After I spoke to Roblox in 2020, the corporate was within the midst of rebuilding its total underlying infrastructure. It had been working into points with downtime as a consequence of inadequate assets to fulfill demand and wanted to construct a contemporary, cloud-native system to deal with its rising consumer base.
However past the nuts and bolts of that system rebuild, Roblox had some concepts for his or her developer customers as nicely. The gaming platform was additionally taking a look at its developer software set and the way it might put together for a world the place the venerable internet browser was not its most important supply mechanism.
Roblox goals to democratize recreation growth, letting its customers construct video games no matter their technical talent. You may be a 10-year-old in Peoria or a staff {of professional} recreation builders in Tokyo — no matter your talent degree or motivation, the concept is to offer a platform the place individuals can construct video games.
However the firm believes that the Roblox platform might have extra makes use of and is constructing a brand new method to accommodate the required flexibility whereas conserving it simple to make use of. By hiding the underlying complexity from much less skilled builders and constructing a versatile new system for extra technical customers, Roblox is trying to transfer past video games into different experiences like digital live shows, commerce and extra inventive approaches.
“We glance in some methods like a really specialised cloud supplier, and our group is available in and builds all these things on high of it.” Dan Sturman, CTO, Roblox
We lately caught up with Roblox CTO Dan Sturman to get an inside take a look at how this undertaking is coming collectively, the challenges of constructing a tech stack for the plenty and the corporate’s foray into digital forex.
Rethinking the software set
Whereas the phrases “web3” and “metaverse” get tossed round very often nowadays, particularly when speaking a couple of social gaming platform with a monetization engine, Roblox desires to keep away from the jargon. As a substitute, the corporate desires to construct a versatile platform that strikes content material seamlessly throughout system sorts, whether or not it’s telephones, headsets or desktop computer systems.
“Metaverse is a time period that’s been blown up and overused and it’s non-specific. However I have a tendency to return to those two core parts: 3D and social. There’s so many attention-grabbing issues you are able to do when it’s a 3D surroundings. It’s inside a collaborative kind of mode with some group of individuals — your pals, your colleagues, individuals with the identical pursuits, no matter that’s. These two coming collectively, I believe, have a ton of energy behind it,” he mentioned.
