Roblox's Concept is Used by Fortnite to Allow Users to Build Their Own Games

More so than anybody else, gamers themselves know what they want. Not all of the 67 million users who visit Roblox each day are playing pet adoption games, such as Adopt Me! Or an anime fighting sim. According to the company's annual report, 4.2 million users created their own games using Roblox's game development tools in 2022 and earned their own in-game money.

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Epic Games Inc.'s Saxs Persson calls these game developers "citizen creators." The hardcore players are those who think to themselves, “I love Fortnite, but I’d love it more if there were trampolines all over the ground.” During the Game Developers Conference, Persson and I sat on the second floor of an elaborate and absolutely mobbed Epic booth and discussed this growing segment of gamers. Game development is Epic's next big push for the company, whose keynote was advertised everywhere that morning.

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With a feature dubbed Fortnite Creative, Epic already allows creators to "remix" the game. Nevertheless, as of March 22, "anyone may functionally make their own games" with Fortnite's Unreal Editor, according to Persson. Children who grew up playing the popular first-person shooter will be able to create games featuring characters like Shrek or enormous robots thanks to Fortnite Creative 2.0.

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Comparable to the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is the change from gamer to "citizen creator." Businesses are rapidly turning into venues for people to build games rather than merely creating and publishing them. Roblox has been doing this since 2006, but the pattern mirrors contemporary gaming industry efforts to increase participation.

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The obvious finding, according to Persson, is that players who engage with more content are happier, stay longer, and spend more money overall. Today that so many games are free-to-play, and firms monetize their audience through time spent on the platform and in-game currency known as "microtransactions." What better strategy to maintain people in your ecosystem than to make it very vast?

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CliCli Interactive, a platform for game creation and distribution, also had its GDC debut. NetEase Inc., a major player in the Chinese gaming and internet industries, generously invested in CliCli Interactive. According to Ryan Kinports, senior content partnership manager, "anyone can utilize our editor to build and publish games on the platform." He stated that the "barriers to entry are reduced" for people to create games as we played a lovely tower-defense game.

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Some current games, including Overwatch and Halo from Activision Blizzard Inc. and 343 Industries, offer modes where the base games transform into sandboxes for bizarre, meme-y experiments. Publishers occasionally profit from player adaptations, such as Valve Corp.'s Dota 2, which gave rise to the wildly popular Dota Auto Chess. This group of "citizen gamers" has the potential to become so organized as to give rise to wealthy, established firms that specialize in creating Roblox games.

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In the future, we'll see a lot more of this. For Roblox, it succeeded. The idea for Bee Swarm Simulator could only have come from a child who had grown up using the platform.