There's something weird and sad about Roblox for me as an old-timer who still has silly dreams about free/open software internet utopias for just fun? There's so much creative (programming etc) energy in that place and, for what?
I get you perfectly (I play Roblox with my kid almost everyday) but I have another opinion. When I think about what it accomplished, I think Roblox is pretty amazing; actually one of the most amazing software ever made. It accomplished in practice basically what lots of people have been trying to do for decades, since the MUDs from the 70s, and what Zuckerberg wasted billions of dollars with. Sure, most of its content is total crap, but the same could be said of many other great things (the internet for ex.) If you dig a bit you can find really nice puzzle games (“obbys”) for example that require two or three people to collaborate, and there are actually kids there waiting to collaborate with you. So the point is, yes it needs active filtering, but the engagement of players and developers is unprecedented and pretty exciting.
My main criticism right now is this idea of jumping on the LLM buzzwagon. It’s sad that they don’t understand that their success is 100% human-driven, and that using LLMs beyond QoL stuff will be their downfall. The moment we get fully AI-generated games and worlds, it’ll be over.
My kids have recently become interested in Roblox. I installed it on the PS5 but honestly I don't get the appeal. The games we tried are of very low quality. It doesn't have the complexity or interest of Minecraft. It doesn't have the polish of Astro's Playroom (or Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, which they are too young to play). It reminds me a little of Fortnite's non-battle-royal games, but much worse. Can you give some advice on how to approach it as a parent? I suspect there are some good games in there that we missed.
I play with my kid and my advice is to not look for a game in Roblox, but to play Roblox as it is. It's not going to be about the quality, it's not polished and there are probably 8 game types to it: Clicking, Obby, Tycoon, Survival, Farming, Sports, Shooter and Story.
All the games in one of those categories are a variation of itself, some are better balanced and the grind is fair, some will reach a point which the kid will give up and some have a very interesting trick that will soon be copied by all the others.
Why do we play it? For him, because it's familiar, he knows what to do and how to master it. For me, mindless gaming that I don't have to put any effort to it.
The time that I spend with him is very valuable, and there is a reversal here because its me entering to his world and not him to mine. He feel proud when he is better than me into something, the obbies are challenging even for someone who spent his life playing platform games, I just can't make the jumps and he can, so he comes to recue me taking my iPad and going for it.
I do enjoy some of the games, Islands is very well done but the devs quit it, Wacky Wizards is very quirky and with endless potion combinations, Death Bumper Car is really crazy and frustrating, but fun to play together, The Space Simulator is a space mining that is really hard in some places and interesting challenge... there is a lot to find. Sometimes I just can't play the game and I will tell him that I didn't like it, he feels defeated because he was trying to invite me in to his world and I shut it down, sometimes I just suck it up and play the bad game, I think the important part is to remember that this is a world that they have more control than you, let them lead. :)
It's less about the games being high-quality, and more the games being community-created and user-driven.
Roblox isn't a competitor to Astro's Playroom or Ratchet and Clank. Roblox is like, the next generation of ActiveWorlds, or like a user-generated version of Uru. It's a 3D Chatroom that solved the problem of "what do you do when people want something to do, while standing around chatting in the 3D chatroom?" by saying, "we'll give a bunch of tech tooling to the players, and maybe 0.1% of them will do something interesting with it". And that's enough.
The closest PS5 equivalent would be something like, the Dreams game from Media Molecule.
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As a parent (with a kid, who loves Roblox), I totally get it. I lived on ActiveWorlds as a kid, I saved up paper-route money to pay for my own "P-10 World" back in the day. The next summer, I used paper-route money to buy a "catch-a-call" device, so I could be on ActiveWorlds via Dial-up without tying up the phone line from my parents. I had an entire alternative identity and active social life on there in middle-school & high-school. I would bicycle all the way downtown to local community college, to take VB6 classes with college students over the summer, to learn how to program against their ActiveX control API to write my own ActiveWorlds Bot, to interact with folks in my private ActiveWorld. I ran an ActiveWorlds "TV Station" (in AW, you could set a JPEG image to 'refresh' regularly like a webcam, and I would point the URL at a custom PHP script I ran on an old cPanel-based shared hosting plan, that would rotate JPEG images out in appropriate order every 1 or 2 seconds, in pre-programmed ways, so you could have 'shows' broadcasting, and you could switch to 'live' (screenshots) on 'air' and such)
I treat Roblox similarly for my child. (They can play on it, but never use real names, reveal no personal information, there's some time limits to ensure you don't go crazy, talk through appropriate content and what stuff warrants adult intervention, etc. And gently prod them that, if they're ready to deep-dive on Roblox, all the tools people use to make their favourite "obbys" are things they could actually learn and write themselves, with some time and patience and practice...)
> It's less about the games being high-quality, and more the games being community-created and user-driven.
There's also the socialization part. My kid's friends are all on Roblox. They don't get together IRL because a lot of them moved away when their parents had to move, and others just live way across town and "meeting at the park" is so 1980s. When new kids come to school, they share their Roblox and Fortnite usernames and that's where they hang out after school to socialize.
It sounds like the platform really matters for Roblox, if it's that much of a creative tool. BTW the first time I'd heard of "ActiveWorlds" (or Uru) was just now from your comment. And it also sounds like my kids don't have the problem Roblox solves! (And I don't really want them standing around in a chat room looking for things to do; absent a compelling reason to look at a screen, I encourage them to do real-world things.)
Your take sounds about right. It's minigames. You can play an exact equivalent minigame in minecraft 98% of the time, but it's easier just to pick one ready from the browser and get started immediately with people doing the same and nothing else. If I was a parent I
'd try to skim ideas from Roblox yourself, make it happen for your kids and their friends in Minecraft, join yourself, talk about it, record yourself playing it, share it with strangers; for full non-Robux-driven wholesome non-mindless experience.
Essentially Roblox store is built upon outsourcing game making to kids and so the games themselves are appealing to kids, but also they carry as much merit as a 4th grader can put into them.
Why are people OK with this? Because there's a place to spend "money" inside this virtual space?
The paradigm could be replaced with literally anything, yet the prevailing mode of "play" in these spaces is convert meatspace credits to in-game "virtual property"; costumes, weaponry, etc.
These kids arent' making anything, they're aphids.
Because like it or not, this space has basically become a "third place" for many kids. In that regard it has to compete with console games about as much as a lonely arcade machine in some old bar does. They aren't coming for the games alone.
>The paradigm could be replaced with literally anything, yet the prevailing mode of "play" in these spaces is convert meatspace credits to in-game "virtual property"; costumes, weaponry, etc.
Yup, but as we know from growing up and seeing the rise of social media: the best, sleekest solution isn't always thr Victor. It's all about network effects.
Nice reference to aphids (which are used like cows by ant colonies). So kids make games which require currency from other kids?! Why would they do that? Do they get a cut?
Yes. Like $105 for every ~43,000 robux (~$350-$490, depending on the tier of robux purchased) players spend in your game. Not including the money you get for free just by retaining players with a Roblox subscription in your game.
Top Roblox devs are making millions of dollars. [0]
Yup. I imagine those millions are the ones I see on LinkedIn offering 50-60k for a "Roblox game developer". Even in a UGC platform, the biggest money makers are the ones doing it as a legitimate job.
I've had this half-idea for recreating something like Garry's Mod in Godot for a while now. It seems like something someone would have created by now but it doesn't exist yet for whatever reason.
Like, a framework for building first-person FPS-ish game modes and handling all the asset management, sync, etc, like GMod being built around Source does and just letting developers build the game modes without worrying about the annoying tricky stuff.
I took "own" here as "you have control over the entire stack". Seems like the idealized version of Garry's mod. Garry doesn't even own all the assets in Garry's Mod.
Looking at the pages and pages of crap games in Roblox is a bit reminiscent of a long list of horrid software on a dialup BBS.
Everything popular seems to start as a clone of non-Roblox games, and then goes off on it's own direction from there.
Not Roblox's fault, but it's not a good place for kids to make friends; any kind of contact information must be censored. They can play there with friends made elsewhere.
short rant over