Everything you ever wanted to know about Roblox, but were afraid to ask a 12-year-old

MOM I NEED ROBUX FOR SKINS AND OBBIES

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Dear Reader, but you’re getting older. You used to be young and cool, at the cutting edge of all things pop culture, confusing all the boring adults. I’m sorry to report, but those days are over. You are now one of the boring adults. The children are now confusing you, what with their 6-7s, Brain Rots and Labubus.

It’s hard getting older. It’s hard realizing you don’t know what all the kids are talking about these days, but don’t worry. If you’ve ever been confused and wondered what exactly a Roblox is, I’m here to help. This is everything you ever wanted to know about Roblox, but were too afraid to ask a 12-year-old.

Roblox is the biggest video game in the world

Roblox is the biggest video game in the world. It’s free to play, and available on nearly every platform - Xbox, PlayStation, PC, Android, iOS, and more. It’s known for bad graphics, user-generated experiences, and having an extremely young user base.

For many kids, Roblox isn’t just a game. It’s where they hang out after school, it’s how they express themselves creatively, it’s where they try on new identities and learn social dynamics. Roblox is deeply integrated into the formative experiences of childhood for a surprisingly large number of kids today, and is quietly one of the most important cultural forces in America.

How do you play Roblox?

Roblox is not really a video game in the sense most people understand video games. It’s more of a platform. When you open Roblox, you’re greeted with a wide variety of user-created games and experiences to choose from:

There is no ‘Roblox’ game to play - when your kid says they are ‘playing Roblox’ what they mean is that they’re playing one of the millions of games that other users have built. Roblox users have developed their own lingo for the types of games available, which often fall into certain categories:

• Role-play games

• Obbies (obstacle course)

• Tycoons (resource management games)

• Simulators

• FPS/Shooters

• Social/Hangout games

• Horror

• Party/Minigames

Logging into Roblox isn’t like booting up a game of Call of Duty or Mario Kart. It’s more like opening YouTube and choosing a video - if each video was an interactive, playable experience.

So Roblox is just a bunch of games?

I mean, technically yes. But if that’s your full description of the platform, you’re missing the point. CrazyGames.com is a site that I would call “just a bunch of games” and it’s not all that popular. Roblox is a fully realized digital platform.

Each game is a digital space you can walk around inside and explore. Inside those spaces, you can do more than just play the game - you can interact with other players. Spatial chat lets you voice chat with any player whose avatar is standing near your avatar. Think of it this way: Mark Zuckerberg has lit more than $80 billion on fire trying to make the ‘Metaverse’ happen. He renamed his company Meta! And he failed entirely, because the actual metaverse was Roblox the entire time.

For many kids, Roblox is the first digital platform they learn to navigate. It lets them build things, develop preferences, chat with their peers, hang out, and play. There are games where the narrow goal is a game-like objective to shoot or score or win - but there are even more games focused on creation, expression, and connection. Kids on Roblox navigate social status, try to make money, maybe get scammed, join communities, and experiment with identities. All the classic markers of childhood happen online now, and for a huge number of kids they’re happening in Roblox. Roblox is ‘just a collection of games’ in the same way that a thriving church is ‘just a room where people pray’.

So how big is this thing?

Roblox is the biggest game in the world right now, and arguably the biggest video game of all time. It dominates every metric you can judge a video game by. In late 2025 it averaged more than 150 million daily active users…

Wait, it’s HOW big???

Yes, 150 million daily active users. However big you think Roblox is, it’s bigger than that.

Here’s a chart showing monthly active users from 2024:

Roblox is twice as big as any other mega-popular game like Minecraft or Fortnite. But it’s also bigger than entire platforms. It’s twice as popular as the entire Steam ecosystem. More people play Roblox on a monthly basis than play the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and Xbox combined. And it’s not close! Roblox, at the end of 2024, had hit more than 380 million monthly active users, and it has almost certainly grown since then.

Individual games like Grow a Garden or Steal a Brainrot can hit peaks where more than 20 million players are playing them at the same time. Or as I wrote last year:

The subgame ‘Blox Fruits’ had almost as much total engagement in 2024 as the entirety of Blizzard Entertainment as a company. Roblox content dominates content - last year people spent twice as much time watching Roblox content on YouTube and Twitch as they did on the entirety of Disney+.

Roblox videos have more than a trillion views on YouTube. It’s very hard to overstate how massive Roblox has become.

Why are the graphics so terrible?

This is part of the genius of Roblox. While the platform’s engine is actually capable of hosting more graphics intensive games, most games have low-resolution graphics, blocky avatars and simplistic visuals. This helps in two ways - simpler graphics make the game more legible to young kids, and it allows anyone with any kind of computer to play the game easily. You might need a high-end gaming PC to play the latest AAA titles like The Witcher 4 or Grand Theft Auto 6. But Roblox can be played on virtually any laptop. It can be played on an iPad, or a phone. The game requires so little computing power it will practically run on a potato.

This is at least part of the story for how Roblox has become so successful internationally and with children. Kids and gamers in developing countries are two demographics who might not be able to drop thousands of dollars on a high end gaming setup, but Roblox doesn’t require that. You see the same dynamic in other hyper-popular games. Some of the very biggest games of all time - Minecraft, Fortnite, Among Us - all have deliberately simplistic graphics.

Do people make money off Roblox?

Roblox is free to play, so all its revenue comes from Robux, the in-game currency. Players can purchase Robux with real money, and use Robux in various games to buy in-game items, to gain power-ups, to access secret areas, to customize their avatar, etc.

To incentivize users to create lots of new games, experiences, and cosmetic items, Roblox has a program called the Developer Exchange program that allows creators to keep a percentage of the Robux that users spend in their games and convert it back to real cash. If your game becomes popular, you can start offering power ups and items for Robux and keep some of the real money people are spending in your game.

