APRIL 4, 2026
Hello, this is my first blog post on this new blog and I swear the rests of the posts aren't going to be this negative but perhaps this just reflects the state of the world currently. If you want something a bit less crazy, rant-ish, and biased, then you should probably skip this one and go check the other posts, as I'll be launching this blog with at least a few other ones X﹏X.
Roblox has been around for basically almost as long as I've been alive and it's been something I've been playing for over 12 years at this point, which is crazy to think about. Originally, I just started playing it since I couldn't convince my parents to buy me Minecraft on the computer and I was therefore introduced to Roblox Build mode, if anybody knows what that is. I was also playing the games offered on the platform at the time, which to today's standards would not hold up at all.
All thoughout this time however, I do not think that Roblox has ever truly listened to their community from the heart and have never faced any real consequences just because their growth trajectory has always been up up and up due to their business model of offloading game development to a majorly unpaid and voluntairy workforce of "creators", which let's be honest are mostly minors barely making a fraction of what the platform takes away.
Sure, one could make the argument that it's not about the money and that Roblox provides the tools, infrastructure, and audience for people to create and share their games, but the fact of the matter is that Roblox is a typical Silicon Valley company that really only cares about short-term growth. No matter what Roblox's marketting department says, the engine is FAR behind any other reasonable alternative due to their allocation of resources being focused on features that, quite frankly, only look good to people who don't know anything about game development.
Believe it or not, Roblox, after 20 years, STILL does not have the option to implement ANY kind of custom shader or real lighting customizability and cannot even support basic features like bilinear filtering on decals, materials, textures, mesh texture ids, etc. It's almost like they don't want people to make games on their platform. They do not even have the option to turn off features forced onto you like ambient occlusion, which is a nice feature for many games but is a nightmare for ones where they simply want that disabled and are forced to tell users to lower their graphics level in order to even play their game in the way it's intended to look.
They'd rather allocate R&D resources to grand-sounding features like, for example, as of recent, makeup on avatars? It's a horrible waste of money and resources that could've either been used to improve the engine or to give more money to the creators who are actually making them money. They in fact, according to page 282 of their 2024 financial report, the latest year could find on their investor relations website.
Maybe all these stupid features really cost that much, but 1.4 Billion for research? Really? We still can't get basic features AFTER all that investment. Not to mention the fact that they're consistently spending more than they have (typical of tech companies but still seems unnecessary).
I might be reading this all wrong as I'm not an industry export nor a financial analyst but it really does feel like a waste of a platform that already effortlessly attracts people to make quite literally the most creative works I've ever seen sometimes. Personally, in my opinion, this is a huge missed opportunity and I really hope that they can turn things around in the future and just hope that the platform doesn't collapse under its own weight before they do.
I think it's safe to say that I will definitely not be making too many blog posts about Roblox in the near future lol now that I let that all out. Thanks for reading this far (I personally wouldn't have done so) and have a safe day!!