ramblings of a yapper

Why Are There No More Good Games on Roblox? — A Case Study into the Evolution of How Youths Are Entertained

The internet has always moved extraordinarily fast, it has done so since the day I was conscious enough to use it, but it hasn't always moved quite this fast. As a member of Gen Z who has witnessed the modern-day evolution of the internet and social media culture, I feel like it's beginning to move too fast even for me.

Back in my day (2016 :skull:), we used to have trends, memes and news topics for at least a good week or two before we hopped on to the next one. Nowadays, it feels like I'll see a trend while scrolling on Instagram, get attached to it and never see it again in the span of 2 days. If you've been scrolling Instagram the past few days, you might've seen that one trend where people make fun of a country's geography using specific clips, starting with people joking about the elongated shape of Chile. I kid you not I saw memes following that trend for 2 days and I have not seen any since the start of this week. That's mildly concerning at best.

Of course, we have the occasional meme that sticks around for longer than the others. Tung Tung Tung Sahur has been around for god knows how long now and "6 7" feels like it's been a part of internet culture since I was birthed, but even those two cornerstones of post 2024 "memery" have begun to fade into irrelevance.

Point is, Generation Alpha, and soon Beta, has shown that the attention spans of youth is trending downwards in a slightly terrifying rate. They pick up a toy, play with it for a few days before it's tossed aside never to be seen again. I think this phenomenon can be seen most clearly in, believe it or not, Roblox.

Ignoring the controversies it has recently been embroiled in, Roblox is a cornerstone of modern gaming, dare I say up there with Minecraft. It has raised an entire generation of kids, me included, and has given Generation Z and Alpha no shortage of amazing memories. Despite that, it would not be overkill to say that Roblox is washed up.

Most people think the golden generation of Roblox, when the platform was at it's perceived peak, ended in 2018 - 2019, albeit there were still a couple of really good games released up until at least 2024 when the "SLOP ERA" hit the platform. During this time, up until 2015 which is what we'll discuss for now, the top games on Roblox were probably those that nurtured childhoods.

If you take these batch of games and try to draw a trend between them, and I might be reaching here, you'd come to the conclusion that games of this era were rather roleplay oriented. Everybody loves the Sims franchise for the same reasons they loved this era of Roblox, it was life simulation but with friends. Mess about with your friends, attend classes you wouldn't attend in real life but would in Roblox for whatever reason, become a Pokemon trainer yada yada. You could argue that the games were higher quality in this era precisely because the target audiences had attention spans that wanted to be maintained. They wanted a game they could frequently come back to for the familiarity, to continue what they started, to make friendships or maintain friendships. That was the original appeal of Roblox as a whole, in my opinion, a platform that gave you endless options and choices for you and your friends to mess about in.

The aforementioned roleplaying games bleeds a lot into the 2015-2020s era too where I'd say a lot of the roleplaying games still frequented to this day emerged. Brookhaven, Jailbreak and Bloxburg were all MASSIVE games and still continue to be some of the biggest games on the platform by far, all centred around the same kind of roleplaying content from before and all games that were, I'd say, of pretty good quality when they released.

However, I think it was around here that a noticeable shift in Roblox's content began. Living through that era, I'd say even a lot of Roblox players themselves also noticed it in real time, including me. Personally, the biggest indicator of the shifting landscape of Roblox came with the release of Adopt Me

I feel only the people who were actively on Roblox during this era will understand what I'm about to ramble about here, but I'll do it anyways because what is the point of me writing this if not to get things off my chest lmao.

Adopt Me was, in my opinion, the beginning of the end for Roblox. It rose through the ranks near immediately after it's release, essentially killing off it's direct predecessor in genre - MeepCity. These two games follow roughly the same format: Own a house, decorate it, play mini-games or find a job, earn currency, use it to buy nicer house and decorate nicer house, repeat. Adopt Me did what MeepCity did but with the addition, later on, of pets. With pets, came trading. With trading, came value. With value came gambling. With gambling comes the exact issue of entertainment nowadays... dopamine hits.

An example for you: I truly believe Tung Tung Tung Sahur is a drug. There is no inherent entertainment in Tung Tung Tung Sahur, nothing about him is funny in the way running someone over with your truck in Work at a Pizza Place is funny. What's funny about Tung Tung is his presence. You see him and you laugh. It's like a trigger that is pulled by his mere presence, and I truly believe that's why he's stuck around for so long, because he's LOW HANGING FRUIT. I won't act all high and mighty and say I don't laugh at Tung Tung Tung Sahur on the regular (because I do), but he is a trigger for laughter instead of being something constructively and creatively funny. In that sense, he is a drug. In the same sense, gambling is a drug.

