Roblox

2020 Roblox Logo

The_Story_of_Roblox — The Story of Roblox

Roblox (originally stylized as ROBLOX ) is a massively multiplayer online social game platform, where players are able to create and publish their own virtual worlds using building tools and the programming language Lua. Players can earn or purchase Robux, which can be cashed into real-world money if earned from developing games or clothing items. There are over 29 million games and approximately 56 million active/1.1 million peak concurrent players playing a total of 1 billion hours each month.^[1]

Since the official release of Roblox in 2006, this site has been growing faster gradually. As of March 22, 2020, over 1.5 billion accounts have been created. According to David Baszucki, the founder and CEO of Roblox, the game had about 9 million monthly active users in February 2016 (not including guests and visitors).^[2]

During the summer of 2018, Roblox started Roblox Education, an education program that aims to teach coding, business, communication, and entrepreneurial skills to children all over the world through Roblox Studio.

Powering Imagination™
Roblox

History

File:Pirate.jpg

Roblox in early development. (2005)

From December 2003 to January 2004, the platform went through multiple different names, such as GoBlocks and Dynablocks, and switching to their respective domains in a short time frame. Roblox became the final name choice, and it was finalized on January 30, 2004. Alpha testing ended in February 2005, after which the platform went into beta testing. In April 2006, Roblox was fully released to everyone with multiplayer games, and would gradually receive new updates and features over the years to shape it into what the platform is today.

Features

Roblox is available on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Xbox One, and on the Windows Store. People interested in getting more involved with Roblox can make an account; they could formerly play as a guest, which is no longer possible to do due to their removal. Users choose their own username and password, and can then create their own places. Users also have their own character, which can be customized via avatar shop purchases, and they can participate in social aspects of Roblox such as group walls, messages, and the party chat feature.

Places

Places are where players play games on Roblox. Players can create an unlimited amount of places, but active places are limited to 200 places regardless of membership.

Before September 27, 2017, the number of active places a player could have was based on one's Builders Club membership:

Free users - 1 active place
Former BC (players whose BC membership has expired) - 5 active places
BC - 10 active places
TBC - 25 active places
OBC - 100 active places

Roblox has now changed this so that any user can have up to 200 active places at a time. Roblox provides templates for users who don't know how to start.

Avatar Shop

Roblox's Avatar Shop, formerly the catalog, is a place where users can buy items to customize their avatar (hence the name). Unlike the obsolete Tickets, Roblox does not give a daily Robux reward to users; users with any form of Premium membership are an exception to this. Clothing is the only feature on Roblox that is mainly community-driven, and clothing cannot be sold for free. However, clothing could have previously been sold for free, and all clothing that was priced free is still free.

On December 4, 2019, givenothingback replied to a user on the Developer Forum regarding the user thinking the site still being labeled "Catalog" but the navigation bar labeling it "Avatar Shop." Givenothingback stated that "Avatar Shop" is a test name and it will be reverted back to "Catalog" once they are done testing. But, the name has stayed the same for several months.

Library

Similar to the avatar shop, the library is used by users and developers to release models, scripts, audio, decals, meshes and plugins to other Roblox users. All items in the library that are available for purchase are free with the exception of plugins, and any user may take items to place in their inventory. Users can have a virtually unlimited amount of items from the library, and some groups place their models in the library to make it easier for them to be used in multiple games. Sometime in late 2018, Roblox removed the ability for users to search for library items that are off-sale, due to many assets by developers being stolen by others with no credit. In December 2019, RoxyBloxyy announced plans for paid plugins.^[3] The announcement also revealed plans that many other marketplace types would be able to be sold for a price rather than free in the future, too. Later that month, paid plugins went live for all users.

Blog

Roblox runs a blog, where they post about released updates and showcase creations by developers.

Groups

There are many groups on Roblox. All users can join them, and all users are able to create a group if they have at least 100 Robux on their account (formerly, only Premium members can create one for 100 Robux). Users can join up to 100 groups regardless of membership. Before mid-December 2019, free users can join up to 5 groups at once while Premium members can join up to 100, regardless of tier.

My Feed

My Feed shows notifications from a friend's status, game updates, and group shouts.

Trivia

This section is a trivia section. Please relocate any relevant information into other sections of the article.

If "Dynablocks.com", "Goblox.com" or "Goblocks.com" is typed into the address bar of a web browser, it will redirect to the Roblox home page.
- On the Roblox Blog, John Shedletsky created a blog post on April 1, 2007, saying that Roblox had been sold to Google for $380 Million. This was untrue, as it was an April Fools joke.
On September 27, 2018, Roblox's favicon was changed from red to gray.