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Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

matthewball.co

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Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#541

Post by justinclift »

dagmx wrote: post #538
justinclift wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, maybe you're only familiar with the Visual Studio SDK's? The Azure SDK's aren't charged for access: https://azure.github.io/azure-sdk/ The SDK's for modern MS products generally seem to be freely available. Maybe it's only their legacy offerings that have some charge to it? If that's actually the distinction, then my guess is that it's simply "no cost access means higher numbers of developers using them" for th…

Hmm maybe you’re only familiar with their azure SDKs ;) What makes Windows not modern? The whole point of my comments is that different business eases have different funding. Azure is a separate business for Microsoft than windows development. I’m going to guess based on your range of comments that you’re primarily a devops and web developer and not a native app or game developer? Which leads back to my first respons…

Oh come on. Just because something doesn't fit your narrative you can't suddenly change the goal posts. Azure is literally Microsoft.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#542

Post by justinclift »

dagmx wrote: post #343
justinclift wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... how do you balance that out? Not sure what you're asking? "Significantly" doesn't seem to be correct. At least, not for the (GPL licensed?) stuff that's been stuck on ancient versions for many years. Though they have (from my rough memory) made some contributions back to FreeBSD where it seemed to make sense. All that aside, the point is that they didn't build their platform "almost from scratch". They assemble…

What I’m suggesting more than asking is, when you say that open source has lifted their development burden, it makes it sound like it’s a unidirectional taking. And sure, some might be freeloading. But they also do contribute quite a bit to open source. https://opensource.apple.com/ I know your response was more to correct the “developed from scratch” but I still think it’s important to note that it’s not unidirectio…

> ... it’s important to note that it’s not unidirectional.

A somewhat unexpected factoid about Apple and OSS, is that Apple doesn't seem to provide hardware to any OSS projects they didn't themselves create.

Not even Homebrew, who (to my thinking) should have been first in line due to the immense benefit they used to provide Apple's users.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#543

Post by realprimoh »

hipadev23 wrote: post #394
kin wrote: post #388

Everything I've seen from Roblox just seems so rough across the board. Poor UI, poor graphics, poor gameplay. There's a sense of freedom that is quite refreshing kind of like Gary's mod. I'm just so surprised that with such high adoption, none of the money is going into make anything remotely polished.

> I'm just so surprised that with such high adoption, none of the money is going into make anything remotely polished. There are numerous polished games on the platform, but the most of the players are younger kids on hand-me-down mobile devices, so the most popular games tend to be easy to run casual games. Here are a few examples of what you're looking for: * Frontlines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA71d3O1ID0…

The fact that these are Roblox games are blowing my mind. Wow!

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#544

Post by whywhywhywhy »

itake wrote: post #524
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok why doesn’t Microsoft get 30% of revenue of Steam purchases or Adobe CC subs? Why doesn’t Apple get 30% of revenue from purchases through the Safari browser in MacOS? After all they play a massive part in making those purchases possible.

In your example, MS and Apple do not curate, provide support, managing licensing, or provide payment support.

Ok so why can't I take care of those things myself on iOS? Pretty sure I can handle my own curation, licensing and payment overhead for 30% more revenue.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#546

Post by thomas34298 »

hoseja wrote: post #212
thomas34298 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the same argument could be made for Twitter/X. The app stores by Google and Apple specifically disallow pornographic material, yet the app is full of it. Once you're big and important enough, the rules mostly don't apply for you anymore. Of course, if they tried to circumvent the app store tax directly within the app, there would be consequences, but as long as Google/Apple can make a profit, it's okay it see…

I don't think I've ever actually seen any porn on eXtwitter. (Well, on main.) Why was a perfectly fine Unicode Blackboard X filtered out of my post.

There is a lot of porn. X even added official rules for it: https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/adult-content

I don't have an iPhone, but I know that you can access it via the official app from Google Play.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#547

Post by hoseja »

thomas34298 wrote: post #546
hoseja wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've ever actually seen any porn on eXtwitter. (Well, on main.) Why was a perfectly fine Unicode Blackboard X filtered out of my post.

There is a lot of porn. X even added official rules for it: https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/adult-content I don't have an iPhone, but I know that you can access it via the official app from Google Play.

What I'm saying, you have to seek it out.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#548

Post by micromacrofoot »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #517
micromacrofoot wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's popular because it's addicting

Like most games? Mario Bro's. was addicting.

mario bros didn't ask you for $1 to revive and save your progress every time you died

these are gambling mechanics... if I just pay $1 more I can make it to the end! if you pay $5 you can be better than everyone else! if I buy just one more lucky box it will have the rare item!

arcades had this, but they also had additional friction as a physical location... now little timmy can sit at home every waking hour badgering mom for another quarter to put into the machine and there's the social pressure of bobby and mary having the exclusive $10 youtuber hat

all the typical trappings of life exaggerated and optimized to extract money in exchange for good vibes... from children

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#549

Post by consteval »

Aerroon wrote: post #421
consteval wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, no social media When I was a kid, everyone was absolutely riddled with self-doubt and insecurity. Jealousy and bullying was the norm. There wasn't a soul in my middle school who didn't deeply, deeply hate themselves. This was before social media. Imagine that, but now kids ALSO get to form unrealistic expectations and envy at home on their devices. > no video games for kids? What are you talking about? You can…

> You can still get your friends together and play mario party or super smash or kirby or whatever. That never went away, we still have co-op games where it's free to play for the other kids. Yeah, they don't add those free to play mechanics because they force you to buy an extra piece of hardware for $400 to play those games. It works great when you're rich, I guess, but then these f2p games shouldn't matter in the…

What? No, you don't need a console. One switch can play a 4 player or 8 player game just fine. How it's been for decades.

Re: Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

#550

Post by ffgjgf1 »

dagmx wrote: post #358
ffgjgf1 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did MS ever make any significant amounts of money from selling VS/MSDN compared to how much the availability f 3rd part software benefited Windows sales/increasing market share? Also you didn’t actually necessarily need it to publish software on Windows. While if you want to develop for iOS (and even macOS these days) you still need to pay the $100/300 yearly fee (which is there entirely for gatekeeping and not an ac…

To your question, that’s exactly my point. Without access to a companies books, you don’t know how they fund things. Take this as my response to your other reply as well. You don’t know if Microsoft chose to fund certain parts of their development with the profits from VS enterprise or not. None of us do. Even, for arguments sake, if we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect p…

> Without access to a companies books, you don’t know how they fund things

I’m highly certain about that. Regardless also I don’t think most companies work like that. More or less all revenue at least from the in specific divisions like Windows or Azure is going to the same pot.

> Nobody has enough facts outside the companies

Well.. same argument applies to > 90% of all stuff people say on online forums like HN and makes most online discussions entirely meaningless.

Regardless we can still reason about a lot of things with a fairly high degree of confidence without complete certainty.

> we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.

Yet it’s the direction MS has been taking over the last 10-15+ years. They have invested massive amounts of money into products which are either effectively free for most users or don’t really generate enough direct revenue to fund them like GitHub.

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