Trivia / Roblox

• Banned in China: On May 23, 2018, Roblox, along with other online games, were banned in the United Arab Emirates, because they claimed that the games cause mental destruction in children. On March 11, 2021, the ban was lifted.
• Cash-Cow Franchise:
  • Jailbreak is so popular and profitable through DevEx that co-developer badcc (real name Alex Balfanz) had enough money for a four-year tuition at Duke University.
  • Adopt Me! is no slouch at making money, racking up $16 million in revenue mostly from Microtransactions as well as receiving sponsorships from the likes of SCOOB!, Sing 2, Minions: The Rise of Gru, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish respectively.
• Christmas Rushed: Defied by Escape Room 2 opting out of the Metaverse Champions event to allow for the game be released in a stable and non-buggy build. DevUltra does regret that he was unable to complete the game in time for the event, but hopes to launch the game soon.
• Creator Breakdown: Treelands' sudden stop in updates was explained months later by Newfissy. SoUpErHeRoW, an important part of the Treelands developer community, passed away. This caused another member of the dev team to spiral into a deep depression, which in turn caused morale to drop and led to an unhealthy atmosphere which ended with Newfissy leaving the team. Though Newfissy would make a Creator Recovery, by deciding to make Adopt Me, a game that would leave an impact on kids the same way MapleStory and RuneScape left an impact on him. It is currently one of the most popular games on Roblox, even setting a new record for most players in a game.
• Dear Negative Reader: Rule 17 on Defend The Statue's Discord server made discussing in-game functionalities not allowed. Not awful on its own, but what got people upset is when the creators downright mocked the complainers, comparing them to an "overzealous 9 year old who wants Fortnite cheese". Needless to say, the developers' rudeness towards players criticizing the game, combined with one of the game's Scrappy Mechanics, caused it to have significantly reduced player counts, and ultimately led to its eventual shutdown.
• Defictionalization: The longtime favorite Bloxy Cola was made as a real energy drink provided at the Roblox Developers Conference 2019.
• Demand Overload: Its common nowadays to have Roblox going down on Saturdays. The reason?: Pet Simulator X releases a big update every Saturday, in which many players go to the game to see what features are added into the new update, causing Roblox to go down for a few hours.
• Distanced from Current Events:
  • The Hazmat Isolation Helmet hat originally had a sentence in its description reading "Someone’s put Ebola in the water supply." It was removed in 2014 in response to the West Africa Ebola epidemic.
  • Roblox's Twitter once tweeted "The Airports might be crazy right now, but that wasn’t of any worry for these YouTubers", around the time the news broke out that Juice Wrld had passed away at Chicago's Midway airport. The tweet was taken down soon after.
  • Two unrelated games named Virus Simulator were announced in April 2020 and were immediately met with backlash due to the announcement coming right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the games was canceled and its dev team disbanded, while the other was released with a This Is a Work of Fiction disclaimer and renamed "Sneeze Simulator".
• Follow the Leader: Obstacle courses ("obbies" as they're called), which are usually floating masses of land filled with free models^note A derisive name given to models used to make a place with little effort, like Lava Bricks, Spinners, and other Obby Pieces. Granted, they are released to the public, so there isn't much excuse not to use them. . It's almost impossible to browse the front page without seeing at least one "WHO KILD SPONGBAWB OBBI" or something similar.
  • Tycoons are another example. Most of them are just plots of land with conveyor belts, droppers to drop stuff that earn money, flat disks on the ground to walk on, and the occasional ability to kill other players. Fortunately, some, such as Theme Park Tycoon 2 and Lumber Tycoon 2, don't use such mold and stand out as original tycoons.
  • The situation seems to have gotten better, with games of higher quality sticking on the games page for longer. Obstacle courses still appear, albeit infrequently.
  • Examples Of 'Leaders':
    • Murder Mystery -> "Murder Mystery" games (Link to original impossible, because this sequel replaced it).
    • Work at a Pizza Place -> "Work at a(n) X" games.
    • TrueStar's Cart Ride Tycoon Through a/the X -> "Cart Ride Tycoon" games.
