[ineedasername]

Yes, I think the success is pretty clear. It's kind of what I thought Minecraft might have (should have) developed into but it never really had the sort of accessible development tools that Roblox has. To the best of my knowledge there's still no official visual development toolset of that sort. A real missed opportunity. Seeing what modders had been doing with it for years should have lit a fire under Microsoft on that front. Heck I thought that was the whole reason they bought Minecraft.

[blackrock]

So, is Roblox better than Minecraft? Technology-wise. I’m not too familiar with either. Although Minecraft was written with Java.

But, I’m surprised that a one-hit-wonder application video game, is filing to go IPO.

[OkayPhysicist]

From a a tech standpoint, Roblox definitely has a dramatic lead over vanilla Minecraft's tools for creating arbitrary added content.

That said, if you factor in the tools the Minecraft community have built (namely the Force modloader, and the Bukkit multiplayer plugin system), it becomes a lot harder to say. On one hand, the barrier to entry in Roblox is practically non-existent (I remember screwing around with lua scripts while I was still in elementary school), while on the other hand I've seen far more technically impressive content come out of the Minecraft modding world.