You’d be forgiven for thinking free-to-play, online game creation platform/community Roblox lets you create games that you and others can play, because that was the case up until fairly recently. You’ve actually been creating experiences this whole time, you poor fool.
Up until a few days ago, the microtransaction-riddled experiences users created within Roblox were just called games, and those games had players, but not any more. You can thank the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit for the change. According to The Verge, Roblox recently scrubbed its website of all mention of games and players, insisting that the platform is a metaverse, meant for creating all sorts of different things.
The term ‘experiences’ is consistent with how we’ve evolved our terminology to reflect our realization of the metaverse.
Like, totally, but why? Well, probably because Apple doesn’t allow games in the App Store to include direct payment options (like what Epic tried to do with Fortnite), and also doesn’t allow for apps to host games Apple hasn’t individually vetted (like why Microsoft xCloud isn’t allowed). Roblox does both of these things, but has been available on the App Store since 2012 – awkward. Hence, the Great Terminology Cleanse of 2021.
Obviously, Epic brought this hypocrisy up in court. However, Apple marketing head Trystan Kosmynka justified Roblox’s unhindered existence by sticking to the “not a game” argument.
If you think of a game or app, games are incredibly dynamic, games have a beginning, an end, there’s challenges in place. I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences that are in Minecraft. These are maps. These are worlds. And they have boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of.
Goddammit, I thought Minecraft was a game, too…