I grew up playing Roblox games (and later scripting in Studio) and the most memorable aspect was how surreal everything was. Most of the games were mishmashes of pre-existing assets, puerile humor, and pop culture references.
I remember one game in which you started off on a massive platform full of food, and had to shovel the food onto a conveyor belt that led into a giant person's mouth. If you yourself fell onto the conveyor belt, you'd be treated to a grand tour of the person's digestive system before being turned to poop and dropped into the toilet bowl. Inside the toilet there was an obstacle course, and at the end of this obstacle course there was an array of fighter jets that you could use to get back onto the food platform. The jets didn't have throttle: they either went super fast or not at all. So the poop-people would bail out of their planes in mid-air, and the jet would crash into the baseplate, usually killing someone below.
This was back when there was no way for developers to monetize their games. Some games had "VIP T-shirts" that gave you tools or allowed you to enter a special room, but devs had neither the technical ability nor the incentive to "do it for the money". Most games were like the one I described: bizarre one-off projects created with the intent of showing something really cool. A few "classics" kept stable player-bases, but for the most part the front page was a constant churn of weirdness.
Roblox is the reason I'm a developer today. To be fair, I got in on it pretty early (late '07 I think), but its been around since 2004. There are high school students current applying to college that never knew a world without it.
This is actually how old Quake III-era FPS maps used to be. I played Star Trek: Elite Force (and Elite Force II), which were Star Trek-based Quake III games that supported third player multiplayer maps.
You had plenty of maps where the creators tried to match the game's feel, and so many that were completely unrelated. Giant bathrooms where you are the size of a mouse was one of the standouts I remember.
This level of customization is often just something businesses have moved away from allowing. And considering the "condo" problem with Roblox, it's understandable why: https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game... (The bathroom map I recall above, had a photo of a topless woman in a hidden area.)
Padman maps were the ones where you were shrunken. They are one of my all time favorite FPS experiences. The homogenized nature of modern games really makes me miss all the modding that went on. When I was a teenager we made our own maps in Doom1-3. I dabbled in Q1-3 maps but it got a lot less accessible due to learning curve. Doom was perfect because it was 2D.
Now I'm having flashbacks to the Battlefield mod community from HS and college. Pirates, Galactic Conquest, Desert Combat, and so many other amazing ones that had a ton of players because of lack of server monetization and developer lock down.
I have an 11-year old daughter who finished or was able to play to the ending of MineCraft around 2016/2017. She's been playing it since 2014. She discovered that there is an ending and she did hers too. She began playing Roblox around 2016.
So, when I read “grew up playing Roblox”, I had to read up Roblox's history to understand my bearing.
This is surreal.
She's been asking me that she need to become a premium member to create Roblox artifacts/items. She is creative. I need to look into this. She meets her friends, hangs out with them there. She has even taught her 4-year old sister to play and wander around with her on Roblox.
I'm not a parent, and certainly not your child's parent, but...
Please help her with that. What's she's asking it basically what I asked of my parents at her age. I did things like run a BBS and write stupid programs, and today I'm a senior software developer with a job that pays quite well. And I still love programming.
While she doesn't technically need it to be creative, doing things that interest you is a huge boost in the creativity and learning departments. She probably won't learn what you or she expects to, and that's even better, IMO.
Of course, I don't know what else you're already doing for her like that, and there's certainly a point where you're just throwing money away at whims. But I just felt the need to put this out there.
Flash games and animations is basically what really got me into the design side of web dev. Before that I was all about the code, then making silly little flash games based around in-jokes between me and my friends is what got me into graphics, animations, etc.
The global hate for flash (which is fairly warranted) drowns out the absolutely colossal impact it had on pushing the web from a purely informational thing to a platform for entertainment.
I've only had a brief play with Roblox and didn't get to the good/weird stuff. This year we've found some fantastically strange creations on Dreams, plus a lot of the models/audio/logic/etc. that people create are set to be reusable in any other project.
Well worth a try if you have access to a Playstation.
Sounds like the internet when it was younger, and things like geocities allowed anyone to have a free website. People put up anything and everything, niche interests to fan sites, complete with animated skulls or torches or mailboxes, scrolling text, music players, and visitor counters.
