To strangers, Roblox may look like a Minecraft clone crossed over with Lego, but the truth is, there's a lot more to it.
For one, Roblox actually launched in 2006, three years before Minecraft's first public test version and five years before its full release. The game is extremely popular with younger gamers and offers in-game creation features that even eclipse the creative building aspects of Minecraft. While it might not quite have the Minecraft cultural impact, Roblox also has as many players as Minecraft, if not more by some points.
How many active players are in Roblox?
Roblox's developer, the Roblox Corporation, has released regular player count updates over the past few years, and the numbers show that active players have grown rapidly since around 2016. A major driver of that growth is likely the Xbox One. . Roblox arrived on Microsoft's platform in late 2015, introducing the game to a whole new audience. At the end of 2016, 10 years after Roblox's launch, Roblox Corporation announced that the game had 30 million monthly active users.
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By March 2018, that number had grown to 50 million users, continuing to expand to reach 70 million players per month by September of the same year. In April 2019, Roblox had 90 million active players, and a few months later, in August 2019, Roblox Corporation announced that Roblox had reached a benchmark of 100 million monthly active players.
At this time, Roblox players outnumbered Minecraft players. More recently, an announcement from new investors in Roblox revealed that the game had surpassed 115 million monthly active users as of February 2020. For comparison, the last number of players available for Minecraft returned in September 2019, showing 112 monthly players. Of course, both games have a lot more registered users than that, but these numbers reflect the number of people who regularly play the game.
What exactly is Roblox?
The simplest point of comparison for new Roblox players may be Minecraft, but the two games actually have some very significant differences. While both are open-world creation games, Roblox has a much more robust toolkit that gives users more freedom to shape the world.
Roblox players can actually use in-game tools to create their own new game modes. It is seen by many users interested in game development as a way to learn the skills needed, especially from children and adults. teenagers who make up most of its players.
The game has a robust marketplace where players can share or sell the assets they create in the game. Roblox CEO David Baszucki describes the game as "a safe and civil place where people come together to create, learn and enjoy".
