[ahmadss]

"Roblox is absolutely wild

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

[cycop]

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.

[philjohn]

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.

[worldsayshi]

That's awesome. Feel like there's a new revolution of user created virtual world building unfolding. And the kids today are surfing the wave.

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?

[yalogin]

Can you please tell me more about the private server and how you set it up?

[nomel]

The owner of a "place" (game saved from the editor to the Roblox cloud) can set the permissions for who can participate in the live, collaborative, editing environment (invite basis), and who can play it (public, friends, or editors).

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.

[HomeDeLaPot]

If I had to guess, they're using the "places" that every user gets allocated. You can have a bunch of them, but only so many active at once. Maybe you can adjust the privacy settings for a place to allow only your friends. Roblox does all the hosting and provides the IDE (Roblox Studio) and everything. All the games on Roblox are somebody's "place" that they've made public and developed into a fun game.

This is from my own experience >5 years ago, so it could be outdated.

[philjohn]

https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/205345050-How-d...

[ricefield]

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.

[chabad360]

The ads are not in game, they appear only on the website and are solely for advertising other games.

[Buge]

It looks like currently their ads are all player-created, for their own content. For example refresh this page and see the banner at the top:

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.

[glaring]

Correct, they used to display regular ads on their website (but never in the actual games) for those users that did not purchase the Premium subscription. Users with the premium subscription would then see only user-created ads for user-created content.

It was honestly quite jarring and this new approach is better for developers on the platform, as they can reach way more people.

[ehnto]

I think it would be naive to not imagine advertising as part of the long term strategy for a platform like this. After they go public, it's going to be a big tool in their toolkit for profitability.

[Kaveren]

exact opposite, they've made a 180 on advertising. there used to be external offsite ads shown on the website, which were removed. there used to be a developer API to show video ads for revenue within games, which was removed. they've cut down heavily on event promotions from companies (think movies that appeal to kids)

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.

[boogies]

Most games are already full of ads for Robux microtransactions.

[diegof79]

Sadly that’s true. I’m very careful with the screen time of my 6yo kid, but the pandemic made it very hard. Many of his friends in the school started to use Roblox.

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.

[boogies]

Minetest¹ is one game that I think in theory could be a great creative platform for kids, it’s kind of Minecraft + Roblox — a Minecraft clone except everything besides the most basic engine functionality — even mobs — is implemented as a mod — which is just a Lua script + (3D model, texture, and/or sound) assets. Edit: and each server can have any mods it wants and the client will load any it doesn’t have locally.

[1]: https://www.minetest.net/

[RHSeeger]

Honestly, it's not all that different from something like the Play Store. There's a LOT of games that are trying to get people (who don't know any better) to spend money. But there's also a lot of real quality games, too. Many of the best games have the option to spend money, but don't shove it down your throat.

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.

[girvo]

Right, but should a young child have free reign on the App or Play store either?

[lmm]

The point is that the "walled garden" isn't actually any safer than a platform with much less review.

[gtrhtrhtrhtr]

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.

[tudorw]

People watch movies twice? TIL

[gtrhtrhtrhtr]

I do it all the time, TV shows as well.

[Kinrany]

Link from the tweet: https://www.matthewball.vc/all/digitalthemeparkplatforms

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.

[phkahler]

How is minecraft doing these days?

[sokoloff]

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).

[beachy]

I found my 8 year old playing hypixel. I know jack about Minecraft, so I couldn't understand how come he was having some kind of chat dialog with someone. The only thing I've ever shown him on his Fedora laptop was how to log in, open a terminal and and start Minecraft from the command line.

It seems that he taught himself to find the web browser, then find google, then search for Minecraft resources, then enter urls for Hypixel and Mineplex into Minecraft.

I was torn between pride and trepidation of what's to come.

[raunakdag]

As someone who’s 17 - this is exactly how I learned about computers, but when I was 7 (so 10 years ago yeah). I will say that my parents turned on a chat filter pretty quickly, as incredible amounts of obscene stuff was posted on lots of the random servers I played on.

Hypixel is pretty great (I actually still play sometimes!), and they have a good curse filter and it’s definitely family friendly.

To be honest, I spent a ridiculous amount of time on MineCraft over the past 10 years (definitely over 5k+ hours), and it’s taught me an incredible amount. It’s where I picked up my first O Reilly book, on Minecraft mods, where I learned for the first time how to self host a server, and also where I made some really great friends.

I’d be more worried about your kid finding something like social media FROM Minecraft - for example, I spent a ridiculous amount of time on Reddit, which I found through MC. As a kid whose parents don’t really care about what I do on the internet, unlimited access to viewing whatever I wanted wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

[sokoloff]

If you have any minecraft modding resources to recommend, I'd love to find some to do some simple, relatable things with the kids. (We're way past scratch, onto javascript [still plenty to do here to get the basics completed], but I like to bring in "more interesting" things like react-native or minecraft mods.)

[bigshell]

Hi. I'm 16 and got into programming in a similar way but I can't in good conscience say that making Minecraft mods is a good way of learning programming. It's a pain in the ass. There's practically no documentation and you usually find yourself scrolling through deobfuscated game code trying to make sense of the thing and figure how the game works. I don't think it's a good way of learning. Don't get me wrong, getting started programming by making things that you want to make is an excellent way to make it enjoyable rather than a chore but trying to write Minecraft mods and figure out what to do is frustrating and grueling.

[uyt]

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

[derwiki]

Not really an answer, but my niece loved Roblox and said “Minecraft is for boys”

[dlhavema]

My girls ( 8 and 9 ) love Minecraft. Especially any kind of dragon mod.

[weavie]

I sometimes find myself firing it up to play with my daughter, and then still find myself playing it long after she has gone to bed..

[gtrhtrhtrhtr]

My theory for making platforms that make money is: facilitate competition or creation. Any platform that facilitates competition or creation is ripe for $$$.