I don't remember exactly, there were tons of games like that and a lot of them blended together in my mind. The most similar game I can specifically remember is the Human Body Obstacle Course:
Don't consider Roblox a traditional game. It's basically Gmod for kids and with official corporate support and a official way for developers to wring money out of its consumers with micro transactions.
More platform than game. It's really easy for developers to develop a game, easily implement real money transactions, and have an audience.
My 8 year old and 5 year old girls spend literally their entire allowance on Robux. They would spend literally the entire day playing if I allowed it. The developer toolset is crazy strong too, I bet they're not even 10% of the way with their market penetration.
Same here, with daughters 4 and 7! They beg me for Robux on a frequent basis and 100% of their weekly allowance goes towards it.
I have no doubt Roblux will continue to make mountains of money. The amount of people playing it is mind blowing and I’m sure there are additional ways to monetize their ecosystem.
As a side note - it’s cool to see them play so well together and I even play with them too to engage with them on something they enjoy. On the other hand, I sometimes get concerned with how much they play and how addictive the micro transactions are for kids their age. Then again, I spent most of my days growing up playing games like EverQuest, WoW, learning to program, etc. , so it’s hard for me to judge.
It is interesting to me that this is a commercial entity. It looks to me more like it should have been an open source platform. It kinda has that vibe to it.
Yes, multiplayer is a good point. Roblox is an easy way to make games that are
1) Multiplayer (skipping all netcode, account systems, and so forth)
2) Have a secured, safe, and trusted way to make transactions
If you were to try and make a multiplayer, microtransaction based game in Unity, that is a large amount of work, especially for a younger developer, and it's _critical_. Messing up payment code has huge consequences.
How do they get away with being essentially a platform itself for multiple games and not run afoul of the same restrictions that prevent cloud gaming platforms being sold in the App Store?
That's a very good question. Also it seems that Roblox games are scripted in Lua. How do they get away with running downloaded user scripts inside their app?
The App Store review guidelines prohibit this very clearly:
> Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not [...] download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app [...]
There is only one narrow exception which clearly does not apply to Roblox for several reasons; for example it's only for HTML5 content.
Tim Cook just testified to Congress that all developers are treated equally, but this seems like a clear case where an app that is "too big to fail" gets special treatment.
It's Roblox for the next generation, and extremely fun even to me when I tried it out as an adult. I hope Roblox expands into VR or recroom will eat their lunch. VR is the future and people spend HOURS in there playing all sorts of official games and community made games.
The only thing VR is going to eat in the next 5-10 years is (more) dirt. It’s still niche and I have yet to see any application to make it not niche. Including that.
I get that Roblox is a platform and not just another game on the App Store. It appears to be popular and addicting to children, but most children don't have money. Is all of their revenue coming strictly from children's allowances or is this something that has potential to appeal to older people?
ha, you don't sound like you have kids. My kids love Roblox... You're birthday is coming up, what do you want? Roblox gift card. Grandma wants to get you a birthday, xmas, ____ gift, what do you want? Get me a roblox gift card or robucks as they are called. My kids now design shrits and sell them online and take the money and spend it on roblocks. Roblocks is also a way for kids to connect online. For example, mine talk to their cousins that live in another state and their friends from a neighborhood we moved away from.
> We have experienced rapid growth in the three months ended June 30, 2020, September 30, 2020 and for a portion of the three months ended March 31, 2020, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic given our users have been online more as a result of global COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies. For example, our bookings increased 171% from the nine-months ended September 30, 2019 to the nine months ended September 30, 2020. We do not expect these activity levels to be sustained, and in future periods we expect growth rates for our revenue to decline, and we may not experience any growth in bookings or our user base during periods where we are comparing against COVID-19 impacted periods (i.e. the three months ended March 31, 2020, June 30, 2020, and September 30, 2020). Our historical revenue, bookings and user base growth should not be considered indicative of our future performance. We believe our overall acceptance, revenue growth and increases in bookings depend on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, our ability to:
> We have a history of net losses and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future.
