Roblox beefs up its developer tools as it looks to a future beyond games

techcrunch.com:

When I spoke to Roblox in 2020, the company was in the midst of rebuilding its entire underlying infrastructure. It had been running into issues with downtime due to insufficient resources to meet demand and needed to build a modern, cloud-native system to handle its growing user base.

But beyond the nuts and bolts of that system rebuild, Roblox had some ideas for their developer users as well. The gaming platform was also looking at its developer tool set and how it could prepare for a world where the venerable web browser was no longer its main delivery mechanism.

Roblox aims to democratize game development, letting its users build games regardless of their technical skill. You could be a 10-year-old in Peoria or a team of professional game developers in Tokyo — whatever your skill level or motivation, the idea is to provide a platform where people can build games.

But the company believes that the Roblox platform could have more uses and is building a new approach to accommodate the required flexibility while keeping it easy to use. By hiding the underlying complexity from less experienced developers and building a flexible new system for more technical users, Roblox is looking to move beyond games into other experiences like virtual concerts, commerce and more creative approaches.

We recently caught up with Roblox CTO Dan Sturman to get an inside look at how this project is coming together, the challenges of building a tech stack for the masses and the company’s foray into virtual currency.

While the terms “web3” and “metaverse” get tossed around quite often these days, especially when talking about a social gaming platform with a monetization engine, Roblox wants to avoid the jargon. Instead, the company wants to build a