    • Camping: Since early 2019, it's common to see an adventure game decorated with a simplistic vector design and having a casual and innocent premise, until it pulls off macabre twists and forces the players to survive.
    • TONK started a wave of oversized UGC items that started off covering half of an avatar, before it culminated into items that covered the entire avatar. This led to backlash by developers and players of competitive FPS games as people began using these items to disguise themselves ingame to score easy kills.
    • Piggy: Since then, there have been more Granny-like games on Roblox albeit with Piggy's unique shticks, skins and in-game chapters. AlvinBlox's series on developing such replica only encouraged the trend.
    • Tower Battles: Afterwards, more Tower Defense games have been added to Roblox, the most popular being Tower Defense Simulator and Tower Blitz, along with Tower Battles still being popular to this day.
• Franchise Killer: While the Egg Hunt tradition is generally well-regarded by the fandom, it hit some rather nasty bumps over the years that encouraged extensive retooling before it was eventually retired after 2020:
  • 2010 had the last "Egg Drop", where eggs would fall from the sky at set times for all ROBLOX games. It ended up not working for most people, with people being ready at the set times only to be faced with a complete lack of eggs being so common that the catalog released a face called "Where are the eggs?" as a bit of Self-Deprecation. This led to the next Easter event being designed as a new game so the parameters for egg collecting could be properly controlled, which stayed the tradition until the below example.
  • The 2014 Egg Hunt put a damper on egg hunts taking place in an exclusive game, and events using exclusive games in general. The event was designed around a hub game that would transport players to several variants of the same map each with their own individual eggs to collect. The problem was, either as a result of working on several maps at once or just mismanagement in general, the event was such an Obvious Beta that it kept getting shut down mere minutes after opening up to players several times in succession for bug fixes, and still wasn't the most stable even after that.
  • The 2015 Egg Hunt followed ROBLOX's newer event style of adding objectives to pre-established games. Negative feedback led to ROBLOX switching between creating exclusive games and adding objectives to older games for the egg hunts each year with varying reception. 2019 was originally intended to be the last egg hunt, but an event was released for 2020 with the eggs scattered across 49 games that meant any sort of quality control or unified vision was impossible. It's saying that the 2021 event released around the usual time the Egg Hunt would used a similar concept of scattering the items across a large batch of games, but made it so that most of the games shared the same items with doing the extra objectives just being a part of the event's leaderboard gimmick rather than required to collect all the exclusive items.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Any and all old versions, but especially the farther you go back. A lot of old clients have circulated around the Internet, but the absolute farthest back you can go is August 2007 - and even that client was only discovered by a user who found the files archived on an old PC. All builds older than that have yet to surface.
  • A ton of classic ROBLOX games either became entirely unplayable due to site updates, haven't been updated in years, or have just flat-out been deleted. The older the game is, the more likely this is to be true. In some cases, however, there's a reuploaded or repaired version of these games floating around somewhere on the site.
    • In particular, "Welcome to the Town of Robloxia" was infamous in the early 2010s for having dozens of copies uploaded to the site. Later on, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the original game has been closed to the public for years.
    • Super Nostalgia Zone seems to exist entirely for the purpose of preserving the games and general "aesthetic" of classic Roblox, even going as far as recreating old sound and physics glitches.
  • Adventure Forward: Star Savior was originally going to be shut down for maintenance, but now remains permanently unplayable due to creator Explode1 being banned before the game was reopened to the public.
• Kids' Meal Toy: Adopt Me! got McDonald's toys in November 2023.
• Long-Runners: It was publicly released in 2006 and it has received new updates and features ever since.
• Newbie Boom:
  • Starting in early 2016, a massive rise to new players was seen, which ticked off older players. Some have blamed this on Lets Players. To the uninitiated, after the old developers of Roblox were superseded by new members or simply stopped caring, things took rather drastic turns, usually for the worst. New pay systems were devised (Turbo Builder's Club, Outrageous Builder's Club), with subscriptions going into the hundreds of dollars. Scripting was locked down, with many game-breaking changes implemented that angered the scripting community. The rise of Roblox Lets Players has led to this. Older players will often blame YouTubers, such as DanTDM, for introducing Roblox to a wider audience of children.
