Developers, developers, developers.
What makes a developer, and not just a hobbyist? In the context of Roblox; if I open studio once by accident am I developer? I’d argue not, but Roblox might disagree with me on that.
So how about if I publish a game, or an “experience” as they’re now called to the platform? Well now it gets tricky, every player on Roblox has a “Starting place” assigned to them when they first create an account. RTrack’s data as of August 2021 says there are 2,822,215,359 accounts on the Roblox platform, who have created 7,275,348,176 games. Are there 2.8 billion Roblox developers? Probably not.
What does Roblox say?
Surely Roblox themselves have a better idea of the number of developers on the platform though, right? Let’s see.
As of last year in July, Roblox put it’s developer numbers at 345,000 developers who are “monetizing their games”. Perhaps this means the number of people who have created game passes or developer products on the platform?
Alright then, so this is the number, 345,000 developers. At least Roblox has a figure for it. But wait what’s this in their S-1 filing?
Seven million developers? Doesn’t that seem a little higher than 345,000? Well that’s because it is, it’s about 20x higher in fact.
So we’ve established that Roblox has no idea how many developers they have, there’s no solid definition for what a developer is, and that these numbers are just overall misleading. Now let’s try and fix that.
What does RTrack’s data say?
Let’s have a look at this from the perspective of someone with one goal: to get an accurate and meaningful understanding of how many people are actually out there creating Roblox experiences.
To do this, I’m looking to RTrack’s almost 8 Billion datapoints on Roblox to get the numbers we’re all looking for. Let’s start with categorising developers by the number of visits their games have had.
I’ve categorised the data into four columns: the total number of games with more than 100,000 plays on Roblox (36,520), the total when factoring in the player who owns the group as well as the player who owns a game (24,810), and the data split between groups and games.
This data shows that 24,810 Roblox accounts have created a game, either through a group or through their own account that has reached more than 100,000 players in Roblox’s lifetime.
But what if we move the bar a little lower? Perhaps 1,000 plays should determine that a player is now a developer. Here’s that data.
With the same four columns, we can see that even at this level of 1,000 players as a baseline there are still only 157,000 unique developers on the Roblox platform. I think this is the most representative figure of the total number factoring in smaller and larger developers, and independent of creating purchasable game items.
Interested in RTrack’s data?
You can check out RTrack’s membership plans for game-by-game data, and RTrack also provides these kinds of data insights to enterprise clients looking for a better understanding of the Roblox platform. You can get in touch at [email protected].
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