This will probably come as no surprise, but our staff is populated by gaming enthusiasts. We spend our lives working to make ROBLOX the best gaming experience out there, and part of that means keeping a vigilant eye on our industry. ROBLOX is a unique platform in that it exists entirely on the internet–and it’s been interesting to notice other platforms start to shift their gaze towards a cloud-based architecture.

Continue reading

The advent of broadband internet has revolutionized the way video games are distributed. 10 years ago, the idea of downloading, streaming or playing in a web browser what was traditionally boxed and sold on store shelves was almost unbelievable. Today, it powers video game distribution. Steam does big business distributing games, OnLive and Gaikai have demonstrated that streaming even high-production experiences can be done without sacrificing gameplay quality, and there’s a plethora of free browser and social games you can start playing within seconds in every corner of the web.

Technology has enabled game developers of all shapes and sizes to get their creations to an exponentially larger audience than they could in the past. The question for PC game developers, then, is what’s the best medium: a web-based player or a downloadable client? The industry is still figuring out the answer to this question – right now, the decision hinges on the game’s goals and target audience – but we expect to see some convergence sooner rather than later.

Continue reading

Have you noticed that you’ve been jumping into ROBLOX games quicker? That’s because our networking team has been hard at work exploring ways to make our network more stable, secure, and most importantly, fast. After a ton of experimenting, we’re pleased to report that our network is the fastest it’s ever been–our data is faster and its footprint is smaller, and we’re continuing to make tweaks and enhancements. We tapped ROBLOX Software Engineer Yunpeng Zhu to tell us how we got there.

ROBLOX has sped up dramatically thanks to a couple of changes we’ve made in our networking infrastructure. A few of these changes were very simple, while some of them became extremely complex–it’s difficult to gauge how much faster ROBLOX is running because it’s not entirely dependent on networking, but the hardware users are playing on.

Continue reading

A hot topic among game studios in recent years is the notion of “cloud-based gaming”–a tectonic shift in the infrastructure behind multiplayer online games. Gone are the days of hosting your own server, opening up your firewall, forwarding ports in your router, and sacrificing a goat in order to be able to host your own multiplayer environment.  In a traditional solution, if you wanted to play game with friends on the internet, you’d set up a game server and have your friends connect to it. We decided early on that this was a method we wanted to avoid–encouraging users to set up local hosting often results in a plethora of problems that interfere with stable gameplay.

Continue reading