“I don’t think enough people are across just how catastrophic an entire generation being raised on Roblox and Fortnite is going to be for the ENTIRE video game industry, not just the AAA end,” wrote Aftermath editor (and Sports! guest) Luke Plunkett on Bluesky recently. “These kids have no interest in playing or paying for anything else. And they’re not ‘growing out of it.’”

I think this sentiment is common, and the angst and handwringing about what Roblox’s influence will mean for games is understandable given there are only two kinds of headlines: 

Roblox just recorded more concurrent players at once than all of Steam

And…

Roblox accused of being a ‘hunting ground’ for child predators as legal firestorm against gaming giant intensifies

Roblox is huge in many senses of the word. It’s played by most children—and also, it’s true, brings them a lot of joy! It happens almost every day in my own house with a nine-year-old and five-year-old and they are, like most kids who use Roblox, fine. But my approval of Roblox in the house doesn’t take away from noting it’s also undeniably dangerous, both in the exposure it gives to potential predators and the way it tries to pickpocket their money with trivial microtransactions. 

You’re also, in many ways, just describing navigating modern internet platforms. Similar concerns exist across many of them. It sucks.

The former gets the headlines, but I gotta say, the latter is what gives headaches. You cannot enter a Roblox “experience” without being aesthetically assaulted by pop-ups demanding that you pay a few dollars for basic parts of playing a video game, like checkpoints. Hey Congress, do something useful and block companies like Roblox from targeting kids like this, okay?

In our house, the policy is that we don’t pay for in-app transactions in Roblox. The kids aren’t even allowed to buy “robux” gift cards with their own money. We just don’t engage. There have been a few exceptions, like buying access to a special room full of exclusive clothes in the popular (and well-designed, importantly) dress up game Dress to Impress. I also bought a cosmetic that let both kids look like a Labubu. Both were harmless. Both were exceptions.

Sorry, we gotta back up for a second and explain the “experience” thing. It’s hilarious.

Roblox is full of games. Games. But Roblox doesn’t call them games to skirt Apple’s App Store guidelines. (What Roblox users define as a “game,” however, is the more important distinction.)

Bizarre, right? 

Over time, Roblox is going to completely change video game design. But it’s also a situation where we can replace “Roblox” with “Minecraft,” if you want. You can swap it for Fortnite, too. The trends match.

Roblox and Fortnite are, to many young people, the equivalent of Steam. It’s not a game, it’s a platform. You log on to find out what the new trending thing is that everyone is playing, much like you’d open up Netflix and scroll through the service’s top 10 lists to find a decent time waster. The kinds of games that appear on these platforms often resemble the games that you and I obsess over, but under the surface, they’re operating in fundamentally different ways. 

Recently, a colleague asked me “Are Roblox games good games?”

The art style is awful. That, sadly, is unlikely to change. We must call for a revolution.

The answer is complicated and comes with bias towards past and current game design history as being forever lessons in the way video games should be designed. The way it will always be.

I suspect that if you logged onto Roblox and poked around, you’d come away discouraged. The overall aesthetic is simple, yes, but also terrible to look at. It’s entirely possible for Roblox games to have their own art style—but most don’t. There’s so much junk to wade through. 

There are, for example, loads of platformers on Roblox (called “obbies,” aka obstacle courses), but the jumping in Roblox is awful. It does not feel good to run, jump, or do much of anything.

Or, as I try to remind myself, is it just different?

There is also, often, just not much to do in a Roblox game. Some of that is owed to the uniquely ephemeral nature of Roblox game design, where you’re playing for (or off) trends and trying to siphon users off the most recent game (or pop culture moment) that’s popped off. But it’s also because with Roblox, it’s social first and gameplay second. Even there, it’s worth poking at what we mean by “gameplay,” because it fronts how we’ve come to define entertainment in games.

What does my daughter want from time in Roblox? What is her definition of play?

When one of my kids logs into Roblox, they are not necessarily looking to play a “fun” video game in the sense that the mechanics are interesting, that the difficulty is tuned to scale as skill progresses, etc. Roblox experiences are social first, because on Roblox, Fortnite, and these other platforms, the audience is there for the social experience that’s in a gaming-like wrapper.

Roblox is a digital playground. The entire reason our family approved Roblox in the first place was because my oldest daughter wanted to keep playing with a neighborhood kid who was a few years older than her. It was the early days of COVID. There were no vaccines, so we weren’t playing inside with relative strangers. She wanted to make a friend. That felt valid.

“When one of my kids logs into Roblox, they are not necessarily looking to play a “fun” video game in the sense that the mechanics are interesting, that the difficulty is tuned to scale as skill progresses, etc. Roblox experiences are social first, because on Roblox, Fortnite, and these other platforms, the audience is there for the social experience that’s in a gaming-like wrapper.”

It’s also true that, generally speaking, my children are not interested in what I would call “traditional” video games. Some, like Astro Bot, have broken through. We play a lot of Mario Kart, too. But despite running a newsletter about the “intersection of parenting and video games,” it would be better to describe my family’s relationship with games with an asterisk*, because it’s really about my children’s relationship with games where game over screens are rare, difficulty isn’t prioritized, and having meaningful social interactions is the primary motivator.

Some of this has to do with the devices young people play on these days. When I was a kid, I popped a video game cartridge into a video game machine. There was a district choice being made about the time I was about to spend. On a phone or tablet, though, your relationship with any one app is going to be thinner and less sticky because you can, on a whim, switch to something else. I was stuck with the game we rented at Blockbuster as a nine-year-old, while my nine-year-old can spend 15 minutes in Roblox, shrug, and shift over to a Minecraft world.

Or work on her digital journal.

Or spend a few minutes editing a video she’s working on.

On and on it goes.

That is, naturally, going to have massive consequences on the future of games. It also means we’re going to get fundamentally different kinds of games because the priorities of these players are going to change. If Roblox continues to dominate children’s time, I suspect interesting design will emerge from it.

I don’t disagree that places like Roblox becoming digital nation states for children is in inherently problematic, but looking at the big picture, I think some of the tension comes from realizing the why a new generation of people are playing video games is shifting, which itself portends a massive shift in fundamental questions of what defines fun.

It’s also true that social-first design is in its infancy. It might end up looking a lot more like traditional games over time, some fusion of both—or, hopefully, radically different and new.

I am, admittedly, an optimist by nature. But I’m also a realist. This is where games are going. 

Patrick Klepek (he/him) is an editor at Remap. In another life, he worked on horror movie sets, but instead, he also runs Crossplay, a newsletter about parenting and video games. You can follow him on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky.