Your Kids, Roblox and $45B
Roblox IPO'ed in March 2021 at $45 Billion. Last year, just before lockdown, Roblox was valued at $4 Billion. It made a huge jump in valuation in one COVID-infused year.
Roblox isn't a game. It is a collection of virtual worlds that players step in and out of. There are 20 million of those virtual worlds for you to visit and play with friends.
As I played Roblox with my kids, all I could think about is how much time and patience we used to have as kids for us to freely roam around in the offline or online worlds. Our time as adults is so structured and when it is not structured we just want to do nothing. Vegetate to recharge and procrastinate until the structured part of the day comes. Plus, our patience as adults is much less than when we were kids.
Some of the popular creators within Roblox make $10K to $50K per month. The creators tend to be in their 20s and started as regular players of Roblox when they were younger and then started creating games as they got older.
When I say creators, I don't mean the influencers. I mean the Roblox players who use Roblox Studio to create a game for others to play.
Ten years ago, to make a game, you needed deep technical knowledge. With tools like Roblox Studio, you don't need to be a developer.
I always point out to my kids the difference between content consumption and content creation, and how they can not only be passive consumers of content, and they need to also be content creators in one form or another.
So, how do creators make money?
Robux is the currency within the app that you can buy with real cash.
Robux is a term that merges the name of the platform - Roblux - with the colloquial term of - Bucks: Robux
Even the developers themselves, if they want to grow the number of players in the app, they use Robux to advertise their game. The same way an app developer pays Instagram or Google cash to get more people to use their app, there is a similar mechanism within the world of Roblox.
Why is Roblox successful?
It has a wide variety of different types of games: building, dancing, fighting, fashion, etc. A mix of art, tech, creativity, and pure fun.
It is very easy to invite friends to join you in a virtual world, and they just appear right next to you. Spawn is the term the cool kids use. No loading time, no additional downloads.
Popular Games if you want to speak the lingo of your Kids:
Adopt Me is a virtual game where you raise and dress virtual pets.
FashionFamous is a virtual game where you create a fashion outfit based on a theme and other players rate the outfits.
SharkBite where one player is a large shark and eats other players to win. The players evade or grab items to hurt the shark.