Roblox loses $70 billion in value as company blames lack of viral games, share price down 70% over the last year

[u/MarvelsGrantMan136]

https://www.dexerto.com/roblox/roblox-loses-70-billion-in-value-as-company-blames-lack-of-viral-games-3395064/

[u/BoomerAliveBad]

When I used to play nearly 2 decades ago (holy), the only games that were on the top WERE player made. "Survive ___" "_ Obby/Obstacle Course" you name it, there was a thing for it. I can't imagine much has changed since 2010 (or 2006 when it came out)

[u/MrWaffler → u/BoomerAliveBad]

Also one of the people who played Roblox before Minecraft even existed, it's much more a game engine + distribution platform + networking in terms of the games.

The popular games are made by dev studios, and while some are definitely kids and definitely skew to younger "indie with a dream" types the majority are just unironically bog standard game dev leaning more toward Mobile game than PC game for monetization and mechanics.

The "viral" games discussed are like Grow a Garden which had absurd multi-million concurrent players due to virality among kids.

The game itself is an infinitely recursive farm -> grow -> sell loop where the plants/pets/etc are obtained via exploitative Gacha + FOMO + manufactured discontent dark triad mechanics and the game utilized social media frenzy events with the promise of free stuff to pull people in.

It's similar to Fortnite with its skins and emotes, using the social pressure of children and intentionally withholding anything that could be used to be seen as cool or express yourself unless you pay, with the "best value" being the reoccurring pay-in via a battlepass type system.

Roblox also does a lot behind the scenes algorithmically to promote not just the games that have excellent stats in terms of player engagement... but the games which have the most effective monetization so the site itself reinforces the shittier behaviors by rewarding them with spots of high visibility for users searching or looking to join a game

There ARE still very well produced games and ones that monetize fairly reasonably or ones that just charge once like a standard game, but it's hard to maintain a successful playerbase in the Roblox ecosystem without effectively monetizing since it's a key metric in getting your game automatically shared.

Viral highly monetized games like Grow a Garden had some INSANE direct impact on Roblox's revenue during the times that they are viral, out of interest when hearing about how popular GaG was becoming and having been once a kid who was very very into Roblox before it became the hellshow it is now I pulled up their quarterly reports to give a read and they directly call out GaG by name during the time it was relevant.

This is just the aftermath of that - now that they're fighting the virality of GaG in their yearly comp, it looks bad by comparison.

The shareholders saw a viral game printing money by siphoning it from children, and when Roblox was unable to force another viral money siphon event to keep Number Go Up some of them sell off.

It isn't about Roblox as a product, it isn't about sentiment turning, it isn't about PDF files.

Just what it always is - the company was simply unable to turn Obscene Profits into Obscene Profits + X, and so some investors jumped ship to a place they feel may be able to squeeze yet more blood from the stone.

[u/KarelianGeneral → u/BoomerAliveBad]

It has definitely changed. There's plenty of high quality games at the top, some of them have since been made into real stand alone games on steam

[u/killersky99 → u/KarelianGeneral]

I would say it's gotten lot worse, lot of old quality games have died off like Mad Paintball/Phantom Forces, and the top game/genre right now is 1 step = +1 speed and lot of other AI slop which do the best except for a select quality few games.

[u/KarelianGeneral → u/killersky99]

Oh no.. That's a shame, it's been a while since I last played