Roblox Review: One Of The Most Popular Games For Creators

Roblox is regarded by some as one of the first metaverse platforms, a virtual world where people (mostly kids) can interact, play games, kill time, and even work to earn income. In this Roblox review, you’ll discover what Roblox is, how it works, its many features and its in-game economic system powered by the virtual currency Robux.

What Is Roblox?

Roblox is an online platform that allows users to create, share and play games and other immersive experiences. Founded in 2004, the official launch was in 2006 and the company is based in California. Since its launch, Roblox has seen massive success, with over 500 million downloads on Google Play alone. Thirty-three million reviews on Play Store give it 4.4 out of 5 stars. The Apple Store rates it as 4.5 with 8.5 million reviews.

Roblox boasts nearly 60 million daily users on its website, most of which are under 15 years of age. It has over 30 million experiences available and has extended from gaming to education, social media, and sports, basically turning into a massively multiplayer online virtual world that many describe as a metaverse.

Roblox’s Wikipedia page states that the company's growth began to accelerate in the second half of the 2010s and further during the Covid pandemic. Roblox has made game creation accessible to players and developers alike. However, it echoes concerns about privacy protection and the possible exploitation of children.

Features Of Roblox

While Roblox is essentially a game-creation platform, it has a lot more to offer. From digital collectibles to monetization for developers, there are many features of Roblox, and here we will unpack and review the most important ones.

#1 Accessibility

Roblox is available on more devices than most other gaming platforms and brands. You can access it on:

• Apple App Store—downloadable to iPhone, iPad, Mac PCs, and iPod touch.
• Google Play Store—it's tagged as the number one top-grossing adventure platform.
• Amazon—Robux packages are available for purchase, and Roblox is available as part of the Amazon Prime Gaming package.
• Microsoft—Roblox packages are available for download to Microsoft PCs and Xbox One.
• PC—users can also download Roblox from the website itself to PCs.

#2 Parental Control And Involvement

As part of the company’s child protection policies, Roblox encourages parents to be involved with their children’s activities on Roblox. They can do this by:

• Playing games with them to provide a sharing of experiences and reassurance for parents about the child's interactions with others on Roblox. It recommends some of its most popular games as being family-friendly. These include Bird Simulator, Work at a Pizza Place, and Natural Disaster Survival.

• An ongoing focus on the values of digital citizenship by exploring the difference between right and wrong, reflecting real-life issues.
• Allowing parents to monitor their children's online interactions, including their private message history. They can also disable or restrict their child's opportunities to be involved in the Chat function.
• Allowing parents the ability to ensure the correct date of birth is on the child’s profile and set an Account PIN.
• Setting restrictions automatically based on the child’s age.
• Other in-game protections, such as appropriate avatar clothing detection and a parental reporting system.

#3 Roblox Create

There are endless resources online about what to create and how to do it. Fundamentally, anyone can become a creator and build interactive games or experiences. This has the advantage of providing free resources to developers, but it also makes it hard to reach your target audience in a very crowded space. We tested this by downloading the apps—Roblox Studio and Player. When we searched for ‘Running Games in Experiences’ on the Player app, the result was thousands and thousands of games.

They all look pretty slick and professional, which is a testament to the ease of use of the Studio app, where the games are created. Each game has a rating and shows the number of current players. The first game in the screenshot above has 466 thousand players; the lowest we could find was one. Getting your game noticed may take some considerable time.

Roblox also has a Creator section on its website, which takes users through the process of generating their own game step by step.

There is content for everyone, including children, beginner designers, and advanced coders. The beginner creator will use templates and stock characters inserted into a specific type of game. Roblox advises inexperienced users to start with Obby games. Short for obstacle games, Obbys are simple, jumping, running, and collecting games. More advanced developers can learn how to build their own aspects of their game by learning how to write their own scripts and then designing worlds and more complex experiences. There is a vast amount of free support and resources, both within Roblox and the wider community, for all levels of players and developers.

