The User-Generated Content Landscape (and What Drives It)

By Andrew Haak - September 13, 2012

Successful user-generated content platforms have long tails.

Not literally. Statistically.

ROBLOX Users and Indie Devs: More in Common than You Think

By Andrew Haak - August 9, 2012

Indie gaming. It might make you think of small teams – even teams of one – holed up in home offices; focused experiences that put more stake in creative game-play mechanics – your Braids and Fezs – than next-generation, video-card-frying graphics; unique aesthetics and memorable styles.

But 10 years ago, you might not have thought… Well, anything. It’s only been in the last six or seven years that the indie gaming scene has exploded. And in the future, we believe user-generated gaming platforms, including ROBLOX, will not only sustain the explosion, but grow it, as more and more people pick up on what it takes to independently develop games well before going pro.

ROBLOX Users: Content-Creating, Game-Playing Machines in 2012

By Matthew Finick - July 11, 2012

We just passed the halfway mark of 2012, making it high time to look back and evaluate how much content ROBLOX users have generated and played so far this year. The graphic in this blog post shows the growth in games created, assets created (all user-generated, non-place content), game plays and game-play hours logged for the first halves of the past three years.

Click the image to see it at full resolution.

The Games That Paved the Way for User-Generated Gaming

By Alan Fackler - July 7, 2012

Here at ROBLOX, one of our goals is to make your world-building experience easy, flexible and fun. We’ve got teams of developers working tirelessly to ensure that creating and sharing games is a seamless experience, and that the tools you need are both user-friendly and deep.

And though ROBLOX users now create millions of games per year, we can’t take credit for inventing user-generated gaming. User-generated content has existed in the realm of video games for decades, though only a small fraction of gamers had the technical know-how to truly embrace the idea.

The First 2012 Game to 1 Million, and How It Got There

By Andrew Haak - July 5, 2012

Every ROBLOX user wants to get to the top of the Games page. It’s symbolic of success. A place reserved for the best. It turns games into trends.

“It feels really, really unbelievably good and exciting when a game you’ve made hits the top of the first page,” said ROBLOX user Playrobot, whose creation, Lakeside, was the first game created in 2012 to reach 1 million game plays.

User Showcase: Procedurally Generating a “Zombie City!”

By Andrew Haak - July 3, 2012

Procedural generation refers to content that is created algorithmically, as opposed to manually. It was originally implemented in video games as a workaround to the memory limitations of early hardware; for example, the 1984 computer game Elite used procedural generation to create a universe with eight galaxies, each containing 256 planets, that wouldn’t soak up valuable memory. Today, procedural generation persists, but instead serves as a method for developers to make each play session of their game dynamic. ROBLOX’s Build and Battle, for instance, uses it to create a random swath of jagged terrain for each match.

Cunning ROBLOX users have found ways to implement procedurally generated content in their games. Zombie City!, an abstract – at least, for now – game by user um3k, known outside ROBLOX as Justin Phillips, is one such case. Each time a player starts an instance of the game, it procedurally generates an expanse of terrain and a complete city — littered with zombies.