But we live in a world today where it’s hard for kids to go out and have unstructured play with their friends,” he says. “When I came home from school, I’d get on my bike, go out in the woods, do pick-up baseball. He also suggests that one reason for Roblox’s popularity is its emphasis on “unstructured play” in an era when many children are more restricted in their physical-world activities than previous generations were. “So it’s very much an organic phenomenon.”

And the second way is they’ll watch people playing on YouTube,” says Roblox’s chief business officer Craig Donato. The No 1 way that someone finds out about our platform is they get invited to play by a friend. “We’re not a company that does a lot of marketing. Photograph: Roblox Why is Roblox popular? Work at a Pizza Place by Dued1 – teams of players fill orders and earn credits to buy home furnishings. The company adds that 19% of seven-to-nine-year-olds in the UK are playing Roblox, some way behind YouTube (43%) but ahead of TV brands like CBBC (11%), Nickelodeon (10%) and Cartoon Network (8%). Its data, based on an annual survey of 20,000 British children, suggests that 24% of 10- to 12-year-olds here are on Roblox – more than on TikTok (13%) and Snapchat (20%) and nearly as popular as Instagram (25%). In the UK alone, there are around 1.5 million children playing Roblox, according to research firm Kids Insights. Roblox doesn’t split its 100 million figure between children and adults, though it does say that 40% of them are women and girls. Roblox isn’t a new thing: it officially launched in 2006, and has been growing steadily ever since. Social features are also key to its appeal, including the ability to add friends and chat to them while playing. The simplest comparison is to YouTube: a huge library of “user-generated content”, but in this case the content is games rather than videos.Ĭhildren (and adults) download the Roblox application for computers, games consoles, smartphones or tablets and use it to browse and play its catalogue of games. It’s not a single game, but rather a collection of more than 50m games, all created by its community of players. It has flown more under the media radar than those rivals, leaving parents whose children are now asking to play it (or playing it without asking) in need of a primer.

Roblox may not be as famous a children’s game as Fortnite or Minecraft, but it recently announced that it has more than 100 million active monthly players.

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