#4 Roblox’s Robux

Robux is the currency of Roblox and is used to buy and sell items and assets from the Avatar Shop. You can earn Robux by:

• Purchasing through Roblox itself.
• Users with a membership package receive a number of Robux automatically each month.
• Account holders can sell digital creations and receive a percentage of the selling price.
• Creators can sell Games Passes which allow players exclusive entry to restricted areas.

Roblox is clear that any attempts to persuade users they can easily generate Robux are usually scams and should be treated as such. However, there are ways to earn Robux outside of Roblox, for example, by using Fetch Rewards.

Related: You may be interested in earning free V-Bucks for Fortnite.

#5 Chat With Voice

This is a newly developed product only available to some users who must be 13 or over. Once enabled, this feature allows the user to hear and speak with other similarly enabled users in a suitable game. Game developers can choose to incorporate this technology into their games. Users must have an appropriate microphone.

#6 The Roblox Blog

This extensive blog is really a reference library charting the company's development and exploring the platform's technology. It's clearly geared toward adults. Some examples of post titles are:

• Semantic Subtyping in Luau.
• Roblox Innovation Awards 2022.
• Spotlight on Roblox Research.
• Working at Roblox: Meet Richard Sim.

In addition to the Blog, there’s a lot of website content for parents teaching them how to keep their children safe on the platform but we couldn’t find any in-house advisory Blog content for children (perhaps children don’t enjoy reading blogs that much).

#7 Roblox Review: Education

Roblox promotes itself as an educational tool that enables young students to ‘create immersive experiences that inspire creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking.' It provides teaching lessons to support learning to code, animate, and design. The lesson plans are precise and methodical and should help teachers who are unfamiliar with this kind of content.

This sort of activity is hugely popular with children, and a lesson plan alone is insufficient to ensure students are learning skills and not just playing. It has to be used with care, good management, and thoughtful planning.

The lesson plans provided are standard aligned, which is transferable to other countries, and they're free for educators to access. The nature of the Roblox app and technology means that little set-up costs are required, and the demand for school resources, such as internet bandwidth is minimal.

Roblox Premium Membership

In order to automatically receive Robux each month, users need to purchase a Premium Membership. There are three premium levels:

	Premium 450	Premium 1000	Premium 2200
Cost per month	$4.99	$9.99	$19.99
Robux Received	450	1,000	2,200

This means that every 100 Robux can cost you anywhere from $0.91 (for the Premium 2200 plan) to $1,11 (for the Premium 450 plan). In addition, Premium Memberships give the account holder:

• Premium-only items and special discounts at the Avatar shop.
• Special levels, items, and boosters within experiences.
• A bonus of 10% extra Robux when purchased separately.
• Unlocks the ability to trade.

Making Money On Roblox

While there may be some Roblox users who want to create games and experiences for reasons like learning skills, sheer enjoyment, and meeting people, most creators are using Roblox to make money on their creations. The chart below shows the split of money made on Roblox, which leaves the developer with 29.6 cents in every dollar spent on their games and products.

It's to the credit of Roblox that they're so transparent, but it may be shocking to users that they receive less than a third of the earnings they generate. However, compared to other royalty-earning creative sites, this is actually not a bad deal.

Furthermore, Roblox provides a lot of support for developers, much of which just runs in the background and doesn’t need to be considered by the creator. The trick, of course, is making money in the first place; you can’t earn a commission on zero sales.

Developers have different revenue streams:

• Selling avatar items in the Avatar Shop. These can be experience-related or not. There is an upload fee, and moderators must approve items. The seller receives a commission each time the item is sold and if it's used within someone else's game. The upload fees start at ten Robux. The commission rates range from 30% to 70%.
• Developers can earn Robux if they incorporate other users' assets into their game. The commission rates range from 10% to 40%.
• Special abilities and accessories can be sold within games.
• Part of the Premium Membership fee is returned to creators based on the amount of time users spend playing their games.
• The Roblox Studio can be used for creating specialized tools and assets, which the developer can then sell.

Related: You may be interested in apps that pay you to play games as well as in legit apps that pay you to answer surveys.