We have incurred net losses since our inception, and we expect to continue to incur net losses in the near future. We incurred net losses of $97.2 million, $86.0 million, and $203.2 million for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, respectively. As of September 30, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $484.0 million.
It's boilerplate for companies that lose money! Most IPOing companies outside of the tech sector certainly don't have this in their S-1.
It's only not notable because if you've even skimmed the rest of the S-1, you already know whether they make money or not. If you haven't, it's possibly the most notable thing there. It's the single bit of information that tells you most about the company's historical financial performance.
They probably have investors who would rather they have net losses and grow top line growth as fast as possible. This is software, not a service provided by people or involving physical goods. So its hard to believe they can't tweak profitability when they want to. It could be bad for their growth, particularly if they have to monetize the game more. But that's a reasonable proposition for an investment.
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.
My daughter did that at first - now she has a private server where she and her friends (all 9 years old) build their own games to play with each other. They all build 3D models in the world builder, and even some Lua scripting to alter mechanics.
It's a pretty neat way of getting kids into game dev.
I recently had a director reach out to me about joining their team to work on rebuilding an ad system from scratch, so unfortunately your fear may very well be valid.
Why? Because of two things: you do not need to re-learn a UI (the same way people would play mods in W3, CS, etc.) and because it is hard/there is friction in starting a new game. Think about it, why do you spend hours thinking about what movie you're going to watch on Netflix just to re-watch a movie you've already watched? It's easier for your brain.
If my kids (late elementary, early middle school) and their friends are any guide, it's doing extremely well.
The thing my kids most consistently spend their allowance on is hypixel (a minecraft curated multiplayer server with some scenario-based games is the best way I can describe it).
I have never actually played minecraft but have watched hundreds of hours of minecraft videos. It could just be my personal filter bubble, but it seems to be going through a huge boom among streamers right now.
The appeal is that it is some sort of a Second Life or Metaverse for these streamer personalities who otherwise have no "physical" opportunities to interact outside of voice chat. In these worlds, they have towns, homes, pranks, disputes, wars, and lots of opportunities for highly entertaining roleplaying in general.
I mostly watch virtual youtubers (pekora from hololive in particular) but if you're not into virtual youtubers, the mod'd OfflineTV server is also great. Michael Reeves will probably appeal to the people on HN. Right now there's a nuclear war going on and Reeves thinks he can win by programming an army of self-replicating turtles using Lua: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/805937812 The guy with nukes is the dictator of the server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrtKTFZvK5Y
My theory for making platforms that make money is: facilitate competition or creation. Any platform that facilitates competition or creation is ripe for $$$.
Roblox was a fairly big part of my childhood, it made programming exciting and got me learning. I remember reaching the front page with my game at no.1 with the most players online and reaching 350k+ plays. After that hanging out in script builders was a lot of fun also (is that still a thing?)
It was such a great experience, had a lot of fun, thank-you to the original devs for the good times :)
I also grew up playing Roblox, and it's how I learned programming. I probably logged thousands of hours in script builders. My life definitely turned out very different thanks to Roblox.
For those not in the know, script builders were places that were just an empty map, but that allowed anyone in the server to load in their own scripts - so people would create and run custom weapons, power armor, admin commands, etc. and play around with each other. There was a very dedicated community of programmers that played them for years, and I'm still friends with some people I met through them like 7 years ago.
I think as a genre they're pretty dead, though - Roblox tightened security around loading arbitrary scripts that broke all the script builders several times, and now had replication filtering so that client-side scripts can't set properties. You probably could still make cool swords, but they'd need to use proper RemoteFunctions for client-server RPC, meaning all the old scripts are broken.
Yep definitely had a lot of fun in those places. I remember loads of people logging on injecting admin command scripts (wasn’t it something like Person210’s admin commands that everyone used?)
One of my more vivid memories was making a script that would inject a train station that only I had access to, with a train that would take me to a distant planet with god-mode weapons and aircraft. Had a lot of fun with that! This must have been back in 2008/09
I never went into game dev. I started off as a junior in web development, worked my way up to contracting for some UK financial services companies working on some large projects. More recently I’ve spent the better part of a year on my own startup in proptech.
