We already knew Roblox was the king of the metaverse (better luck next time, Zuck). It’s emerged as the top platform for Gens Z and Alpha to live their digital ‘second lives,’ with thousands of user-generated experiences, plus brand-designed worlds that serve as giant ads. We’ve been seeing lots of chatter about that side of things, thanks to more and more companies getting savvy about using Roblox to reach finicky young customers.
But it’s also important to remember that Roblox has become one of the top gaming platforms for the same demographics–as well as a destination for indie game creators.
Last month, we wrote about how the growing sector of Roblox-focused studios, entities like DoBig and Voldex, have made multimillion-dollar acquisitions of games that proved promising.
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Now, it’s worth zooming in from the industry to spotlight the solo and small-team developers who are using Roblox’s game-creation systems to make their next big idea.
They might not be our usual kind of creators, since we’re largely digital video specialists, but Roblox has made itself a massive presence in online culture, and developers show they can amass dedicated playerbases that follow them from title to title, the same way YouTubers and TikTokers have viewers that follow them from video to video.
One of those developers is Chrollo, who’s made top sports games Basketball: Zero and Tennis: Zero. These games regularly have ~30K and ~5K concurrent players, respectively; to put that in context, that’s around half of the traffic to AAA and major games like Apex Legends (~65K on Steam at press time), Dead by Daylight (~60K), Elden Ring Nightreign (~25K), Red Dead Redemption 2 (~25K), and Rocket League (~18K).
It’s also not far behind the only sports game to make top 20 on Steam’s charts: EA Sports FC 25, which has ~40K players right now.
Chrollo’s playerbase doesn’t stop at number of concurrent viewers, though. He’s snagged ~735K subscribers on YouTube from posting livestreams and videos about his development process and games. Meanwhile, his Discord server has nearly 1.5 million members, all of whom get updates directly from him about Basketball and Tennis, along with their upcoming sibling game, Soccer: Zero.
Ben Sarraille, who co-founded Roblox-focused influencer management/marketing company Makeshift, said Chrollo has found success developing his titles because (aside from the basics, making good games people want to play) he’s used YouTube and Discord to build “a loyal, portable audience […] so he isn’t just relying on Roblox’s discovery system to push him to the top of a category.”
Like other video game-related sites, from purchasing platform Steam to livestreamer Twitch, Roblox has reams of content and simply can’t effectively promote everything that’s good to everyone who might be interested. Some games get left behind; some categories aren’t given enough visibility. So Chrollo has followed the path of many Twitch streamers, and used other platforms to build his audience.
And that audience is keen to follow his projects. The first trailer for Soccer: Zero, dropped 11 days ago and has nearly 600K views on YouTube, with over 8,000 comments from people who dig the Grand Theft Auto-vibe visuals.
“WE USED TO PRAY FOR TIMES LIKE THESE,” one top comment says.
It’s rare to see this kind of hype for games that don’t have AAA marketing budgets behind them–which shows that, once again, fans are gung-ho to support projects from their favorite creators.
It also shows that Roblox (which has 118 million daily active users and just posted quarterly results that sent its stock to a near all-time-high) is shaping up to be the game industry’s equivalent of the YouTube/Hollywood relationship. Burgeoning talents are getting their start there and, like Chrollo, building careers. Roblox developers, like YouTubers, aren’t beholden to anyone else’s timelines. They make what they want, when they want, and fans dig it.
