Roblox lures pro game developers who compete with coding kids

tech.hindustantimes.com:

In the fall of 2018, Mary Rukavina was enjoying her first day of college at the University of Minnesota, where she had enrolled to study biomedical engineering, when she received an intriguing call. RedManta, a video game studio founded that year, offered to pay Rukavina $5,000 a month to make games on Roblox, an online platform that allows people to program their own games and play games created by others.

“My second day of college, I moved out,” Rukavina says. “My parents were like, ‘You’re crazy.’”

Rukavina had discovered Roblox as a 13-year-old messing around on her mom’s laptop. Every day, she sunk at least three hours into the rapidly expanding virtual world, fascinated by games about raising animals like turtles or dragons. Over time, she began to think up her own games, too, using the company’s proprietary platform, Roblox Studios. 

Rukavina never dreamed it could be a career. But it has been for four years and now she’s the creative director of Sonar Studios LLC, an independent studio that makes games for Roblox. In fact, more than a dozen such studios have cropped up to tap into what was once the domain of middle and high-school students.

Founded in 2004 by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel and launched two years later, Roblox was envisioned as a platform where content was created by kids, for kids, using the simple programming language Lua. Parents and educators loved the platform because it was seen as helping kids learn to code. Roblox can be played virtually anywhere, from an Xbox console to a phone, laptop, or PC, and boasted 45.5 million daily active users at the end of last year. The company went public in a direct listing  last year.

Roblox’s trajectory generated interest from professional game developers, many