Game dev was something that appealed to me when I was younger (mainly because of Roblox) but I never really considered a career in it.
It's a super interesting point: why are these games so appealing to tweens and are dismissed as shit to everyone else? I spent about 10 hours playing a game on the platform called Bee Swarm Simulator and some other game where you build a rocket and I think the answer is that it's actually a social platform first, then a game dev platform. In financial news everyone is comparing it to Unity in an attempt to price the IPO, but I think Roblox probably in a class of its own.
My kids FaceTime their friends and play Roblox together, the bee game and adopt me. And the obbys and piggy. All they want is Robux. They like Minecraft too but there are Minecraft like games inside Roblox too. It’s nuts. Definitely buying this stock.
This is exactly it - they're fairly simple games (in some cases) but the social dynamics are what makes them.
In the current pandemic setup where my kids are so isolated Roblox has been a huge win as it's so much like a digital playground for them to hang out on.
> Games look boring AF to me, but tweens seem to love em.
I saw my nephew spend _hours_ in Roblox manning a virtual restaurant cash register for some incredibly minuscule amount of Roblox bucks (like, pennies worth). That’s when I knew this was going the be the biggest thing ever.
Can you explain what this means for someone who is too old to “get” Roblox? Was he earning a minuscule amount of robux or was he spending a minuscule amount of robux? If he was earning them, how does that work? Where does that money come from? Are there ads? Or some sort of time-limiting mechanism?
I had the same thought when my 10 year old showed me the games he plays on Roblox. Absolutely awful graphics, gameplay, "story", etc, but they are _obsessed_ with them.
On the other hand the graphics are simple enough that it runs smoothly on phones, tablets, and hand-me-down computers from the mid-2000s, which is what many kids are running.
It's gotten my eldest son into Lua programing and 3D modelling, so I have no problems with the platform as it currently is.
A few of the games/servers were interesting: Phantom Forces was a reasonably well polished FPS, and the Murder Mystery games (sneaky murderer vs sheriff and villagers, typical social deduction/betrayal game) were pretty fun.
Hoping it doesn't get completely and totally overrun with ads.
I think part of it (as some other comments have alluded to) is that maybe the low quality production brings the kids closer to it because they feel like they could possibly build something if they wanted to. Or that someone like them built the game they are playing. It’s perhaps more relatable than some ultra polished AAA title.
So like flash games that a lot of us grew up with then. There is a lot to be said when the games load in seconds so you can jump from game to game and the novelty value is high.
This is probably a really risky investment: Every parent I know has a "kid stole my credit card and bought hundreds of dollars of Robux on it" story. While I've reversed the ones that happened in my own family, it took my tech expertise and some research to figure out how to do so (via Google Play, where the refund request button is deliberately extremely obfuscated)... many parents probably just accept the money is gone and move on.
Roblox has no real way to know, but I'd guess a not insignificant amount of their revenue is unauthorized charges. Better protections on parents' cards may cause their revenue to dry up a fair bit...
And that's before we get into the problematic nature of pushing a monetized game on kids as young as five years old, who might be incentivized to steal from their parents now at an early age. I could see this company's business model getting nuked by future legislation.
My 7 year old daughter has stopped asking for (very pricy) American Girl accessories, and now asks for Robux. The coding schools around us are advertising Roblox Studio classes for kids.
I'm not so pessimistic as you on the model, but those previous operating losses seem pretty big.
What would be costing so much I wonder? The platform has been around for 15 years and whilst I understand it's a platform not a game per se, surely most of the work is done? I wouldn't expect it to get -more- expensive to maintain than it was to build in the first place year over year.
They lost more in one year than it took to build GTAV over 7 years.
I was just putting together my resume to send them (and the thought crossed my mind that an IPO might be coming in the next year), then I see this.
For anyone who's done this dance before, is it a bad, good, or great idea to apply to a company, right when S-1 is released? Don't know if, e.g., companies do a hiring lockdown right before IPO. Also, just on the emotional side, I joined a company very shortly after IPO years ago, and it was always a sore spot to see the life-changing millions of dollars of those who joined the company not long before me, and the constant reminder of "pre-" vs "post-" employees.
