My kids have access to some of the best games in their Steam library, but most of the time they prefer to discover new games on Roblox. I just hope they don't force advertising into the Roblox worlds, that would destroy the experience.
It's a pretty neat way of getting kids into game dev.
This is from my own experience >5 years ago, so it could be outdated.
The only problem with the collaborative editing (which is very very cool) is that it's really easy to click and delete/move/duplicate huge chunks of the game without realizing it. But, if you save often, the built in version control is really nice.
It's pretty neat though, except for the marketplace is absolutely filled with assets that contain malware. A script can be linked with any object in the game, used to give the object life. But, that script has nearly global control.
I think the scripting and standard libraries would really benefit from a huge overhaul, but it's pretty neat. There's quite a bit of friction getting started though. Much of it isn't intuitive, with magic undocumented names required, and you'll usually find well meaning, but very beginner, game developers providing colorful information in the forums.
Dreams, Vrchat, Roblox, neosvr and probably many others...
I hope there will be much more innovation in this space because it feels like powerful interactive content could be created in much more user friendly way than with lua scripting. Is it finally time for a visual programming language revolution?
they have an extremely high revenue business model off actual customers, so they don't really need to do advertising, there's plenty of other ways to get more profitable.
for example, they're at the scale where they might be able to do what Dropbox did by running more of their own infrastructure to save big.
https://www.roblox.com/catalog?Category=0
But I seem to recall in the past there used to be some regular ads. For example see this archived page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120427192637/http://www.roblox...
which has this embedded iframe:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120308000433if_/http://www.rob...
which has Adsense javascript embedded in it.
It was honestly quite jarring and this new approach is better for developers on the platform, as they can reach way more people.
So I played with him to check it, it ended with me uninstalling it: First time use and you’ll see tons of in-app purchases to build your character (all optional but kids that are starting to read cannot tell the difference), then the app is like the Wild West of ads and special offers.
The Apple store classifies the app as 12+, and I think they are right (as a father I started to see the appeal of the closed App Store and Apple Arcade).
The sad part is that it could be a great platform to experiment creating games and coding, is like the Alan Kay vision of Croquet but perverted by ads.
As an example, I played Bee Swarm Simulator with my daughter and I really enjoyed it. I decided to buy some robux and spend it on the game.I did this not because it gave me something I needed to enjoy the game, but because I felt the developer deserved it for creating something that entertained me.