Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Above: ROBLOX FPS Arsenal from the ROLVe Community

Replying to ROBLOX's massive IPO last week, one reader was skeptical it could grow beyond its main market of younger teens, saying, "Older teens and adults expect more from games than what can be built with Roblox Studio" — and to that, Nodoka Hanamura posted this reply to that reply:

As someone who has been on the platform for years (dating back to 2008!), to say that Roblox is limited in capability is foolish – I've seen faithful remakes (and original takes) on more 'mature' classics like Battlefield/COD and Payday, as well as original concepts like Arsenal, and they all appeal to me in gameplay and how fun they are. While I usually ignore the younger userbase for the most part (outside of shitposting in PF chat or just casual discussion every now and again when it's civil and/or mature), these games appeal to me for two reasons:

1. As someone who's switched to Linux, I don't have much choices for games that run well like Phantom Forces, especially due to Anti-Cheat. Roblox runs in VMWare Player flawlessly in most games, meaning I can enjoy them easily without having to hassle with such things.

2. Getting into a match in Phantom Forces or Arsenal doesn't take any more than 1-2 minutes from engine startup, taking much less longer than other games like Battlefield and Call of Duty.

While they are graphically inferior to those and there are other issues like you mentioned, I personally would rather play Phantom Forces due to the amount of content its' developers (Stylis) add on a regular basis, the large userbase (It recently reached 1 Billion plays), among many others. And Stylis [creator of Phantom] aren't the only ones who develop for Roblox in this fashion – RolVe, a obvious nod to Valve Corporation, does the same with Arsenal and their other games, some of which are inspired by Valve's releases.

Adding to what Nodoka says, I'm personally impressed at just how popular some of these ROBLOX games really are. As I write this, ROBLOX's user-made game Arsenal has over 42,000 concurrent players — making it popular enough to place in the top 15 of games played on Steam:

For instance, Arsenal has more concurrent players on Steam than Dead by Daylight (just under 39,000 concurrent players), and for that matter, is much more popular than VRChat on Steam (a mere 15,600 players).

Nodoka is also right that quick-loading games with low-poly graphics have quite a lot of appeal, even with older gamers — it's why most hit mobile games are low-poly and/or non-3D. My impression is ROBLOX is currently adding features which add more graphics and gameplay pizazz to retain users as they get older and start expecting more. But as Nodoka suggests it would be a mistake to underestimate what's already possible.