Want to Make $500,000 Dollars with Roblox to Build Games?

Want to Make $500,000 Dollars with Roblox to Build Games?

Roblox introduced Game Fund last summer with $25 million earmarked for new games. Now Roblox has announced another $10 million for a handful of projects that the company believes symbolizes what the platform is about.  The company characterizes its cohort of Game Fund experiences as the future of Roblox itself and selects specifically for developers who are pushing the envelope of what’s technically possible on the platform. While there aren’t many of these developer grants awarded, each project gets a minimum of $500,000 — enough to fund some sophisticated experiences on a platform best known for its blocky, simplistic graphics.

“Designing and building a high-fidelity experience with new technology, well-known IP and rich storylines is time-intensive and requires larger teams, so Game Fund is there to give participating creators the financial backing and guidance they need to de-risk development,” Roblox Head of Community Expansion Jad Boniface, has stated.

“… We’re looking for projects with innovative gameplay, ambitious visual designs, and creative ideas that are unlike anything else on the platform,” Boniface wrote in a blog post promoting the Game Fund update. “Current Game Fund participants have wowed us with compelling cross-platform gameplay, engaging social mechanics, dynamic in-game avatars, and creative economic models.”

Roblox and Fortnite both offer plug-and-play game development tools, but on Roblox user-generated worlds are the norm, making up the entire experience of “playing” Roblox. Players just hop into an ever-rotating catalog of user-generated content and try something out, often meeting up with friends in the process. Roblox is ubiquitous among kids under 13 and offers an endless array of user-generated “experiences” — portals to virtual hangouts, pirate games, branded sneaker shopping experiences and everything in between.

Roblox sees its Game Fund as a way to support impressive, visually exciting games that mostly don’t look or even work like what the platform is known for. Instead of funding the median experience someone might have on Roblox now, the now $35 million pool of cash represents what Roblox wants to be known for in its next era — and that’s shaping up to look a lot different than the last one.