Looking back at our timeline, we filed the S-1 about 3.5 months before the first day of trading. (I'd been there a little over 2 years before that, so well after it was clear we had a legitimate chance, but well before it was clear we could IPO.)
I would say that employees who were there right before or shortly after the IPO weren't all that different in terms of initial grants. The only difference is that pre-IPO employees could get ISOs which have slightly better tax treatment than NQSOs.
I would make the decision based on the work, the pay, and your overall feelings for the space rather than whether you applied 4 weeks ago or 4 weeks after IPO. You already missed the gains before the IPO, but most companies have a lot more gains after the IPO than before it.
If you're the type to be jealous that you missed on the pre-IPO gains, don't go, of course. Those employees who made "millions" in the IPO didn't do it because they joined 2 months before you. They probably joined 2+ years before you.
All you say is true. I suppose except if IPO has a big pop then obviously you can miss out on that but for a few days here and there.
In my own case I described above, yeah I was actually very envious of the pre-IPO crowd (almost destructively so) when I joined, but my envy eventually calmed down out of exhaustion -- after the Nth meeting with a billionaire or centi-millionaire, and after you meet the Nth person like yourself who missed out on the rocket-ship, and after you turn down the Nth supposed rocket-ship that flames out (bullet dodged!) you kinda lose the ability to care much about what-could-have-been.
Readit News
I remember one game in which you started off on a massive platform full of food, and had to shovel the food onto a conveyor belt that led into a giant person's mouth. If you yourself fell onto the conveyor belt, you'd be treated to a grand tour of the person's digestive system before being turned to poop and dropped into the toilet bowl. Inside the toilet there was an obstacle course, and at the end of this obstacle course there was an array of fighter jets that you could use to get back onto the food platform. The jets didn't have throttle: they either went super fast or not at all. So the poop-people would bail out of their planes in mid-air, and the jet would crash into the baseplate, usually killing someone below.
This was back when there was no way for developers to monetize their games. Some games had "VIP T-shirts" that gave you tools or allowed you to enter a special room, but devs had neither the technical ability nor the incentive to "do it for the money". Most games were like the one I described: bizarre one-off projects created with the intent of showing something really cool. A few "classics" kept stable player-bases, but for the most part the front page was a constant churn of weirdness.
I've still never seen anything quite like it.
Feel better now?
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You had plenty of maps where the creators tried to match the game's feel, and so many that were completely unrelated. Giant bathrooms where you are the size of a mouse was one of the standouts I remember.
This level of customization is often just something businesses have moved away from allowing. And considering the "condo" problem with Roblox, it's understandable why: https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game... (The bathroom map I recall above, had a photo of a topless woman in a hidden area.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrke_zOuskY
So many weird and wacky maps. Maps built to look like spongebob's house, maps to look like mario, so many hours wasted on surf maps.
I'm sad newer games don't support custom maps or servers as much these days.
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So, when I read “grew up playing Roblox”, I had to read up Roblox's history to understand my bearing.
This is surreal.
She's been asking me that she need to become a premium member to create Roblox artifacts/items. She is creative. I need to look into this. She meets her friends, hangs out with them there. She has even taught her 4-year old sister to play and wander around with her on Roblox.
Please help her with that. What's she's asking it basically what I asked of my parents at her age. I did things like run a BBS and write stupid programs, and today I'm a senior software developer with a job that pays quite well. And I still love programming.
While she doesn't technically need it to be creative, doing things that interest you is a huge boost in the creativity and learning departments. She probably won't learn what you or she expects to, and that's even better, IMO.
Of course, I don't know what else you're already doing for her like that, and there's certainly a point where you're just throwing money away at whims. But I just felt the need to put this out there.
Better Roblox than TikTok.
The global hate for flash (which is fairly warranted) drowns out the absolutely colossal impact it had on pushing the web from a purely informational thing to a platform for entertainment.
Well worth a try if you have access to a Playstation.
https://www.roblox.com/games/334009/Human-Body-Obstacle-Cour...
