During the 2017 Roblox Developers Conference, officials said that creators on the game platform, of which there were about 1.7 million as of 2017, collectively earned at least $30 million in 2017. In September 2025, the government of the Mexican state of Nuevo León, through its civil police and cyber police unit, issued a public warning to parents stating that Roblox was not a safe platform for children for similar reasons. Later that year in August, Indonesia requested that Roblox strengthen its chat filters to remove harmful content and enhance child safety, warning that failure to comply could result in a ban. Russia banned the platform for promoting «extremist materials» and content related to the LGBTQ community.
After Knowledge Revolution was acquired by MSC Software, the two left the company and Baszucki began investing in earlier social media sites like Friendster. Before the creation of the platform, both Baszucki and Cassel worked for Knowledge Revolution, a company that specialized in creating educational and physics simulation software. Age verification and estimations are handled via Persona, a third-party provider of age verification software. Users can only communicate with each other after they perform an age check, which is done through either ID verification or having a video of themselves analyzed by age estimation software. Since November 2021, the programming language has been open sourced under the MIT License. Roblox does offer hacking victims a «rollback» for their items, although this is only offered once per account.
Players can also join ‘communities’ (formerly known as Groups), where users can send messages in an internet forum-like environment. Roblox allows players to communicate with each other in a variety of ways, such as through in-game chat and direct messaging. Games that are restricted to players over the age of 17 require ID verification to access. The engine and all games made on Roblox predominantly uses Luau, a dialect of the Lua 5.1 programming language.
After the original supply of that item runs out, players can resell them for a higher price. Since 2019, select users have gained the ability to publish avatar accessories, animations, bundles and more. The platform is made to appeal to a family-friendly audience, and has been described as a massively multiplayer online game (MMO). While Roblox started off small—both in playerbase and as a company—it began to grow rapidly in the second half of the 2010s.
These early versions of Roblox were extremely basic, with player avatars having not been animated yet and various features only being present in their most simplified form. While the age estimation features can result in inaccurate age group assignment, the user can provide their ID to correct their age manually. For example, a user who is twelve years old can only communicate with users aged 9 to 15. Communication is further restricted to only allow users in similar age groups to communicate with each other. If one of the users is over the age of 18 while the other user is between 13 and 17, then both parties must prove that they know each other in real life. An additional ‘tier’ of this system, known as «Trusted Connections», allows users to send unfiltered chat messages and personal information to each other.
He also discussed the Ready Player One and Ready Player Two books as being inspirations for the company’s ideas. Roblox’s business model throughout this time has continued to be based around creating a metaverse, and attempting to increase the platform’s appeal. In January 2022, LuoBu was shut down, with Roblox stating that they were going to redevelop the release, and that LuoBu was only ever intended to be a test version. The growth of Roblox, both as a platform and as a company, continued into 2021 and the following years.
The most popular game on the platform around this time was the role-playing game Adopt Me! Additionally, the average number of daily active players in 2020 had increased by 85% compared to 2019. By December 2016, the platform had about 30 million monthly active users, a number that had increased to 90 million by April 2019. By January 2014, the platform’s monthly player count had increased 10 to 12 million monthly players, although a majority of those players did not have registered accounts and instead played as «guests». By August 2011, Roblox had about 6.8 million active users monthly, becoming the second-most popular kids entertainment site.
Some items on Roblox have a «limited» status, with only a few being available and the price of the item based on supply and demand rather than a fixed price. It has also been criticized for its alleged exploitative practices toward children and microtransactions. Although critic reviews for Roblox have been positive, it has faced heavy criticism for its content moderation, due to the large amount of sexual or politically extremist material on the platform. The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports.
In April 2021, Hasbro released Roblox-themed Nerf blasters and a Roblox-themed version of Monopoly. The sets included a code that was used to redeem virtual items, as well as blind boxes that contained random minifigures. At the same time, a port of Roblox to the PlayStation 4 were announced, and later released on October 10. In 2023, Roblox released public beta versions of the platform for Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro on July 27, with full versions released in September. Efforts were also made towards making Roblox more accessible, with automatic machine translation being added to in-game chat in 2020, initially supporting 9 languages. The company also expressed interest in porting Roblox to other virtual reality devices in the future.
This version initially only released with selection of 15 games chosen by Roblox staff, due to concerns regarding Entertainment Software Rating Board standards. One of the most successful creators on the platform at the time was Luke Weber, known on Roblox as «Stickmasterluke», who had a following of over ten million plays across all of his games combined. By this point in the platform’s history, several games had been played million of times. Games that were made by the community early in the platform’s history included paintball games, haunted houses and model trains that players could ride. It was determined early on in development that the two would design Roblox to rely entirely on user-generated content, only providing the tools necessary for people to develop games, as well as the server hosting later in development. Games on Roblox greatly range in genre, and the content of these games effects its age rating.
It has also been accused by Hindenburg Research of artificially inflating its monthly active player count. In April 2022, Truth in Advertising filed a complaint against Roblox with the Federal Trade Commission for false advertising, mainly failing to disclose when advertising is present, such as with advergames and brand ambassadors. Roblox has been criticized several times due to the content that is present on the platform, specifically the presence of sexual or politically extremist-related material.
In 2020, Roblox reported that roughly 345,000 game developers on the platform earned money through the program. Through the Roblox «Developer Exchange» program, users are able to exchange their earned Robux for real-world money, as long as they have at least 30,000 Robux. Additionally, users with an active Roblox Premium subscription spinnaus login are able to trade limiteds amongst each other.