Last weekend, ROBLOX reached a milestone: 100,000 concurrent users. This achievement inspired us to do some research about where this figure stands in the greater scheme of gaming and online entertainment.

Before getting to the facts, note that “100,000 concurrent players” means 100,000 authenticated ROBLOX users were playing games, building in ROBLOX Studio and browsing Roblox.com at the same time. It does not include every visitor at Roblox.com – that would make it a much larger number – nor does it represent guests (players who are not logged into a ROBLOX account). We estimate there were 20,000 guests playing at the time.

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ROBLOX is in the process of bringing our 9.8 million user-created games to the iPad. The first release of ROBLOX Mobile that supports online play is almost here. To raise awareness in the ROBLOX community of our imminent launch, we’re running a promotion targeted at ROBLOX game developers that will give them an opportunity to win a brand-new iPad 3.

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Let’s look at the facts: if you want to play or build games using our platform, it’s free. While it takes a lot of computing power to keep hundreds of thousands of gamers playing ROBLOX games, we want all our users to be creative and express themselves. But if you’re reading this blog, you probably know there’s a whole lot more to ROBLOX than that. Using the features bundled into Builders Club is essential to experiencing everything ROBLOX has to offer. When you purchase Builders Club, a lot happens behind the scenes at a very fast pace. We had ROBLOX Technical Director Matt Dusek explain what happens when you purchase Builders Club, and Creative Director John Shedletsky pick out some key benefits for newer users.  

A lot of engineering effort has gone into making the ROBLOX payment-processing system bulletproof. We can process payments from a variety of providers (such as credit cards, gift cards, iTunes, PayPal and SMS to name a few) with financial-grade encryption and data security practices. Furthermore, our payment processing is 100% transactional–sales will be faithfully completed even in the face of hardware failures in our billing system.

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Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our platform, our technology, and our place in the gaming and technology industries. For those of you who catch up with ROBLOX over the weekend, the Weekly ROBLOX Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week. This time: we talk with Uuvinu, the creator of ROBLOXRanks.com, we respond to your ideas for ROBLOX, several developers talk about the games they’re playing, the latest entry in our series about the ongoing development of ROBLOX for iPad, ROBLOX FPS Authority, ROBLOX on Google+ and more.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Spotlight on Uuvinu, the creator of ROBLOXRanks.com

User Uuvinu put together a website that ranks users based on a variety of different factors. It’s a very interesting service that’s getting thousands of hits a month. He’s also the creator of The Vortex, a ROBLOX game that emulates Portal pretty realistically. We chatted with him about his work and summarized our conversation in this, the latest Spotlight article.

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If the first part of developing a well-performing ROBLOX experience for the iPad is ensuring stability through memory optimization, the second part is improving the frame rate to the point it’s as smooth as it is on a modern desktop or laptop computer. The process is a balancing act: push performance optimization to its limit without noticeably degrading the quality of the experience.

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‘Tis the season of gaming, so we thought we’d sit down with a handful of ROBLOX employees to find out what they’ve been playing this holiday season. We’re all gamers at heart, and this proves it. Enjoy. 

Kip Turner (Content Team)

I’ve been playing Orcs Must Die 2–it’s so fun. You defend these massive dungeons against hordes of enemies, and you can place traps all around the map. It also introduces co-op, so you can slay orcs with your friends. From a developer’s perspective, I really get a kick out of the physics system. All the traps have physics parts built into them, and you can use them to send orcs flying off the edge of cliffs into a murky abyss.

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When I spoke to user Uuvinu over the phone, he seemed distracted. So much so, that I asked him if something was wrong. I had simultaneously noticed that his website, ROBLOXranks.com, wasn’t loading. This was his response: “Sorry. Our servers in New York City were knocked out by the storm, and I’m working on migrating data to Dallas, Texas. Site should be live in an hour.”

It was back up in thirty minutes. He’s 15-years-old.

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