ideas. Due to the clear visual-coding environment, it’s easy to juggle with 3D models, sprites, and physical properties. If you’re a developer, you can create full-value multiplayer experiences and even monetize them by offering players various virtual items and paid battle passes. It’s the most diverse free-to-play game development simulator on the market.