ALast weekend, many children behaved in a strange way, and it wasn’t just Halloween disguise. Suddenly they had more time for their parents or went outside more often than usual to play. The reason: Roblox was down. The popular video game platform, which is mainly used by children under the age of 13, was offline for a full three days. It started Thursday evening, and it wasn’t until Sunday evening that Roblox reported operations had been fully restored. Children were in a state of excitement for days. Some Twitter users wrote that the scariest part of this year’s Halloween was the Roblox outage.
Failures of large online platforms have recently become a regular occurrence. Four weeks ago, the social network Facebook and its associated services such as Instagram and Whatsapp were paralyzed for more than five hours. But the Roblox outage lasted a particularly long time. CEO David Baszucki said a software bug had overloaded a “core system” in the company’s infrastructure. Because this error was difficult to detect, it took longer than hoped to get the systems up and running again.
The failure hits a platform that, like many other representatives of the video game industry, has gained significantly in popularity just in the midst of the Corona crisis. Roblox was founded in 2004 and launched its platform in 2006, but the number of users has risen sharply recently. The main idea behind Roblox is that there are millions of different games to be played on the platform. These come from external developers, but also to a significant extent from the children themselves, who create them in a simple programming language and make them available to others.
At the end of the second quarter, the service had 43.2 million daily users, more than twice as many as before the pandemic. Users spent nearly ten billion hours with Roblox during that period. Roblox is globally active and has almost as many users in Europe as in the North American home market. A Roblox version in German has been available since 2019. Here, too, the platform has developed into an important contact point for children and young people, especially during the pandemic.
Notable IPO
The company took advantage of its surge in popularity this year to go public, and today it has a market cap of more than $ 48 billion. That is twelve times the valuation that was set for an over-the-counter financing round at the beginning of 2020. External developers who put games on the platform receive a share of the sales.
CEO Baszucki now said Roblox wanted to compensate the developers for lost sales during the outage. The games are free in their basic version, but users can buy virtual goods and subscriptions, which they then pay for with the in-house currency “Robux”. Roblox makes most of its revenue from selling this virtual money. According to the company, only a small proportion of users spend money, but sales are still growing rapidly, more than doubling to $ 454 million in the second quarter. So far, Roblox is still showing losses.
Similar to what has recently been heard from Facebook, Roblox sees itself as a company that is promoting the vision of a metaverse. This means a virtual space in which the users become part of the internet, so to speak. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes it as the next generation of the Internet, and he says he sees it as the future of his company. As a sign of this, Facebook changed its name to Meta last week, so the social network that has given its name to date is only one of many products and no longer has the previous defining role.
Not as problematic as Fortnite
Roblox boss Baszucki also regularly uses the term “metaverse” for his platform and is increasingly trying to bring experiences from the analog to the virtual world. Recently, for example, there was a virtual concert on Roblox with the group Twenty One Pilots. Such concerts have also taken place in Fortnite, the video game from Epic Games, another company that promotes the idea of a metaverse.
In Germany, in view of the young users that Roblox attracts, there is now a rich compendium of Internet guides for parents on how to use the platform. The media advisor “Look!” From the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, ARD, ZDF and AOK published a guide for Roblox in August 2020. On the basis of the inquiries received from parents, the construction kit has now caught up with other popular games such as Fortnite and Minecraft, says a spokeswoman for “Look!”. Even on Roblox, individual games can contain violence or other content inappropriate for children, but the platform is not as problematic as Fortnite, where violence is a core element of the game.
.