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these days, Roblox BedWars averages 36K on weekends:

https://romonitorstats.com/experience/6872265039/

however, Hypixel seems to have overtaken it! last Saturday, it peaked at 39,000 concurrent players. i prefer the original gamemode anyway

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Grow a Garden, a game on Roblox reached 21.6 million concurrent players.

That number is just insane.

For comparison - top Steam concurrent game is 3.2 million in PUBG.

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I think it’s because of Kings Kids on their iPad playing this games vs being on PC playing a game on Miniclips or Ebaumsworld…
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Some of it has to do with roblox being free.

(I don't have a minecraft account) but Trust me when I say this but within developing countries especially. You can find 3-4 people out of 1 who plays on hypixel but can't because they can't pay for the game usually when we are really young which is also roblox's most major userbase.

I can imagine Hypixel being atleast 2x and a rough estimate of 5x more the size if they support Cracked Minecraft accounts for example.

Btw, this is also the reason why aternos is so popular within some communities because a free server which can have cracked option. Sign me up starts happening in bulk.

Me and my friends had an aternos server. It was truly something out of this world meeting them tomorrow after having 10 people together in a minecraft server.

I was the person though who spent way too much time and had less stacked gear lol in the end because some of my friends were like bandits haha, who stole my stuff from caves and in general, I have spent much of my time in minecraft during the starting (nothing -> diamond) then afterwards (diamond -> end/netherite)

Anyways my point is that we all could've definitely been on hypixel and something similar if Hypixel supported crack client. For example 11 of us or more played the game one time or another (not sure) within our single class of 50 people and only one of the guys had an minecraft account.

One of my friends literally got into some cash-app type stuff with a shady tetris to earn money app which showed ads to earn 25$ just so that he can buy minecraft to play on hypixel and the game fundamentally required something impossible and my friend felt so depressed at the time and he's one of the smartest people I know. A) people are easy to scam, B) he and many of us had so much desperation to play on hypixel in general.

You can get an alt (and I used to) for free or very cheap which would work everywhere unless on hypixel which had stricter rules and the difference between account prices could be 10x back or more that at that point its just better to make a minecraft account just for hypixel or similar. (I remember seeing accounts for 3$ or something that would work everywhere except hypixel)

I asked him if I should write a blog post to name and fame the company but he denied and he was truly sad that day :(

All of this combined can show how Roblox truly hits a jackpot with it being a free game. Most people might not pay but because of the perceived fame of the game and the number of people playing it. The people who pay would be more likely to pay and I see some people/kids who really look for ways to make robux online.

So with all of this, its easy to see how these (usually teen developers like us) can make something which can land 100k$ as unachievable that sounds.

one of my friends racked in quite a lot of money making 3d sprites in blender for these roblox people and in exchange used to have them buy blender extensions. Those extensions were truly a lot of money if he had to go buy them.

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I agree with this. For the last ~4 years I have been working to turn my Minecraft server into a free browser game on a custom engine.

Though in Roblox's case, there's two additional factors helping the success of games on its platform besides being free to play

- Roblox has become the de-facto portal from which lots of people play games by default, especially on mobile devices like tablets where discovery for other games (that aren't P2W and can spam ads) is very poor

- Multiplayer games are exceptionally easy to develop on Roblox. (With a standalone game you have to grind on an engine for years like what I'm doing. I'm developing thousands of LOC per weekend with a multi-agent setup and there is just so much necessary complexity that launching an alpha build will take months.)

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I would also add it's easier to download and set up than Minecraft. I still have nightmares about setting up various Microsoft and Xbox accounts and trying to help my kid play with her friends. IMO that Roblox doesn't have this friction is huge
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In this day and age Prism launcher [0] will handle Minecraft and any modpacks you want to use. The only caveat is pointing it at your download folder so it can open the tabs for any mods that need a manual download and it will import them, but that's hardly difficult.

Minecraft (Mojang/Microsoft) have also made it clear that with them moving from OpenGL to Vulcan they're maintaining the ability for Minecraft to run on Mac as well as Windows/Linux, which is fantastic.

My bet is that the real different lies in mobile devices - iPads/tablets and phones are something that kids have more access to than laptops or desktops, and lots of people don't bother with parental controls.

[0] - https://prismlauncher.org/

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Sure, but I still need a Microsoft account of some sort to play Minecraft? And parental controls still exists inside Microsoft or Xbox (is that the same account??). I spent a couple days just trying to make it possible for my daughter and her friends to be connected on Minecraft. And then you need to figure out what a launcher is, that Prism even exists. And you get a completely different experience on iPad where Prism doesn't exist. It's stil a hassle compared to Downloading free Roblox and start playing and having the same experience across devices.
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My 9 yo has alt accounts I didn't setup, that's how easy Roblox is. I have MC/Microsoft account info for like 10 people, mostly family/friends kids, in my password manager because their parents were fine with them playing, but didn't want to deal with account management. Every sleep over starts with me logging everyone in on the various available devices, with their parents on standby to help with the multi-factor shitstorm that ensues.

Roblox is getting pretty bad though with age verification, and they will NOT help recover a lost/hacked account no matter how much money was spent on it. 5 year account, likely thousands of dollars in robux spent on it, kid clicked a bad link and it's gone. Roblox just responds they can't help, even though the original email address was verified, and used 2 factor auth through its history. They used to be helpful, they don't care anymore.

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That whole schpiel is why Minecraft isn't free. That people are willing to go through that. There's a lot of free games.
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