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By Kellen Browning
When his school closed in March, Garvey Mortley stopped going to lacrosse and playing drums in the school orchestra. With so much time at home, he sought another interest: Roblox, a game and an online app with Lego-like characters and millions of virtual worlds to explore.
Left on the floor of his living room in Bethesda, Maryland, Garvey began spending more hours in the online world, building virtual homes, adopting virtual pets and competing with other players in obstacle courses. He said he now plays Roblox on his computer for up to five hours a day while chatting with his friends on his phone, from an hour or two before the pandemic.
“It’s like my greatest passion,” said Garvey, 12. “It’s varied and you can meet other people from all over the world.”
The coronavirus has created pandemic winners as others buy en masse on Amazon, buy Peloton motorcycles to work out at home and look for videos on the wheel. For children, there are also pandemic winners, and the main one is Roblox, 14, who was already popular, but has become so huge since it was suggested to others to grow up at home.
Since February, the number of active players in Roblox has increased by approximately 35% to 164 million in July, according to RTrack, which tracks Roblox data. About three-quarters of young Americans between the ages of nine and 12 are now on the platform, according to Roblox. And players spent 3 billion hours on the app and in July, twice as much as in February, the company said.
Inside Roblox, which is free, players create an avatar. You can play the millions of games on the site, taking your character to environments ranging from tropical islands to enchanted castles and bustling cities. Your avatars can engage in first-person battles, decipher puzzles, or participate in egg-hunts while chatting and interacting with other players. Players pay genuine cash ($5 or $10 at a time) to become premium members and purchase an in-game currency called Robux, which allows them to purchase clothes, weapons and even hot air balloons for their characters.
“At a time like this, where other people are confined to the home, escaping into the virtual world and having that kind of laughter and imaginative reports with a friend, is very, very relevant,” said Craig Donato, Roblox’s ad. Director.
For gamers, Roblox has endless discovery details, as independent developers create more than 20 million new games a year for the platform. And for those developers, who are basically teenagers, academics and young adults running alone or with a small team, Roblox’s recent peak popularity also means a boom for them because they get a percentage of the cash users spend. their games.
One of the beneficiaries is Anne Shoemaker, 20, who said she moved from Palm Coast, Florida, to Silicon Valley two years ago with $100 to live with other developers while coding games for Roblox. For a while, he said, he didn’t earn enough from the platform to justify his transformation into a full-time job.
But after the pandemic, Shoemaker saw renewed interest in his two Roblox games, Mermaid Life, a fashion-oriented role-playing game, and My Droplets, a puppy simulation game. Players paid for more content in those games and for the hats they created for the avatars of the users you sell on the site.
Ms Shoemaker said she has now earned about $500,000 from Roblox, the peak of them since March. Before the pandemic, they may only pay one or two more people to help them. Today, his game studio, Fullflower Studio, employs 14 subcontractors and is preparing new games.
“It’s amazing,” Ms. Shoemaker said. “People would say to my mother, ‘Stop letting her play this video game. will take you anywhere.
Roblox said it had more than 2 million developers, 345,000 of whom earn cash and share their 50-50 profits with the company. Dozens of big developers make millions of dollars, the company said, and games from beyond have generated an average of $2 million to $3 million a year.
Roblox’s cellular app revenue, used by players at most, totaled $493 million in the first part of the year, up from $228 million at the same time a year ago, according to SensorTower, an analytics firm. Roblox refused to disclose his monetary data, to say that the money flows were positive.
Roblox, founded in San Mateo, California, founded in 2006 through Erik Cassel and David Baszucki, who were engineers and contractors. Mr. Baszucki is the Director-General; Cassel died of cancer in 2013. The launch has raised $335 million from investors who have added Meritech Capital Partners and Chinese web giant Tencent. In February, when he obtained new investor funding, adding Andreessen Horowitz, it was valued at $4 billion.
In the early years of roblox, expansion was slow. But activity began to rebound in 2015 and 2016, as technological adjustments made it less difficult to play on Microsoft and Xbox phones. Roblox is now at least as popular as Minecraft, one of its main competitors, said Craig Sherman, a meritech venture capitalist.
Even with his recent increase in activity, Sherman said, Roblox is “on the verge” of further growth. He said the platform had a foundation on which other people could start businesses, such as YouTube.
“Roblox adapts to the edition of this generation of going to the mall or downtown with your friends, and Covid is helping to speed that up,” he said.
Some of the kids who grew up in Roblox never left. Alex Balfanz, 21, started scheduling games at Roblox when 9. officials were looking to keep them in jail.
Balfanz said he saw the Jailbreak with more than 70,000 players on the first day in amazement. The game has now been played more than four billion times and generates several million dollars a year, which Balfanz said he shares with his partner.
In the pandemic, Jailbreak reached even higher levels. Balfanz said that in the days, the game has 80,000 to 90,000 people playing at once, compared to 40,000 to 60,000 previously.
“It was a delicious surprise, anything I had no idea of going through in the midst of all the unfortunate cases caused by the pandemic,” he said.
With his income, Balfanz, now a senior at Duke University, said he took vacations, paid his tuition (Duke’s tuition is about $60,000 a year) and bought a Tesla. He achieved celebrity prestige at Roblox and said he invaded star players every time he logged in.
But the risks of the offline world have infiltrated Roblox, adding reports from extremist teams seeking to recruit young people and the emergence of sexually particular content in games.
Donato said protection is Roblox’s most sensible priority. The company reviews the content of the game, has extensive parental controls and filters profephumphums and personally identifiable cat data, he said.
“We see all kinds of real-life primary events, from Covid-19 to racial discrimination, that have an effect on our platform,” he said.
Back in Bethesda, Garvey recently used Roblox to teach others about racism. When players participated in Virtual Black Lives Matter events in the game this summer, she noticed that some were obscuring the skin color of her avatar, apparently as a solidarity with blacks. But for Garvey, who is black, he looked more like a ‘virtual black face’.
So Garvey made a YouTube video explaining the story of blackface in the United States and suggested Roblox users dress their avatars in Black Lives Matter T-shirts to convert their skin color.
“I took an educational route, ” said Garvey. “I look to look a little useful, not just angry at everyone.”
Garvey’s mother, Amber Coleman-Mortley, said she was proud of Garvey’s reaction. He said he saw Roblox as an ideal position for education, especially with a reduction in learning and face-to-face socialization.
“The game is how human beings learn better,” he says.
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