Roblox's user base is distinct from other platforms in both its demographics and its expectations. Understanding the composition and culture of the Roblox community is essential to reaching a wider audience and achieving any measure of success with your experience.
Roblox users value three fundamental strengths of the platform:
Content variety – the collective depth of the millions of unique user-generated experiences attracts and maintains a massive user base for all experiences.
Low friction – users can launch a new experience and start playing in seconds on almost any device. This ease of entry contributes to strong organic traffic and low UA costs.
Social connection – Roblox is in part a social network where users often play with their friends. A strong social component can massively accelerate growth and engagement for many experiences.
Always bear in mind how your experience plays to these strengths when designing for the Roblox audience.
Demographics
Part of what makes Roblox so special is the diversity and inclusivity of its community and its content, whether that's giving a safe space for gender identities, the creation of inclusive content, or the wide variety of developers creating content on the platform.
Roblox's user base now has more users that are at least 13 years old than under the age of 13. Understanding how Roblox works and its network effects will require some focus on younger users, but there's a growing opportunity to create content for their older counterparts.
Roblox is also expanding geographically. While the US, UK and Canada are still the biggest regions in terms of users, Europe, APAC, and the rest of the world are growing more year over year. As more local developers come online from around the world, this growth is only set to continue.
User Behavior on the Platform
A Roblox session typically means playing a handful of different experiences. Roblox is closer in many ways to YouTube than the App Store. It's important to realize that individual experiences fit into a larger, overarching experience. While some users do focus their attention in a session on one experience, it's very common for users to join an experience for a short time, switch to another, and repeat. User behavior in your experience may reflect this in more ways than just session length.
Understanding your audience means understanding the other experiences your users engage with regularly. Since experiences are so interconnected, there tends to be a lot of common conventions and mechanics across the platform. Studying and emulating these conventions helps your users familiarize themselves with your experience quickly and may reduce the risk of them bouncing off in frustration. For more about designing for behavior on the platform, see Designing for Roblox.
Social Factors
Roblox allows users to add Friends, join them in their experience, and invite them to yours. Chat is built directly into every experience, so news spreads fast from user to user. In addition to socializing in various user made Groups on-platform, users are often active on platforms like Discord and X (Twitter).
Engaging experiences will generate a lot of organic traffic through word of mouth. Users find an experience they like, invite their friends, and then those friends invite more friends. YouTube can also attract a lot of attention, as users want to try out whatever their favorite YouTuber is playing. For more on generating traffic and building a community, see Promoting on Roblox.
Roblox Culture
Roblox culture represents the dominant gaming, social, and consumer culture of the future. It has its own vocabulary, memes, celebrities, and even myths. Understanding the culture is essential to understanding your users.
The sharing of community-generated content is the foundation of Roblox culture. Users see developers as celebrity peers. Iteration happens fast, leveraging real time user feedback. Because of the prominent role of organic, word-of-mouth traffic for success on Roblox, communicating with users is critical.
Glossary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Admin | A Roblox employee. Admin status is easy to verify by checking for the Admin badge on a user's profile. |
| Badge | Icons that show up on your Roblox profile, representing your achievements as a Roblox developer or user. |
| Builder | A developer whose skills are a combination of environment art and level design. |
| Builderman | The username of Roblox founder and CEO David Baszucki. |
| Developer Forum | A community forum where developers can make posts, report bugs, request features, and read announcements from Roblox staff members. Typically shortened to DevForum. |
| Developer Relations | The organization within Roblox that interfaces directly with developers, providing announcements, support, and special programs and events. Typically shortened to DevRel. |
| DevEx | Shorthand for the Developer Exchange Program, which allows qualified developers to withdraw Robux (Roblox's currency) from their accounts according to the current Robux exchange rate. |
| Experience | A generic term for anything that can be created on Roblox, such as games, showcases, and concerts. |
| Game Pass | A premium item sold in an experience that provides a permanent boost to gameplay. |
| Group | A feature that allows developers to share assets, access, and profits. |
| Marketplace | Allows approved developers to sell creations such as plugins and avatar items. |
| Moderation | All content in a Roblox experience goes through a moderation process to ensure that it's appropriate according to Trust and Safety standards. Although this process occurs anytime content is uploaded prior to being published, content may also be moderated after publication. |
| Obby | Shorthand for "obstacle course", a popular genre on Roblox that requires users to climb, jump and navigate obstacles to reach the end of the course. |
| Paid Access | While most experiences on Roblox are free, some developers choose to charge a fee for access. Paid access can be especially useful for developers who want to test their experience with a smaller audience prior to a full, free release. |
| Place | Roblox experiences consist of one or more places, similar to how games comprise scenes in Unity or maps in the Unreal Engine. |
| Private Server | Some Roblox experiences offer users the ability to create private servers in which only they and their invited friends can play. Developers may offer private servers for free, or charge users a subscription fee to create them. |
| Showcase | An experience that emphasizes visuals and environment design, with no gameplay. |
| Simulator | A genre where users perform simple, repetitive actions in order to make progress. The goal often involves clicking an item in the world until it reaches its maximum level, then exchanging that item for an upgraded version with higher maximum potential. |
| Tycoon | A genre where users collect from "droppers" that produce currency over time, in order to pay to construct something. As each part is constructed, new parts and droppers unlock for purchase. This cycle of collecting, building, and waiting to collect continues until there are no more additions left to build. |