When I spoke to Roblox in 2020, the company was rebuilding its entire underlying infrastructure. It had issues with downtime due to insufficient resources to meet demand and had to build a modern, cloud-native system to handle its growing user base.
But besides the nuts and bolts of rebuilding the system, Roblox also had some ideas for their developer users. The gaming platform also looked at its developer toolset and how it could prepare for a world where the venerable web browser was no longer the primary delivery mechanism.
Roblox aims to democratize game development so that users can build games regardless of their technical skills. You could be a 10-year-old in Peoria or a team of professional game developers in Tokyo – whatever your skill level or motivation, the idea is to provide a platform where people can build games.
But the company believes that the Roblox platform could have more uses and is building a new approach to accommodate the required flexibility and keep it easy to use. By hiding the underlying complexity from less experienced developers and building a flexible new system for more technical users, Roblox aims to move beyond games to other experiences such as virtual concerts, commerce and more creative approaches.
“We look like a very specialized cloud provider in some ways, and our community comes in and builds all of these things on top of it.” Dan Sturman, CTO, Roblox
We recently caught up with Roblox CTO Dan Sturman for an inside look at how this project is coming together, the challenges of building a tech stack for the masses, and the company’s quest for virtual currency.
Rethinking the toolset
While the terms “web3” and “metaverse” are used quite frequently these days, especially when referring to a social gaming platform with a monetization engine, Roblox wants to avoid the jargon. Instead, the company wants to build a flexible platform that moves content seamlessly across different device types, be it phones, headsets, or desktop computers.
“Metaverse is a term that has been blown up and overused and it is non-specific. But I tend to go back to these two core elements: 3D and social. There are so many interesting things you can do in a 3D environment. It’s kind of collaborative mode with a group of people – your friends, your co-workers, people with similar interests, whatever that is. Those two coming together, I think, have a lot of power behind them,” he said.