More platform than game. It's really easy for developers to develop a game, easily implement real money transactions, and have an audience.
I have no doubt Roblux will continue to make mountains of money. The amount of people playing it is mind blowing and I’m sure there are additional ways to monetize their ecosystem.
As a side note - it’s cool to see them play so well together and I even play with them too to engage with them on something they enjoy. On the other hand, I sometimes get concerned with how much they play and how addictive the micro transactions are for kids their age. Then again, I spent most of my days growing up playing games like EverQuest, WoW, learning to program, etc. , so it’s hard for me to judge.
Making reliable multiplayer games is tough: I'd love to see a serious API service that does the same thing for "real" game engine/libraries!
1) Multiplayer (skipping all netcode, account systems, and so forth)
2) Have a secured, safe, and trusted way to make transactions
If you were to try and make a multiplayer, microtransaction based game in Unity, that is a large amount of work, especially for a younger developer, and it's _critical_. Messing up payment code has huge consequences.
The App Store review guidelines prohibit this very clearly:
> Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not [...] download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app [...]
There is only one narrow exception which clearly does not apply to Roblox for several reasons; for example it's only for HTML5 content.
Tim Cook just testified to Congress that all developers are treated equally, but this seems like a clear case where an app that is "too big to fail" gets special treatment.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/471710/Rec_Room/
It's Roblox for the next generation, and extremely fun even to me when I tried it out as an adult. I hope Roblox expands into VR or recroom will eat their lunch. VR is the future and people spend HOURS in there playing all sorts of official games and community made games.
Roblox has the userbase it does because it's on every platform and runs on potatoes.
How many kids (using a large range from ages 1-18) have VR setups in their homes?
> We have experienced rapid growth in the three months ended June 30, 2020, September 30, 2020 and for a portion of the three months ended March 31, 2020, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic given our users have been online more as a result of global COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies. For example, our bookings increased 171% from the nine-months ended September 30, 2019 to the nine months ended September 30, 2020. We do not expect these activity levels to be sustained, and in future periods we expect growth rates for our revenue to decline, and we may not experience any growth in bookings or our user base during periods where we are comparing against COVID-19 impacted periods (i.e. the three months ended March 31, 2020, June 30, 2020, and September 30, 2020). Our historical revenue, bookings and user base growth should not be considered indicative of our future performance. We believe our overall acceptance, revenue growth and increases in bookings depend on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, our ability to:
> We have a history of net losses and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future.
We have incurred net losses since our inception, and we expect to continue to incur net losses in the near future. We incurred net losses of $97.2 million, $86.0 million, and $203.2 million for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, respectively. As of September 30, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $484.0 million.
This is boilerplate and isn't notable. [0]
[0]: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/how-to-read-an-s1/
It's only not notable because if you've even skimmed the rest of the S-1, you already know whether they make money or not. If you haven't, it's possibly the most notable thing there. It's the single bit of information that tells you most about the company's historical financial performance.
2018: $97.2m
2019: $86.0m
2020: $203.2m
It has 110MM MAUs + delivers an est 1.25 BILLION hours of entertainment each month
It does this not because it makes a good "game", but because players make games/worlds/experiences for and with one another
This only exhausts when imagination does"
--https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/1236773493372596224
It's a pretty neat way of getting kids into game dev.
Exciting, because I've been waiting for these platforms for like 15 years, since I played Warcraft 3.
But also bittersweet, because I have already resigned to having to eventually make one myself, and now it's done.
The thing my kids most consistently spend their allowance on is hypixel (a minecraft curated multiplayer server with some scenario-based games is the best way I can describe it).
The appeal is that it is some sort of a Second Life or Metaverse for these streamer personalities who otherwise have no "physical" opportunities to interact outside of voice chat. In these worlds, they have towns, homes, pranks, disputes, wars, and lots of opportunities for highly entertaining roleplaying in general.
