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Kids have moved on to Roblox, Minecraft is the old thing now. Roblox has far better monetized its game than Minecraft too (some might say Roblox has gone too f

Kids have moved on to Roblox, Minecraft is the old thing now. Roblox has far better monetized its game than Minecraft too (some might say Roblox has gone too far monetizing it). Minecraft has gone the way of every Microsoft acquisition--stagnated and bled talent while competitors continued to innovate.

zwily 4y ago
The kids I see are done with Roblox and actually gone back to Minecraft.
- fsloth 4y ago
  This. Minecraft seems to have much more stickiness. Minecraft really seems to be the Lego of current gen kids - they keep returning to it. Freeform creative building is the key here, I think.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    Probably because Minecrafts model is still mostly as "free" as it was 12 years ago; you pay the one-time upfront fee and after that Mojang/Microsoft gets out of your way and just lets you play and permits you to both let your creativity run loose and see what your friends can come up with. Roblox by contrary runs on what amounts to a "financialize every individual interaction" model. That just becomes tiring for children after a while. Kids are encouraged to spend as much money as possible on lots of bite-sized microgames, all existing on the "Roblox" platform, whilst being encouraged to use Roblox' own (proprietary black box, not reusable outside of Roblox btw) microgame creator to create more games, which they will alledgedly get paid for by the other kids buying those games and it can "be paid out in real money". That sounds got on paper, but in practice it's basically company scrip[0], since Roblox already takes a cut out of every internal currency purchase of a microgame, but once you try to convert it to real cash, you need to have an absurd amount of profit from your microgames first and they take *another cut* when you try to pay out. It's a model basically designed to keep every dollar converted to robux as robux. At some point either mommy catches on that their kid is spending an awful lot of money on Robux/the kid gets frustrated that they're not getting their actual payouts because they want to say, buy a real world thing that you can't get with Robux and gets hit with the "earn 1k$ worth in Robux or we don't pay out" wall. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

zwily 4y ago

The kids I see are done with Roblox and actually gone back to Minecraft.

fsloth 4y ago
This. Minecraft seems to have much more stickiness. Minecraft really seems to be the Lego of current gen kids - they keep returning to it. Freeform creative building is the key here, I think.
- noirscape 4y ago
  Probably because Minecrafts model is still mostly as "free" as it was 12 years ago; you pay the one-time upfront fee and after that Mojang/Microsoft gets out of your way and just lets you play and permits you to both let your creativity run loose and see what your friends can come up with. Roblox by contrary runs on what amounts to a "financialize every individual interaction" model. That just becomes tiring for children after a while. Kids are encouraged to spend as much money as possible on lots of bite-sized microgames, all existing on the "Roblox" platform, whilst being encouraged to use Roblox' own (proprietary black box, not reusable outside of Roblox btw) microgame creator to create more games, which they will alledgedly get paid for by the other kids buying those games and it can "be paid out in real money". That sounds got on paper, but in practice it's basically company scrip[0], since Roblox already takes a cut out of every internal currency purchase of a microgame, but once you try to convert it to real cash, you need to have an absurd amount of profit from your microgames first and they take *another cut* when you try to pay out. It's a model basically designed to keep every dollar converted to robux as robux. At some point either mommy catches on that their kid is spending an awful lot of money on Robux/the kid gets frustrated that they're not getting their actual payouts because they want to say, buy a real world thing that you can't get with Robux and gets hit with the "earn 1k$ worth in Robux or we don't pay out" wall. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip