While designed to allow students to simulate physics experiments, perhaps predictably, they also treated it like a game. (Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)īefore Roblox, there was Knowledge Revolution, a company that made teaching software.

This is the story of how Roblox not only survived, but built a thriving platform. Essentially all other distribution services offering games through a portal have eventually fizzled, aside from some distant cousins like Steam. It has jumped to 90 million monthly unique users and is poised to go international, potentially multiplying that number. Yet here we are today: Roblox now claims that half of all American children aged 9-12 are on its platform. In its early days, Roblox even looked like Minecraft, a game that was released long after Roblox went live, but that grew much, much faster.

Added to that, founder and CEO Dave Baszucki seems uninterested in press.īut overall, the problem has been that Roblox just seemed like an insignificant story for many, many years. Once companies like Facebook, Apple and Google got to the gaming scene, it just looked like a bad idea to try to build your own platform - and thus not worth talking about. Some, like, got lucky or pivoted their business. Why has Roblox’s story gone mostly untold? One reason is that it emerged from a whole generation of gaming portals and platforms. Then there’s Roblox, a company which took at least a decade to hit its stride and has, relative to its current level of success, barely gotten any recognition or attention. There are successful companies that grow fast and garner tons of press.

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