The Avatar Shop

The Avatar shop has a range of free and priced items for purchase. These can be used to build collections or experiences. Developers can sell their avatars in the shop.

Items for sale include:

• Clothing

• Characters

• Accessories

• Heads

• Animations

You can also find limited edition avatars and merch for sale and these collectibles can be traded. Unfortunately, this inevitably creates an opportunity for bots to buy them and resell them at a huge profit. A whole community revolves around purchasing, reselling, and collecting these items.

Lastly, there are items only available for purchase by those with a premium account.

Pros Of Roblox

• Roblox is free for users to sign up for and use.
• The purchase of in-game currency Robux and Premium Membership packages remove the danger of children spending money within Roblox without parental knowledge or consent.
• Developers keep the full copyright of their Intellectual Property (IP).
• Roblox is a great organic educational tool. As soon as children create their own games, they learn a range of skills, starting with the most basic: reading.
• Roblox rewards creators and encourages entrepreneurship, which is an excellent skill for children to learn.
• Educational programs are free for teachers and schools to download and use.

Cons Of Roblox

• The games can be clunky and not easy to play. There are so many that it's difficult to find games that you're engaged in.
• Roblox might try to stop scams, inappropriate communication, and black markets, but they do exist. If parents are not actively involved in monitoring what their children are doing, then they're at risk.
• The highly engaging nature of Roblox may be an issue for children who play on it too much.

Pricing

Roblox is free for users and creators to download and use. Most of the revenue for Roblox comes from transactions made within the platform using Robux. It does have several other income streams including advertising, licensing, and royalties.

Premium accounts come at three different tiers and cost $4.99, $9.99, and $19.99, respectively.

In Summary

In its basest form, Roblox is a platform with thousands of games for users to play for free. Behind that is an extensive program allowing developers to create their own worlds, experiences, and games. These, and individual assets within them, can be sold for the in-game currency Robux. Roblox provides a unique and free opportunity for users to learn how to code and create digital content.

Roblox does have issues, however. The vast majority of users are children and young people who are susceptible to the negative aspects of online behavior, and Roblox has been criticized for allowing predators, scammers, and trolls an ability to infiltrate the platform.

Roblox is undoubtedly an incredible online resource. Users can expect to learn a lot and have fun but should not expect to make a lot of money and parents should carefully monitor their child’s usage.

Roblox Review FAQs

Is it worth being a developer on Roblox?

Yes and no. It's not likely that you will be able to make a living creating experiences on Roblox. Its huge success is also the problem. With so many games available, it's challenging for yours to be discoverable. However, you will learn invaluable, transferable skills as a developer. Resources and learning tools are free, whereas learning in a formal setting is not.

Is Roblox dangerous for children?

Yes, Roblox is possibly dangerous if it's used unmonitored by adults. Children are at risk from peer bullying, inappropriate adult contact, and possibly accessing inappropriate material. However, all of those problems are present on any online platform. Roblox is no more dangerous than children surfing on Google. Parents must take steps to protect children online, regardless of what they're doing.

How can I find a good game on Roblox?

With so many games, it can be off-putting to search through them to find a good one. Here are some of our tips for finding a great game:

• Look at the number of players active on the game right now (just under the thumbnail). The more players, the better the game.
• Check the rating under the thumbnail.
• Use the Popular section or Search function to narrow down the list.
• Word of mouth. Friends and social media will recommend good games.
• Avoid games that might be clickbait. These include those with titles all in capital letters, those that look like significant games like Sonic or Mario, or any that mention Robux,

Are Robux worth it?

The extras that Robux can purchase are worth it for avid gamers. Furthermore, through the Roblox Developer Exchange Program, you can convert your Robux into real money. If you want to use Robux, we recommend buying a Premium Membership package as they're better value than buying Robux separately.

Is Roblox a scam?

No, it's a legitimate gaming and developer platform. However, like any other social interactive community, it's open to abuse. This is especially so as most users are children. They're at risk from scams and trolling. While Roblox attempts to protect them, the ultimate responsibility is with the parents.