(Bloomberg) — In the fall of 2018, Mary Rukavina was enjoying her first day of college at the University of Minnesota, where she had enrolled to study biomedical engineering, when she received an intriguing call. RedManta, a video game studio founded that year, offered to pay Rukavina $5,000 a month to make games on Roblox, an online platform that allows people to program their own games and play games created by others.
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“My second day of college, I moved out,” Rukavina says. “My parents were like, ‘You’re crazy.’”
Rukavina had discovered Roblox as a 13-year-old messing around on her mom’s laptop. Every day, she sunk at least three hours into the rapidly expanding virtual world, fascinated by games about raising animals like turtles or dragons. Over time, she began to think up her own games, too, using the company’s proprietary platform, Roblox Studios.
Rukavina never dreamed it could be a career. But it has been for four years and now she’s the creative director of Sonar Studios LLC, an independent studio that makes games for Roblox. In fact, more than a dozen such studios have cropped up to tap into what was once the domain of middle and high-school students.
Founded in 2004 by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel and launched two years later, Roblox was envisioned as a platform where content was created by kids, for kids, using the simple programming language Lua. Parents and educators loved the platform because it was seen as helping kids learn to code. Roblox can be played virtually anywhere, from an Xbox console to a phone, laptop, or PC, and boasted 45.5 million daily active users at the end of last year. The company went public in a direct listing last year.
Roblox’s trajectory generated interest from professional game developers, many of whom are now fighting to beat out children for success on the highly competitive platform. At the same time, non-gaming companies that had peripheral experience in tech or entertainment, began casting a glance at Roblox and wondering how they too could incorporate their content into the platform. The rise of studio-developed games also coincides with an aging of Roblox’s user base, which has seen the portion of children under 13 slip to 48% of its daily active users in the fourth quarter of last year compared with 57% in early 2019.While Roblox was a pandemic darling, seeing a surge in usage during the lockdown months, it has lost favor with investors in recent months as school and sports resume, competing for kids’ attention. Its shares have tumbled 64% this year. More professionally developed games could help appeal to the platform’s older users and present a very different value proposition in the years to come.
“At certain points in our growth, it probably didn’t make sense to have a 50-person studio, but today it does,” Roblox said in a statement.
One of the first games on Roblox to achieve standout success was Adopt Me!, made by two players in 2017, in which people collect and raise pets. Around that time, “there were a lot of games that started to do really well,” Rukavina said. “The community began stepping away from the ‘amateur’ and you started to see companies develop as LLCs to make games on Roblox.” Explosively popular, Adopt Me! has been played 28 billion times and boasts an average of more than 250,000 active players …….
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/roblox-lures-pro-game-developers-130002009.html