  • A second newbie boom occurred in late 2020, when anime and TikTok games began to explode popularity in the site, caused numerous users from those communities to join Roblox.
  • A third newbie boom occured in October 2021, when numerous popular streamers and YouTubers that almost never played Roblox, played various Squid Game-based games on Roblox and causing their fanbase to play it.
  • The launch of Pet Simulator X caused many players of Roblox to play it and caused a newbie boom of people playing simulators on Roblox.
  • When Find The Markers received huge amounts of players in January 2022, the Find The Badges genre of the games caused a newbie boom, leading to the creation of more Find The Badges games such as Find The Pandas and Find The Bacons.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: Roblox occasionally holds contests where players submit original ideas for future Rthro avatars. The winning designers would win $500 and have their designs be made into official Rhtro bundles.
• Promoted Fanboy: Legoseed was employed by Roblox in 2016, eight years after he began playing.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor:
  • MisterObvious, once a respected fan animator who won a 2014 Bloxy, lost all his reputation and was forced to disappear from the Internet after allegations of sexually predatory behavior to underage girls on Discord were brought to light. It didn't help he tried to take legal action at first. Unlike other cases of this, his account took four years to get terminated despite pleas from many to do so.
  • Explode1 was well known for creating well-received clones of Super Mario 64 such as Adventure Forward: Star Savior. However, in February 2018, his alleged sexually predatory behavior towards minors was uncovered, resulting in Roblox banning his account and having all of his ongoing projects canceled. Later on, Adventure Forward 3 was later Retooled into a Spiritual Successor called Hallowed Hero.
  • EpicCritcal was nearly the victim of this due to accusations of sexually predatory behavior against minors that caused a massive amount of drama to the point where he had to shut down his social media accounts, and went dormant for about 5 months. He then eventually returned, but stated that he was only returning to implement the remaining classes he had planned for Critical Strike.
• Screwed by the Lawyers:
  • At the height of its popularity, content related to Five Nights at Freddy's was taken down at the request of series creator Scott Cawthon due to numerous clones of his work being made. It was to the point where the game's name was one of the things censored by ROBLOX's chat filter, which is usually reserved for filtering out potentially family-unfriendly words or phrases. This has died down over time, though.
  • On April 18, 2018, Pokémon Brick Bronze was taken down, presumably because of a DMCA complaint from Nintendo. This is more Justified than other cases of this, as the developers were making real money off copyrighted material that they did not have permission to use. The developers later re-released it as the lawyer-friendly Loomian Legacy.
    • This had the ripple effect of almost all Pokémon-related games being purged in its wake, with only the most obscure games to use Pokémon themes remaining open. Even non-Pokémon Nintendo games also met this fate.
  • Thousands of copyrighted songs submitted to the site were removed starting from June 18th, 2018. To try and counteract this, Roblox signed a license agreement with APM Music, providing a massive library of license-free music for developers to use. Despite this, the reactions weren't peaceful.
  • In general, like Brick Bronze above, if you make and publish a game with copyrighted assets, even if it's nonprofit, you're at risk for some legal trouble, as Roblox considers itself to be a professional platform. Copyright is treated as Serious Business within the developer community and Roblox even published an article advising developers to not use copyrighted material.
  • A large amount of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout clones were purged from the site following a request from Mediatonic Games. Unlike the above examples, though, community response to this was more in agreement as the site is notorious for producing "inspirations" from trending games for a quick buck.
  • Roblox's dev tools were updated on March 22, 2022 to make audio uploads longer than 5.5 seconds private by default, a stopgap measure Roblox took to avoid a $200 million lawsuit by the National Music Publishers' Association.^note the lawsuit was eventually settled out of court with the NMPA cooperating with Roblox on a new music licensing deal to add replacement music for developers, but the update went through regardless. This ended up gutting the copyrighted soundtracks of a lot of popular games, especially Rhythm Games. As a consolation, audio upload fees were waived permanently, with the only limiting thing being how many audio assets one could upload per month.
  • The famous "OOF" sound was replaced on July 26, 2022 due to a licensing issue.
