Why Roblox

The most common reaction we get from investors hearing "Roblox" for the first time: "Isn't that a kids' game?" It's a fair question. It's also the wrong framing — and the gap between perception and reality is exactly where the opportunity lives.

What Roblox Actually Is

Roblox is not a game. It's a platform — a global engine for building, distributing, and monetizing interactive experiences. Think of it less like a game studio's product and more like an app store with a built-in social network, physics engine, server infrastructure, and payment processing.

Developers build experiences on top of Roblox's engine and publish them directly to an audience that's already there. No marketing spend to acquire users. No server costs to scale. No app store review politics. The platform handles all of it.

The Numbers

This isn't a niche platform. The scale is real:

80M+ daily active users — not monthly, daily
Billions paid to developers — Roblox has paid out over $4 billion to its developer community
Fastest-growing demographic is 17-24 — the "kids' game" narrative is years out of date
Global reach — available on every major platform: PC, mobile, console, VR
4B+ hours of engagement per month — more time spent than most social media platforms

The platform has quietly become one of the largest entertainment ecosystems in the world. The people dismissing it are making the same mistake people made about YouTube in 2008 or mobile gaming in 2011.

Why This Is Better Than Going Standalone

Building a traditional standalone game means solving a long list of expensive problems before you earn a dollar: engine licensing, server infrastructure, payment processing, platform certification, user acquisition, anti-cheat, moderation, social features, cross-platform support. Each one costs money, time, and headcount.

Roblox eliminates most of that list:

Distribution — 80M+ users are already on the platform. Your game is discoverable from day one.
Infrastructure — Servers, networking, scaling — all handled. You don't pay for capacity you don't use.
Payments — Monetization, virtual currency, transactions — built in. No Stripe integration, no payment fraud to manage.
Social & Viral — Friends lists, party systems, in-platform sharing. Players bring other players.
Cross-platform — One codebase runs on PC, mobile, Xbox, Quest. No porting costs.
Moderation & Safety — Platform-level content moderation, chat filtering, parental controls. You build the game, not the trust & safety infrastructure.

The result: radically lower capital requirements to get a game to market. What would cost $2-5M as a standalone title can be built and launched on Roblox for a fraction of that.

Capital Efficiency vs. Other Platforms

Compare the economics of shipping a game on different platforms:

Steam (PC) — Build the game, build the infrastructure, spend $500K-2M on marketing just to get noticed in a catalog of 70,000+ titles. Revenue share: 70/30 (you/Valve). Hope for a viral moment.
Mobile (App Store / Google Play) — Same build costs, plus you're competing with free-to-play giants spending $10M+/month on user acquisition. Revenue share: 70/30. CPI (cost per install) has made organic growth nearly impossible.
Roblox — Build the game. The audience is already there. Revenue share is lower per-transaction, but your costs are dramatically lower too. No UA spend, no server costs, no infrastructure team. Net margins are higher.

For a lean studio optimizing for capital efficiency, the math isn't close. Roblox lets you focus resources on the only thing that actually matters: making a good game.

Developer Economics

Roblox pays developers through a transparent revenue-sharing model. Developers earn Robux (the platform currency) from in-game purchases and can convert to USD through the Developer Exchange program. The effective revenue share after platform fees lands around 25-30% of gross — lower than Steam's 70%, but the comparison is misleading.

On Steam, that 70% comes after you've spent hundreds of thousands on development infrastructure, server hosting, QA, marketing, and user acquisition. On Roblox, the platform absorbs those costs. When you factor in total cost of revenue — not just the platform's cut but everything you'd spend to reach the same audience elsewhere — Roblox's effective economics are competitive or superior for studios at our scale.

The model also rewards consistency. A portfolio of games on Roblox creates compounding returns: each title drives traffic to others, the framework makes new titles cheaper to build, and the revenue floor rises with every launch.

The "It's for Kids" Problem

Yes, Roblox started as a platform popular with younger audiences. So did YouTube. So did TikTok. So did the entire internet.

The fastest-growing age demographic on Roblox is 17-24. The platform is actively investing in features, content policies, and developer tools aimed at older audiences. Brands like Nike, Gucci, NFL, and Warner Bros. are building experiences on the platform — not because they're targeting children, but because they see where the audience is heading.

Dismissing Roblox as "for kids" in 2026 is like dismissing mobile gaming in 2012 because the biggest titles were Angry Birds and Candy Crush. The platform is maturing. The audience is maturing. The developers building serious experiences now are the ones who'll own the market when the perception catches up to reality.

The gap between what Roblox is and what people think it is — that's not a risk. That's the opportunity.

Why AlphaRabbit Chose Roblox

We're a solo-founded, AI-native studio optimizing for capital efficiency, speed to market, and long-term portfolio value. Roblox is the only platform where that model works at our scale.

Zero infrastructure costs
Zero user acquisition costs
Built-in audience of 80M+ DAU
One codebase, every platform
Revenue from day one — no 2-year dev cycle before first dollar

We didn't choose Roblox despite the skepticism. We chose it because of what it actually is — the most capital-efficient platform for building a game studio from scratch.