The incredibly popular Roblox has hit yet another major milestone. Roblox Corporation announced today that the global platform game creation platform now draws in a staggering 150 million active users every month.
At the sixth annual Roblox Developers Conference, held digitally this year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the company also announced that in-game developers are now banking some serious cash, with estimates placing 2020 earnings at over $250 million. The figure dwarfs 2019’s $110 million.
As Roblox founder and CEO, David Baszucki, explains:
”The accomplishments of our developer community have eclipsed even our loftiest expectations; I am incredibly impressed by the unique and creative experiences being introduced on the Roblox platform. Our focus is to give developers the tools and resources they need to pursue their vision and create larger, more complex, more realistic experiences and collectively build the Metaverse.”
Roblox developers earn by selling in-game products, games, and immersive digital experiences aided by Roblox 2020-introduced Premium Payouts, which ensure developers are paid proportional to the engagement time of Premium Roblox subscribers. Roblox Corporation says that in June 2020 alone, developers earned $2 million.
Of these in-game products, Roblox Corporation singled out several that have performed particularly well this year:
- ”Adopt Me! now has over 10 billion plays and surpassed 1.6 million concurrent users in-game earlier this year.
- Piggy, launched in January 2020, has close to 5 billion visits in just over six months.
- Jailbreak surpassed 500,000 concurrent users during a live event in April 2020.
- There are now 345,000 developers on the platform who are monetizing their games.
- Over 50% of Robux being spent in catalog is now being spent on UGC items, less than 12 months after launching the UGC catalog program.”
A talent marketplace, slated for launch later this year, should further encourage collaboration between community members and developers to expand Roblox’s array of experiences. Alongside this, Roblox is introducing a raft of new developer-focused tools and platform services to complement last year’s well-received cloud collaboration tools. These include ‘the ability to grant permissions to team members/contractors/employees to work on a certain part of a game’ and automatic machine translation to offer a broad range of localization and language options.
Roblox Corporation also announced a new venture, dubbed Developer Events, to promote participation in and creation of community events. The tool will launch later this summer and will allow developers to host both virtual and in-person events.
Finally, Roblox also unveiled a new partnership with independent electronic music label, Monstercat. Over fifty tracks covering a wide range of genres (EDM genres, including Drum & Bass, Synthwave, Electro, Chillout, Electronic, Breaks, Future Bass) are now available for developers to use, with an eye on adding even more in the future.