  • On June 15, 2023, UNOfficial was taken down, presumably because of a DMCA complaint from Mattel.
    • This had the ripple effect of almost all UNO-related games being purged in its wake.
• Similarly Named Works: There was a virtual pet site (and toyline) called "AdoptMe.com" before the Roblox game Adopt Me! came along (and grew more popular). The site's old closure notice notes how many people confused the site with the Roblox game.
• Spoiled by the Merchandise: Several characters and Palette Swaps from Heroes of Robloxia (such as Tigris, Midnight Shogun, and a few mooks related to past antagonists) were released as toys before they were officially revealed.
• Stillborn Franchise: The remake of Defend The Statue was intended to launch a number of spin-offs, among other things. However, massive controversy involving the game's mechanics, combined with the creator xKenis suffering a breakdown, resulted in all plans being halted, and the one spin-off it did produce divorced itself from the installment.
• Trend Killer: For a while, there was an notable trend of Roblox "myths", which was associated with accounts based on some fictional history the user made up, with Flamingo bringing the genre's popularity to newer heights. However, when Kadzam, one of the most notable Roblox myth creators, was exposed for multiple controversies, the myth community collapsed overnight as the incredibly toxic environment combined with the massive drama resulted virtually no myth ever receiving a significant amount of attention. This was especially notable since other trends such as tycoon and obbies were other trends that were a part of Roblox history. KreekCraft has attempted to revive it as part of a project, but no progress has been made so far.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: A large number of games from the old days of Roblox no longer work properly due to various changes over the years regarding the way scripts work. Pretty much every game made pre-2011 or so that relied on some kind of Lua programming has been affected, though not always in the same ways. Issues range from minor things like malfunctioning weapons or vehicle tools, to massive, game-breaking bugs like respawn scripts that no longer function or game lobbies that you can never leave. More often than not, the end result is that these broken scripts render games unplayable or unbeatable until the creator can fix them. Unfortunately, with games this old, it's usually not likely that they'll be repaired.
• Unisex Series, Gendered Merchandise: Roblox itself is a unisex game platform, but the majority of official Roblox t-shirts that are sold at retail can only be found in "boy's" clothing departments at stores. Averted with virtually all of the other Roblox merchandise items (e.g. the toys, which are aimed at both boys and girls alike).
• Viral Marketing: At the time Roblox initially went live, YouTube was only just getting started. However, a few noteworthy users on there who gained fame through other kinds of videos ended up making some Roblox videos in a similar manner; this raised awareness of the game's existence tenfold. One of the most famous examples is probably Fleskhjerta (known for his The Most Stupid Deaths in Super Mario 64 series), who was probably responsible for a large percentage of 2007 users joining the game; helped, no doubt, by the snowball effect he created by inspiring other YouTube users to make "blooper" videos featuring Roblox.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things:
  • The forums were reduced to be about Roblox only in July 2017 before being shut down entirely a few months later, due to the moderators not wanting to put up with the G.I.F.T that was always around and went out of control earlier that year. It has also been theorized that part of this was due to QuackityHQ who, starting in May of 2017, repeatedly used his fans to raid the forums (some even going to non-affiliated spin-off sites) because he got a 3-day ban.
  • Supposedly, the Giftsplosion tradition (hats representing gift boxes could be bought or earned and would eventually reward the player with another item) ended due to players constantly pestering the admins about how to get the gifts and what was in them, defeating the entire point of the gifts as mystery boxes one would be challenged to figure out how to obtain.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The titular Metaverse Champions underwent some changes prior to the release of the event, such as Sparks Kilowatt having a lighter skin color and white hair along with a midriff and a mask, Fey Yoshida having dark hair with only purple tips and being a vampire, AJ Striker having a more mechanized design and no tattoo on his arm, and Wren Brightblade had orange hair rather than dark green hair.
  • There was an option in development named Appear Offline, in which makes the player to appear offline for 12 hours and it could make famous people less likely to get snipped by the targeters. But as of July 2022, the option seems to be scrapped for now.
• Working Title: During much of its development, the game bore the name "DynaBlocks".