There are a few instances where Roblox developers have made huge money. Some teenagers have been able to create games that do millions of dollars in revenue per month, and sell those games for millions to larger game companies. One game, Welcome to Bloxburg, reportedly sold for $100 million. ‘Roblox creator’ is slowly becoming a real profession, just like YouTuber or Twitch streamer.

It’s important to note that for most users, the money is very small or non-existent. Roblox is a top-heavy platform, and while the most popular games have millions of players, most user-created games languish with few or no players at all. Much like how three-quarters of YouTube videos have zero comments, and even more have zero likes, the vast majority of Roblox games go unnoticed and unmonetized.

What else happens on Roblox?

When you develop a platform with 400 million users, there are a lot of possibilities for how you can use it. Roblox is branching out with video calls, generative AI creation tools, and a customized ad platform. The CEO has mused about opening a Roblox dating service. Like everything these days, a lot of Roblox games are concerningly close to gambling, with casino and lootbox-like mechanics. Last month, more than 12 million users logged in to watch a virtual Bruno Mars concert in Roblox.

Who wouldn’t want to get in on this hot concert action, I guess?

Roblox is such a flexible platform that it’s hard to capture everything that happens there, and I’d expect that in the future the number of things you can do on Roblox will continue to increase.

Is Roblox good for kids?

In some ways! It’s an excellent outlet for creative expression. There are a lot of kids on Roblox doing a lot of very dumb things, but kids have always done dumb things. Roblox can help teach kids how to create things, how to get feedback from your peers, how to express yourself, how to be entrepreneurial, and more.

There are a lot of digital experiences for children that involve extremely passive consumption. Most kids’ movies are like this, and so is the YouTube content they watch. Video games are more active, and games like Roblox that involve creation and expression are, in my view, a better digital experience than zoning out watching yet another YouTube video like a zombie. Not every kid playing Roblox will create their own games, but a substantial number of them do. And those kids are learning to solve problems, they’re often learning the basics of design and coding, and they’re learning how to collaborate socially with their peers. There are genuinely a lot of ways in which Roblox can be a very positive thing for children.

Is Roblox bad for kids?

Oh boy. The thing about Roblox is that it’s an absolutely massive platform filled with kids that lets you do all kinds of things, including fairly open communication. And that makes it prime territory for predators and pedophiles. I am normally not the kind of person to wring my hands about predators on the internet, but Roblox does seem to have a huge problem, and it’s one the site hasn’t done a great job addressing.

For years, stories have circulated about how pedophiles who seek to groom children and exploit them are all over Roblox, often promising children Robux in exchange for lewd pictures. One 10-year-old in California was kidnapped by a man she met on Roblox. In one instance, a woman convinced a different 10-year-old to try to kill a 2-month-old infant. There was a case in Chicago where a child was raped by someone they met on Roblox, and I had a hard time searching for it because that’s happened more than once just in Chicago. When you dive into this rabbit hole things can get very disturbing, very fast.

To offer a half-hearted defense for the company - when you operate at the scale Roblox does, there are bound to be incidents. Hundreds of millions of kids around the world play Roblox - it would be impossible that nothing bad ever happened to any of them. Longtime readers will know that I consider content moderation to be an impossibly hard problem in most cases. But that doesn’t excuse Roblox, which has at times been weirdly blasé and standoffish about their moderation policies.

The company claims, of course, to take child safety issues very seriously. But CEO David Baszucki did a disastrous interview with the New York Times podcast Hard Fork recently that highlights how that’s not really the case. He rambles, comes off as antagonistic, and generally does not seem to grasp why people are so upset with his company. At one point he calls the child safety controversy “not necessarily just a problem, but an opportunity as well”. It is astonishingly tone deaf, an absolute car crash of an interview.

So yes, to circle back to the original question, Roblox can be bad for kids.

This is horrifying! Is the government doing anything about this?

Roblox is facing at least 35 different lawsuits related to its child safety policies, mostly from families whose children were groomed, exploited or assaulted as a result of being on the platform. In addition to lawsuits from aggrieved families, they’re also facing lawsuits from the governments of Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida, as well as facing regulatory pressure in the UK. These lawsuits collectively allege that the company has known it has a problem for years, marketed itself as safe, and then didn’t do what it needed to in order to protect its underage users.

In response, the company recently rolled out a new age-verification system aimed at estimating user ages and only allowing users to chat with other users of similar age. This seems like a good idea, but you do have to wonder why it took until late 2025 for that sort of thing to be implemented in a platform where 40% of users are below thirteen years old.

Why should I care?

You don’t have to! But this is where Gen Alpha is hanging out, and for most adults it’s a massive blind spot.

Roblox is less like a video game, and more like a mall, a Discord, a game engine and a role playing community all jumbled up together. This is where youth culture is being created. This is where kids are learning to navigate the digital world, where they form new memes, and where they experiment with identities. It may seem silly to attribute any sort of culture to Roblox, but the line between the online and traditional culture is thinner than you think. The hit game Steal a Brainrot (mentioned above) is getting a major studio movie adaptation. And god help us, it’s probably going to make a lot of money.

Roblox is big enough it has a bit of everything. Your kid might start building their own game and learn to organize, to design things, to code. They might just waste time playing literal brainrot. They might meet people - with all the good and bad that comes with that. Roblox has tight knit communities, it has extremely petty drama, it has dangerous actors. It has opportunities to waste and to make money. In many ways, it’s just a digital reflection of the real world. You can stick your head in the sand if you like, but ignoring Roblox is, to some degree, ignoring the future.