The last few years have seen tremendous growth for Roblox. In some ways, we’ve witnessed the culmination of a long process of cultivation of a culture of innovation and play, an endearing and straightforward culture, a childishly honest culture, that produces games with a unique draw. One that feels direct and pure. I believe that’s why Roblox has been and continues to be the place where the players want to be.

This has been a collaborative triumph. The brilliant engineers at Roblox created a robust and resilient and cutting edge platform that, importantly, doesn’t obfuscate the process of game creation, and promotes the evolution of players into developers. The players themselves hold the games and their designers accountable, on a human level – they demand real novelty, as opposed to the mere appearance of novelty. Together, we’ve built something that transcends any individual game, or game engine. It’s a shared culture, an ethos, one that is uniquely compelling and seductive. We’ve done this by making Roblox an innate part of our own identities. Our games are us, we are our avatars and our games. The substance of this platform is and always has been our shared reverence for the nostalgic, innocent, goofy and irreverently playful space we’ve all lived, cherish and maintain. Our culture is fun for the sake of fun.

We achieved this while the rest of the industry was going through a crisis, where the limits of corporatism, and the scientification of play were being met. We resisted the ends of our peers, for example the social gaming space, which was plundered by sophisticated data scientists to its end by insatiable and short sighted greed. Through our unique and seemingly naive union of engineers and players, we’ve avoided the spirits and pitfalls that plague the triple A gaming space and the mobile space. Our games may appear simple, or sloppy, but they are alive and infused with a magnetic living soul. Together, we’ve sustained this culture that celebrates direct play and designer intuition, and through that, have fostered extreme loyalty.

But we’re at a crossroads. With AI, it’s easier than ever to make a game. This in itself can is an extreme blessing to independent designers – it embodies the promise of technological liberation. But between the resulting surge of games, and the ever increasing emphasis on sophisticated recommendation algorithms, a deep obfuscation has taken hold. Transparency is deemed suboptimal.  Innocence too unpredictable, slow and impractical. Yet these qualities were essential pillars of our success – not only for record breaking player counts, but for our identity as the platform for the players, by the players. These pillars constitute our X factor, our authenticity, our magic. Yet, the path for an individual or small team to produce something capable of moving the masses is being fundamentally reframed… We’re in a space where the ability to create is seemingly more accessible than ever,

but who is at the wheel in this new space? Whoever it is, do they share our reverences? What is lost when KPIs transgress from means to an end towards becoming the ends themselves? It’s quite evident what emerges from this transformation: a culture of speculation, of risk management and ownership dissolution. A culture of measurement, and superstitious soothing out of the AI lottery. A culture of hustling and chance, presented as democratization. A culture where no individual has a say, because we our told instead that our ever more subconscious and involuntary impulses are who we actually are. A culture where only the house can win. And this is a culture we are collectively not cut out for – certainly not relative to our experienced opponents.

So begins an era of plundering of the good faith we’ve built over 20 years. We all think we already know who wins here. The investors, private equity, national or sovereign wealth funds, and the other various defenders of extant and landed power.

But in truth, we all lose. The players lose, the children lose, and anyone who identifies with the creative act of play loses. Even the majority of the investors lose. An envious resentment for human authorship itself, resentment for internalize intuition and conscious design, is the only thing that prevails. History and lineage are replaced by perfectly AB tested essentialist slop, hyper-individuated, infinitely attuned to your ever more specific phenotype. Every one of your intuitions will be ripped from your hands, and presented as the brilliance of an ever larger black box to which you are eternally indebted. That is the teleology, the ultimate goal, of this lonely, meaningless, and nihilistic science, disguised as an appeal to reality, to democratic inclusion, to progress, growth and optimization. Here, an optimal AI god will overcome and replace us all, and we, the most direct heirs and the vanguard of popular culture, who the players trusted most to grant meaning through fun, will have sold them out to it.

Or so one defeatist interpretation goes. We’ve persevered before, through many eras, from the metaverse and beyond, and the platform continues to be led by passionate and small teams of independent amateurs and natives, designers and content creators, who identify as players that refuse to grow up. Players who anchor their games and their own stories together as one in the greater story of Roblox. This spirit which unites us, and which we feel on this platform for now, will persevere, in some form or another, so long as we’re honest with ourselves, and fight to retain this identity of a player in everything we do. Do your part and we’ll continue to lead, to create the trends and genres that foster true desire, that feel human and direct, and that move the world. If we remember who we are, we’ll continue to win – to dictate what games can and should be, while the rest continue to follow in our wake. If instead we try to become them, and adopt their feigned objectivity, we are doomed to fail. Let them burn through trillions of tokens trying to capture a tiny fragment of our playful intuition. On my game, which I deeply love and identify with, I work as a solo developer enabled by Roblox, and my game refuses to die. You can have this too. As long as we are truly and humbly rooted in the spirit of play, we cannot lose because all of this, and all of life, is a game.

– Piercen Harbut (Onett)