Gaming platform Roblox, which has seen a surge of use due to the coronavirus pandemic, now has more than 150 million monthly active users, up from the 115 million it announced in February before the U.S.’s shelter-in-place orders went into effect. The company also said its developer community is on pace to earn over $250 million in 2020, up from the $110 million they earned last year.

These metrics and other company news were announced over the weekend at RDC, Roblox’s annual developer conference that was held virtually for the first time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Roblox, to be clear, doesn’t build the games that run on its platform. Instead, it offers the platform for developers to build upon, similar to the App Store. Many of its most popular games are free, monetizing as players spend on in-game items using virtual cash called Robux. Some of the company’s larger individual games, before the pandemic, would average more than 10 million monthly users. And over 10 games as of February claimed more than 1 billion total visits.

Thanks to the pandemic, however, these gaming milestones have significantly increased in size.

During the first part of the year, the Roblox game Adopt Me! reached 1.615 million concurrent users and over 10 billion visits. A new game called Piggy, launched in January 2020, now has over 5 billion plays. Jailbreak surpassed 500,000 concurrent users during a live event held in April 2020.

In total, there are now 345,000 developers on the Roblox platform who are monetizing their games, and over half of Robux being spent in catalog is now being spent on user-generated content (UGC) items, less than 12 months after the UGC catalog program began.

The more than doubling of Roblox developers’ earnings year-over-year is related to a combination of factors, including the platform’s growing game catalog, new development tools, international expansions and, of course, a pandemic that has locked kids indoors away from their friends, forcing them to go online to connect.

On notable factor driving the increased developer earnings, however, was Roblox’s recent introduction of Premium Payouts, which pays developers based on the engagement time of Premium subscribers in their game. Through this system, launched earlier this spring, developers earned $2 million in June 2020 as part of this program alone.

Article credit: Techcrunch

When I first heard about Minecraft, it was how its creator, Markus “Notch” Persson, had made an outlandish amount of money through PayPal. In 2010, a few months after putting the unfinished version of his game up for sale, the Swedish developer had raked in more than €600,000. The cash came in so quickly that the payment processor eventually froze his account to prevent fraud. Almost exactly four years later, that massive take would pale in comparison to what Microsoft paid for Notch’s company — an astounding $2.5 billion.

Why Minecraft is Good for Kids

Parents often ask, “Is Minecraft bad for my child?”. The answer is no! This is one of the few games that pairs the entertainment factor of a video game with the growth and development of important skills like critical-thinking. Still not convinced? Check out these ten concrete reasons why Minecraft isn’t your typical video game and how kids can benefit from playing it.

• You can play with your child. There’s no reason you can’t play Minecraft with your child, either watching what he or she does (and monitoring for safety), or play in multiplayer mode alongside your child. You can work as a team and even bond over the game.
• You can keep play private. If you’re concerned about who your child is playing with, you can limit her or his play to single mode — he or she plays alone. You can also join a server where you know all the players or create your own server, and invite only people you know, like friends from school or family members, to play with your child.
• Minecraft develops your child’s creativity. Minecraft isn’t just about stacking and unstacking blocks. Encourage your kids to build something learned in school, like a Scottish castle or an Egyptian pyramid. Or create an entire world from their imagination.
• You can keep Minecraft nonviolent. If you don’t want your child fighting off creepers and other monsters, you can set Minecraft to peaceful mode which eliminates all hostile mobs from the game.
• Your child can learn another language. Want to expose your child to another language? Set Minecraft to a foreign language — like German, French, or Japanese!
• Your child can master useful skills. A lot of Minecrafters learn useful skills that can lead to future jobs. How about programming to create mods for Minecraft? Or discovering the intricacies of architecture to build houses? Or engineering to hook up an electric lamp or rig a door to open as you approach it? Engineering, design, and architecture are all realistic skills that can be learned and developed within the game and jump start exciting real-world careers!
• Minecraft is relatively inexpensive. The game itself doesn’t cost much and you can even have your child pay for it through allowance, teaching them the importance of saving money! Due to the simplicity of graphics, you don’t need a super expensive and advanced computer to run it on either. It can even be played on other devices like tablets!
• Boredom doesn’t come easy. There is an infinite number of worlds in Minecraft for your kids to explore. Have you explored all you wanted in one world? Find or create another world to explore. Some servers have their own unique themes (underwater, pets only, etc.) that make the options literally endless.
• Your child can learn to think strategically. In Minecraft, you have to learn how to build things — something as simple as a shelter to some something as complicated as an entire village. Your child has to learn how to gather the materials and manage the inventory to complete the challenges.
• Minecraft is a cooler version of Legos. Do you have fond memories of playing Legos, building elaborate buildings and landscapes, then breaking it all down and starting over? Minecraft is, on its face, a 21st century version of Legos.