I mostly watch virtual youtubers (pekora from hololive in particular) but if you're not into virtual youtubers, the mod'd OfflineTV server is also great. Michael Reeves will probably appeal to the people on HN. Right now there's a nuclear war going on and Reeves thinks he can win by programming an army of self-replicating turtles using Lua: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/805937812 The guy with nukes is the dictator of the server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrtKTFZvK5Y
It was such a great experience, had a lot of fun, thank-you to the original devs for the good times :)
For those not in the know, script builders were places that were just an empty map, but that allowed anyone in the server to load in their own scripts - so people would create and run custom weapons, power armor, admin commands, etc. and play around with each other. There was a very dedicated community of programmers that played them for years, and I'm still friends with some people I met through them like 7 years ago.
I think as a genre they're pretty dead, though - Roblox tightened security around loading arbitrary scripts that broke all the script builders several times, and now had replication filtering so that client-side scripts can't set properties. You probably could still make cool swords, but they'd need to use proper RemoteFunctions for client-server RPC, meaning all the old scripts are broken.
Yep definitely had a lot of fun in those places. I remember loads of people logging on injecting admin command scripts (wasn’t it something like Person210’s admin commands that everyone used?)
One of my more vivid memories was making a script that would inject a train station that only I had access to, with a train that would take me to a distant planet with god-mode weapons and aircraft. Had a lot of fun with that! This must have been back in 2008/09
Game dev was something that appealed to me when I was younger (mainly because of Roblox) but I never really considered a career in it.
Games look boring AF to me, but tweens seem to love em.
In the current pandemic setup where my kids are so isolated Roblox has been a huge win as it's so much like a digital playground for them to hang out on.
I saw my nephew spend _hours_ in Roblox manning a virtual restaurant cash register for some incredibly minuscule amount of Roblox bucks (like, pennies worth). That’s when I knew this was going the be the biggest thing ever.
It's gotten my eldest son into Lua programing and 3D modelling, so I have no problems with the platform as it currently is.
A few of the games/servers were interesting: Phantom Forces was a reasonably well polished FPS, and the Murder Mystery games (sneaky murderer vs sheriff and villagers, typical social deduction/betrayal game) were pretty fun.
Hoping it doesn't get completely and totally overrun with ads.
So like flash games that a lot of us grew up with then. There is a lot to be said when the games load in seconds so you can jump from game to game and the novelty value is high.
Roblox has no real way to know, but I'd guess a not insignificant amount of their revenue is unauthorized charges. Better protections on parents' cards may cause their revenue to dry up a fair bit...
And that's before we get into the problematic nature of pushing a monetized game on kids as young as five years old, who might be incentivized to steal from their parents now at an early age. I could see this company's business model getting nuked by future legislation.
I'm not so pessimistic as you on the model, but those previous operating losses seem pretty big.
They lost more in one year than it took to build GTAV over 7 years.
For anyone who's done this dance before, is it a bad, good, or great idea to apply to a company, right when S-1 is released? Don't know if, e.g., companies do a hiring lockdown right before IPO. Also, just on the emotional side, I joined a company very shortly after IPO years ago, and it was always a sore spot to see the life-changing millions of dollars of those who joined the company not long before me, and the constant reminder of "pre-" vs "post-" employees.
I would say that employees who were there right before or shortly after the IPO weren't all that different in terms of initial grants. The only difference is that pre-IPO employees could get ISOs which have slightly better tax treatment than NQSOs.
I would make the decision based on the work, the pay, and your overall feelings for the space rather than whether you applied 4 weeks ago or 4 weeks after IPO. You already missed the gains before the IPO, but most companies have a lot more gains after the IPO than before it.
If you're the type to be jealous that you missed on the pre-IPO gains, don't go, of course. Those employees who made "millions" in the IPO didn't do it because they joined 2 months before you. They probably joined 2+ years before you.
In my own case I described above, yeah I was actually very envious of the pre-IPO crowd (almost destructively so) when I joined, but my envy eventually calmed down out of exhaustion -- after the Nth meeting with a billionaire or centi-millionaire, and after you meet the Nth person like yourself who missed out on the rocket-ship, and after you turn down the Nth supposed rocket-ship that flames out (bullet dodged!) you kinda lose the ability to care much about what-could-have-been.
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Mostly just curious. Getting hired is a big hurdle anway, and it takes a long time, and hell maybe I won't even get around to submitting.