Roblox Statistics and Facts [2020]

If you’re older than 15, chances are that you’ve never heard of Roblox, despite it being one of the most popular massively multiplayer social game platforms of this generation. Even though the game has been around since 2004-2005 on the PC, it was only recently that the game exploded in popularity after being ported to mobile devices and Xbox. This has opened up the Roblox universe to an entirely new age group, specifically grade school and university students.

The history and development of Roblox dates back to 1989 where a company known as Knowledge Revolution was founded by David Baszucki. The company focused on creating an education software with a physics engine. A few years later, David partnered up with Erik Cassel, who would later become a key figure in the creation and success of Roblox.

Fast forward 10 years into the future, and David decided to sell Knowledge Revolution to MSC Software for a cool $20 million but stayed on the company as the acting vice-president until 2004 when he and Erik ultimately departed.

The dynamic duo paired up with Keith Lucas and decided to start a new project that used a dynamic game engine, and thus, Dynablocks was born. This would become the very first stage in the development of Roblox that let players create and play games. In 2004, it was renamed to Roblox—a combination of robot and blocks since the characters sort of looked like robots. After a full two years of alpha and beta, Roblox was officially released in 2006.

Initially, Roblox was pretty simple. It was limited by goofy physics but had a charm that created a highly supportive base community. A year after its launch, Builder’s Club, Robux, and Tix were introduced to monetize features while the game’s core remained playable for non-paying users.

In 2007, David and co. introduced a safe chat feature that allowed players of any age to play. As the years went on and the community continued to grow in numbers, more enhancements were implemented to the creative side of Roblox. This allowed creators to push the limits as to what kind of games they could develop. This includes clothing, terrain, building, and an easier-to-understand Lua programming language for new players to learn.

In 2012, Roblox became increasingly more accessible after it was released on iOS devices. At the time, mobile games weren’t a huge thing, but the cross-compatibility of PC and phones/tablets made it so mobile gamers could try out the existing games. In 2013, Erik sadly passed away after a three-year bout with cancer.

2015 saw a tremendous enhancement to the Roblox world as terrain became smoother, making the game generally more eye-pleasing than its previous blocky world. A year later, the community saw another huge upgrade as the devs introduced the R15 avatars, which gave their in-game characters more limbs, making them less clunky than before. Roblox also took their business efforts outside of the digital world by producing a toy line and all kinds of merchandise. In 2016, Tix were permanently removed from Roblox so as to simplify the game’s in-game currency and trading system.

Today, Roblox has over 40 million playable games of every genre that 164 million players can play at any time.