Roblox, a videogame company that encourages players to build things, is quantifying its success for the first time.
The closely held company, which launched six years ago, estimates that its 2013 revenue will be about $30 million, up from “$20 million-ish“ last year and around $15 million in 2011. The company also said it is “close to break-even“ in terms of profit.
Its disclosures in an interview resemble the fortunes of some competitors. Mojang AB‘s Minecraft, for example, last year earned about $90 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization on revenue of $235 million.
Roblox, which is based in San Mateo, Calif., isn‘t pulling in Minecraft-level money. But the company said it is seeing strong usage, with Web traffic rising about 50% each year. The firm said its site was used by 3.3 million people for 62 million hours in June.
“We‘re making fairly good revenue on these users,“ said David Baszucki, Roblox‘s CEO.
Roblox offers an online platform–targeted at kids and teens as well as adults–that players augment by building objects, environments and games. It takes its name from the words robot and blocks–with simulated blocks typically used to build things. Players‘ characters, in fact, are often shown as a collection of various squares and rectangles.
A player, for example, might build a cavern with fast-rising water for others to escape, or an arena for gamers to battle one another with swords. Roblox offers tools designed to follow the laws of real-world physics, while allowing developers to create devices from cars to booby-traps.
The popularity of these types of games has been steadily growing in recent years. Though the visuals of the titles harken back to arcade games of decades passed, Baszucki said the social interactions among players and the creativity they‘re allowed by producing their own creations using simple coding tools has helped them to catch on.
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(Published Aug 20, 2013, on The Wall Street Journal’s Website.)