Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge
Roblox is one of the biggest apps in the world, and you’ve probably been hearing its name: the company recently went public, and its stock price climbed so high it was temporarily worth more than gaming giants EA and Take-Two combined. Roblox has come up as a contentious topic in the Epic Games v. Apple trial as well.
But it’s also just an astonishingly popular app: 42.1 million people play Roblox daily. And its popularity is surging during the pandemic. Daily active users were up 85 percent in 2020, compared to the year before.
Until recently, though, I didn’t really understand what Roblox actually was, despite the app having been around since 2006. (Just to give you an idea of how long that is in tech years, the App Store for iOS…