Holy crap! Roblox hits 45 million concurrent gamers, beating Steam
There are lots of widespread video games I haven’t personally linked with, together with The Sims, Minecraft, just about something that appears like anime. Roblox is amongst them—oh yeah, Amongst Us too—and I’ve seen a few of the extra problematic points with it. However final week, Roblox recorded 45 million individuals taking part in its varied modes directly. Holy freakin’ crap.
In keeping with Roblox CEO David Baszucki, the game-slash-service surpassed 45 million gamers on August twenty third. As PC Gamer notes, that’s extra concurrently energetic in-game gamers than Steam—the de facto normal platform for PC gaming—by about 5 million. And I don’t simply imply for a single Steam sport. I’m speaking about Steam’s document for energetic gamers throughout each sport, in all places on the planet at any given time. For additional comparability, Fortnite‘s document is 14.3 million concurrent gamers whereas Minecraft averages virtually 32 million each day gamers with a concurrent peak of 4.2 million.
Granted, this isn’t an ideal apples-to-apples comparability. Roblox isn’t a lot a singular sport as it’s a whole platform, the place customers can develop their very own video games with comparatively pleasant instruments and publish them for different Roblox customers to check out. Roblox can also be cross-platform, accessible on PC, Android, iOS, PlayStation, and Xbox, making a direct comparability to Steam even fuzzier. The preferred sport mode in Roblox in the intervening time seems to be “Steal a Brainrot,” which hit 20 million concurrent gamers the identical day in a current occasion.
Did I point out that Roblox is overwhelmingly performed by youngsters? It’s estimated that about half of US youngsters between the ages of 6 to 16 play Roblox, and only one in 10 customers is over the age of 25.
Roblox isn’t with out points. At any given second, a big portion of gamers are “bots” and “idlers” who’re making an attempt to sport the monetization system, which isn’t nice itself. Roblox additionally incentivizes “creators” (once more, principally youngsters) by rewarding them with actual cash for publishing widespread sport modes. However a few of the sport modes in Roblox have precise groups of builders with budgets that may attain in direction of the million USD mark, and Roblox Company paid out over $300 million cumulatively within the second quarter of 2025 alone. The Roblox platform is nearly 20 years outdated, getting an enormous enhance throughout the COVID pandemic, and now earns over $2 billion in whole income yearly for the corporate.
Whereas many mother and father respect Roblox as a method to get their youngsters fascinated about sport improvement and different programming, the corporate has been accused of exploiting youngster labor for revenue. A number of lawsuits have made that allegation formal. Roblox’s monetization is problematic at greatest, requiring you to earn 30,000 “Robux” value of in-game foreign money earlier than you may switch it out of the platform (a determine most gamers by no means attain). Even when it’s transferred out, that foreign money is working for Roblox, not its sport mode builders—you solely earn a 3rd of the worth again right into a checking account in comparison with Robux purchased with “actual” foreign money. It’s the type of heavy-handed break up that makes the standard 30 % platform minimize for Steam, iOS, or sport consoles look positively beneficiant.
Roblox’s overwhelmingly underage participant base can also be a goal for on-line predators, and its low barrier to entry and allegedly lax moderation instruments aren’t serving to. The state of Louisiana is suing Roblox Company for failure to guard its underage customers, after an issue whereby a YouTube “vigilante” who tracked youngster predators on Roblox and reported them to police was banned from the platform.
