SAN MATEO — Nathan Prijatel, 12, likes running his own simulated store and designing virtual roller coasters — particularly ones where the cars hang from the track.
His sister Miranda, 9, likes building roller coasters, too, but she also likes to walk down the runway in a computer-generated fashion show and play a deadly game of tag where you try to avoid being killed by a cyber-murderer.
And Josh Martheze, 17, has spent much of the last 18 months developing a farming community where people can make money by raising and selling crops all in a matter of minutes.
These kids are playing on or designing for Roblox, an app and website that hosts games and simulations constructed of Lego-like virtual blocks.
Never heard of Roblox? There’s a good chance your children have or soon will. Ten years after it launched, Roblox has become a kind of overnight sensation, rapidly drawing in users by expanding to new platforms including the Xbox One and through simple word of mouth. In fact, when your kids start playing, it’s likely they’ll have found out about it the same way these kids did — through their friends.
Before Martheze, who’s known on Roblox as AlgyLacey, started building his “Farmulator“ game on the app, he was lured there by his buddies, who were playing virtual paintball and “Call of Duty”-style first-person shooter games on it.
“The main draw was that I could play with my friends,” he said.
Roblox is something of a late bloomer. For years, few people were aware of the San Mateo company.
Those that were often lumped it in with other Lego-like virtual world games, including Minecraft and the now defunct Lego Universe.
But lately, it’s been catching on far and wide. The average number of unique adult visitors to Roblox’s Web site and app hit 15.3 million in August, up 90 percent from a year earlier, according to comScore, a market research firm.
Looking at people of all ages who actually log into its service, Roblox reports an even bigger jump. According to the company, the average number of app users has more than tripled over the last year to 20 million a month.
While most users are in the United States and male, some 40 percent now come from other countries, and some 30 percent are female, both up markedly in recent years, according to the company.
“They definitely have been flying under the radar,” said David Cole, principal analyst at market research firm DFC Intelligence. “I’m wondering if they could be the next Minecraft.”
Minecraft, of course, is the virtual world game that has more than 100 million users. Microsoft bought it two years ago for $2.5 billion.
Roblox isn’t so much a single game as a platform for lots of different ones. Users can log in and choose from millions of different options. The app is free and so are most of the games. Some games charge for add-ons and accessories that users pay for with Robux, a virtual currency they purchase from the site that provides Roblox with most of its revenue.
When David Baszucki, Roblox’s founder and CEO launched the San Mateo company, he hoped to build a kind of virtual playground — a three-dimensional computerized environment where eventually millions of people could play together and create games. Although Roblox didn’t immediately become a big hit, Baszucki and his team kept plugging away, building in new features and expanding the app to new platforms. Today, Roblox fans can use the app to play games on PCs, tablets, smartphones and even virtual reality headsets like Facebook’s Oculus Rift. After Roblox launched on Microsoft’s Xbox One earlier this year, it quickly become one of the top downloaded games for the game console.
Because kids are such a big part of the audience for Roblox, the company has made it a point to try to offer a safe environment. Roblox has algorithms that attempt to block offensive or suggestive language in chats, Baszucki said. It has also a team of moderators working around the clock scrutinizing all the images and sounds uploaded to the system and reviewing anything that users have flagged as offensive, he said. The company has also published guidelines for acceptable behavior and content and has blocked users for violating them.
Roblox doesn’t catch everything. The Prijatel kids’ parents cut off their access to Roblox for a while after another user sent curse words to them in a chat window.
But the stand Roblox takes when considering potentially offensive material is “if an 8-year-old is playing and a grandparent is looking over their shoulder, there’s going to be a general consensus that this is OK for them,” he said.
Baszucki and his team designed the Roblox environment so that aspiring programmers could easily create games, even if they had little or no prior experience. Roblox hosts all the games created in its environment on its servers. Its cloud system takes care of the multiplayer aspects, in-game chat services and provides the virtual currency that can be used to buy and sell items in the game. The developer tools it offers include plenty of pre-built virtual objects such as trees and buildings that designers can use to populate their games. And because the games are based in the cloud, it’s relatively easy for developers to customize them so that players can play them on different kinds of devices.
That approach has paid off. About a half-million users like Martheze have created games for Roblox. There are now some 22 million games available within the app. And the games are growing increasingly sophisticated.
When Roblox launched, Baszucki’s then-10-year-old son was dismissive, noting the games initially being built for it couldn’t match his favorite, “Roller Coaster Tycoon,” a PC game that allowed players to build a virtual amusement park. But today users can find “Theme Park Tycoon 2,” a favorite of Nathan and Miranda Prijatel and many others, that Baszucki says is an improvement on its predecessor.
“That’s such a fulfilling thing for me,” he said. “The vision we had when we started the company is really starting to come through and starting to come true.”
What many players love is the sheer diversity of games and experiences available through the app. Josh Rountree, 10, of San Jose, has been playing Roblox on his iPad for about a year and, and now plays it pretty much every day. Among the games he regularly plays are a virtual parkour game, where on-screen characters do acrobatic stunts; and “Heroes,” where players explore a dungeon, fight monsters and collect gold.
“There are so many different types of things you can do in it,” Roundtree said. “It’s fun!”
