Item — HN Reader

For game dev, I believe that it is remiss to not include mention of the change in the gamer landscape. Ten years ago, it was console vs PC as the big game question... and various studios took bets on one or both sides of that.

Today... it's Roblox vs everything else. Steam has its data at https://store.steampowered.com/charts/ - in the past 3 days, 45 million peak online at once.

Roblox has 150 million daily active users and 380 million monthly active users. https://brands.roblox.com/metrics-insights. Different numbers. Back in August it hit 47.3 M concurrent users (Steam's record at that time was 41.2 M).

As those gammers are growing up... they're not switching to other platforms.

Blaming this on AI doesn't feel like most of the story.

Gamers are dying out(*) - Belluar News https://youtu.be/_80DVbedWiI

6 comments

I bought Rust, Conan Exiles, and similar AAA games. But I've been spending most of my gaming time on survival MMOs and idle games on Roblox anyway.

Partly it's because they're easier to get into. It works well on a Mac or even on a phone. Lie in bed, do your three missions, sleep.

Partly because I can play with the kids. No extra account purchases, no teabagging.

I think game devs assume that they're just different audiences, but not really. Just because I like 18+ rated games sometimes, it doesn't mean I wouldn't pay a 6+ rated game most of the time. Who knows, we might see a Civ equivalent on Roblox in time. Roblox is the metaverse that Meta saw a decade away but couldn't capture market share for.

Can you compare daily active users to peak simultaneous users? Seems like apples to oranges. 150 million DAU could easily be the same as 45 million peak online.

Also how believable are both Steam and Roblox's numbers with regard to bot accounts? I have no idea about this, I'm biased towards Steam but based on the HN comments every time Roblox comes up I get the vibes that they are a comparatively less ethical company that might be willing to push the boundaries of ignoring bots for the sake of better metrics to impress investors. Also this isn't data at all but the steam games I play wouldn't benefit from bots, but I could see players of some of the silly little games my kids play in Roblox benefit from having some bot accounts to help you.

So I'm not super well versed with Roblox, but I'd assumed it was aimed at a younger audience?

So wouldn't the above numbers indicate that you have a growing younger gamer population (e.g. in Roblox), and an older one in Steam? And that it would be reasonable to think that many of the current Roblox gamers would transition across to games in platforms like steam, but they cater to a different need or desire in the coming decades?

Or does Roblox have everything that games offer on Steam already? Can I get my Sekiro experience there, or Star Sector, or Civ, or Witcher?

There's no denying that Roblox is immensely popular, but maybe it's OK if Steam has more niche stuff in the long run? There's still big money to be made, especially for small developers.

And also aren't we comparing overall platforms to individual game performance? To compare _all_ of roblox against a single game (BF6) doesn't seem right, no? Shouldn't we be comparing the most popular Roblox experience instead (whatever that may be)?

To put some of those numbers into perspective: Candy crush Saga has 273M MAU and Minecraft has 204M MAU.

Those games are enormously popular and might need some context of their own let's continue: Battlefield 6 has had at most 774k concurrent players, and peaked at 22.5M MAU

so Roblox is about 30% more popular than Minecraft and candy, or a good 19 times more popular than battlefield 6.

Someone is getting a new yacht.

Wow. I'm not very clued in lately but I do own plenty of games in GOG, Humble Bundle and yes, Steam. I was just thrilled that Planet of Lana II got released recently.

This is the first time I heard of Roblox. And it's supposedly this huge phenomenon?

I guess this is what getting old feels like.

A key part of that is a that its dominated by kids. The video I linked is one to start with...

https://www.takeaway-reality.com/post/roblox-demographics-st...

    There are 151.5 million daily active users on Roblox. (70% growth YoY)
    44% of Roblox users are over 17 years old. 56% are younger.
    APAC has the most users (29.5%), followed closely by US & Canada (28%). Europe is the third largest market with 23%, while the rest of the world has 19.4%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox

    As of February 2025, the platform has reported an average of 85.3 million daily active users. According to the company, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16.

I wonder how sticky Roblox is as the current cohort of kids get older. Of course more kids are being born, but last I checked that number is getting lower.

what is more likely:

- everything Roblox says is true

- a company that spent a decade throwing shit at the wall until something stuck, that seemingly has absolutely, utterly zero cultural impact, with a huge, inauditable non-US audience, where every game that any adult has tried is absolutely trash, that has tons of employees but seemingly not a single one has gone onto found a great game studio or do anything interesting in media unlike every other successful game studios, that Apple could ban for violating the mini-apps rule in an afternoon and hence ruin their entire business with a stroke of a pen... is overstating things.

Of interest to me regarding Roblox is that it's been around for a long time - public release in 2006, almost 20 years ago! It was around when I was a kid, and I vaguely remember being aware of it and thinking it was dumb (certainly, I didn't know anyone who played it).

I wonder what happened to make it so popular in the present day. Was it incremental improvement, or a better fit with modern devices/culture; maybe simply being free to play?

What made it so popular was a combination of it being cross platform as well as turning into a "game/experience platform" instead of just a game.

But it is legitimately incredible what some people created in it. I remember playing a very good/accurate counter strike source clone in roblox. Felt exactly like playing a source engine game. I doubt that it was made by a kid.

The Attention Economy(media and enertainment sector - gaming/movies/tv/streaming/sports/news/music and social media) needs a Central Bank. Peoples attention behaves similar to how currency works. And the system currently behaves as if Attention is not scarce and has no upper limits. So chaos is the natural state.

Very similar to how markets worked before central banks emerged. So someone, say a King, would over print cash for whatever random shit his self important 3 inch chimp brain came up with, like War. But at the market place there was nothing to signal random ppl now had more cash in their pocket. How much cash they had in their pocket got decoupled from any work they actually did. So strange things would start happening in the market - prices would jump, factories and farms couldnt produces at the same rate cash was printed, banks would lend too much, people would blame each other or outsiders because no one had info about how much cash was being printed and a mechanism to adjust its supply. Bankruns, asset bubbles, market crashes were the norm. Who looked rich had more to do with how close they were to the money printer.

Weird long explanation about currency, but no detail on what ‘attention economy needs a central bank’ even means in practice. Sounds like an empty LinkedIn slogan.