After I spoke to Roblox in 2020, the corporate was within the midst of rebuilding its complete underlying infrastructure. It had been working into points with downtime resulting from inadequate assets to fulfill demand and wanted to construct a contemporary, cloud-native system to deal with its rising person base.
However past the nuts and bolts of that system rebuild, Roblox had some concepts for his or her developer customers as properly. The gaming platform was additionally its developer device set and the way it might put together for a world the place the venerable internet browser was not its fundamental supply mechanism.
Roblox goals to democratize recreation growth, letting its customers construct video games no matter their technical ability. You could possibly be a 10-year-old in Peoria or a group {of professional} recreation builders in Tokyo — no matter your ability 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 preserving it straightforward 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 seeking to transfer past video games into different experiences like digital live shows, commerce and extra artistic approaches.
“We glance in some methods like a really specialised cloud supplier, and our neighborhood is available in and builds all these things on prime of it.” Dan Sturman, CTO, Roblox
We just lately caught up with Roblox CTO Dan Sturman to get an inside have 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 device set
Whereas the phrases “web3” and “metaverse” get tossed round very often lately, particularly when speaking a few social gaming platform with a monetization engine, Roblox desires to keep away from the jargon. As an alternative, 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 components: 3D and social. There’s so many fascinating issues you are able to do when it’s a 3D surroundings. It’s inside a collaborative form of mode with some group of individuals — your mates, your colleagues, individuals with the identical pursuits, no matter that’s. These two coming collectively, I feel, have a ton of energy behind it,” he mentioned.
