There are a lot of popular games I haven’t personally connected with, including The Sims, Minecraft, pretty much anything that looks like anime. Roblox is among them—oh yeah, Among Us too—and I’ve seen some of the more problematic issues with it. But last week, Roblox recorded 45 million people playing its various modes at once. Holy freakin’ crap.
According to Roblox CEO David Baszucki, the game-slash-service surpassed 45 million players on August 23rd. As PC Gamer notes, that’s more simultaneously active in-game players than Steam—the de facto standard platform for PC gaming—by about 5 million. And I don’t just mean for a single Steam game. I’m talking about Steam’s record for active players across every game, everywhere on the planet at any given time. For further comparison, Fortnite‘s record is 14.3 million concurrent players while Minecraft averages almost 32 million daily players with a concurrent peak of 4.2 million.
Granted, this isn’t a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. Roblox isn’t so much a singular game as it is an entire platform, where users can develop their own games with relatively friendly tools and publish them for other Roblox users to try out. Roblox is also cross-platform, available on PC, Android, iOS, PlayStation, and Xbox, making a direct comparison to Steam even fuzzier. The most popular game mode in Roblox at the moment appears to be “Steal a Brainrot,” which hit 20 million concurrent players the same day in a recent event.
Did I mention that Roblox is overwhelmingly played by children? It’s estimated that about half of US kids between the ages of 6 to 16 play Roblox, and only 1 in 10 users is over the age of 25.
Roblox isn’t without issues. At any given moment, a large portion of players are “bots” and “idlers” who are trying to game the monetization system, which isn’t great itself. Roblox also incentivizes “creators” (again, mostly children) by rewarding them with real money for publishing popular game modes. But some of the game modes in Roblox have actual teams of developers with budgets that can reach towards the million USD mark, and Roblox Corporation paid out over $300 million cumulatively in the second quarter of 2025 alone. The Roblox platform is almost 20 years old, getting a huge boost during the COVID pandemic, and now earns over $2 billion in total revenue every year for the company.
While many parents appreciate Roblox as a way to get their kids interested in game development and other programming, the company has been accused of exploiting child labor for profit. Several lawsuits have made that allegation formal. Roblox’s monetization is problematic at best, requiring you to earn 30,000 “Robux” worth of in-game currency before you can transfer it out of the platform (a figure most players never reach). Even when it’s transferred out, that currency is working for Roblox, not its game mode developers—you only earn a third of the value back into a bank account compared to Robux bought with “real” currency. It’s the sort of heavy-handed split that makes the usual 30 percent platform cut for Steam, iOS, or game consoles look positively generous.
Roblox’s overwhelmingly underage player base is also a target for online predators, and its low barrier to entry and allegedly lax moderation tools aren’t helping. The state of Louisiana is suing Roblox Corporation for failure to protect its underage users, after a controversy wherein a YouTube “vigilante” who tracked child predators on Roblox and reported them to police was banned from the platform.