The moment Adopt Me and other games on Roblox started adopting the pet system, the platform went downhill. Sure there were plenty, plenty of other games between 2020 and 2024 that were still really innovative and fun and didn't rely on dopamine hits like pets and collectibles and gambling, but the trend of games on the platform skewed so heavily after Adopt Me that I think it began to snowball uncontrollably. Things on the platform would never be the same.

2020 to 2023: Islands, BedWars, BLOX FRUITS, PET SIMULATOR X, DOORS, Evade, Blade Ball, Dress to Impress, PLS DONATE,

An interesting thing I'll admit I never considered before writing this was the boom of Roblox horror in the early 2020s. Piggy was essentially the pioneer coming out in 2020, followed by the insanely popular "DOORS" and Evade being up there too. I'm not a big horror fan myself, but being friends with people who are, I know a lot of people really enjoyed the horror boom. I played games like Evade and Doors during this time and almost all Roblox horror games were pretty exceptionally made

Still, the trend I mentioned before also begins to rear it's ugly head during this time. Pet Simulator X was one heck of a game when I was around, probably the pioneer of Pet Simulators and what would later come out to be RNG games. I'd argue Pls Donate also falls similarly into the category of these dopamine hit gambling games, albeit it's more of an e-begging simulator which is equal parts pathetic and equal parts intriguing and useful.

Blox Fruits is a game hated by many in the Roblox community, even to this day. I won't mention games like it much because I think anime games of the like still are generally games of high quality and I have respect for them, but they definitely contribute to the idea that Roblox is full of toxic tryhard kids who don't shower. It doesn't have anything to do with the downward spiral of entertainment in the sense toxicity has always been prominent on the internet and in gaming since the dawn of time, but I do think games like Blox Fruits probably contributed to Roblox's bad rep.

From 2023 onwards, I could probably count on one hand the amount of genuinely quality games Roblox has produced. I would need 50 trillion hands to count the amount of games I've rolled my eyes at.

From here on out, Roblox goes from "relatively decent but having dropped noticeably in quality" to "i cant look at the front page without cringing my fucking eyes out"

Late 2023 - Toilet Tower Defense, Pet Simulator 99, 2024 - A pretty blessed year revolving around pre-existing games like Blox Fruits, Adopt Me, aforementioned horror games etc etc 2025 - Grow A Garden, Steal a Brainrot (FIRST GAME TO HIT 10B VISITS A MONTH), Plants & Brainrot, Brainrot Evolution 2026 - Escape Tsunami for Brainrots, Survive Lava for Brainrots, Grow a Garden 2, Steal an Egg

...

I've voiced my concerns about brainrot and the attention span of youths in this day and age already so there's no point reiterating, I just simply wanted to show how popular brainrot managed to get on the platform during it's surge in popularity. Just following the trend of popular Roblox games through the years, you can slowly but surely track just how youth entertainment has changed in the same period of time

It's not just brainrot either. Roblox is now filled with low-effort, made-to-be-addictive, pay-to-win, simple, formulaic games. This is a issue plaguing the platform that I think equals these brainrot / gambling games in severity and I wish to talk about it. To do so, however, I'll use Grow a Garden as an example

Grow a Garden was the first Roblox game to have numbers beyond anything the platform has ever seen before. It was the first game to have 5 BILLION visits a month, so is to say it was clicked on and entered 5 billion times across a month, and also broke a world record for most concurrent players at around 20 million before Steal a Brainrot stole it's crown with 25 million later down the line. Nothing about Grow a Garden follows a trend I've laid out so far. Rather, it sets a new one: low-effort and simple games which stimulate your attention

Grow a Garden was hated by MANY during it's initial boom of popularity. This hate came from the fact the game was, compared to Roblox games of old, extremely simple. You'd plant a crop, wait, harvest it, sell it, buy new crops and go all over again. Nothing is inherently wrong with that, but for being the most hyped game on the platform with TWENTY MILLION concurrent users, people were confused. It's indicative, really, of how far entertainment has fallen, in a sense. A game that simple was the game to break Guiness World Records and rope in millions of in-game currency from kids stealing from their parents' credit cards.

It's crazy to me that a game like THAT is what people choose to play nowadays.

Grow a Garden also started a trend of other Roblox creators seeing a game get massively popular, stealing it's formula and applying it to create a new game that is inherently the same but with a different context. A gripe that a lot of Roblox players will have nowadays is that almost every game on the front page is the same, formulaic bullshit that was on the front page last week but gift-wrapped in new colours and re-served to you on a silver platter. Formulaic, simple games designed to rope you in, show you big numbers, let you gamble, make the big number bigger, give you funny brainrot pets and let's you leave for the next game with slightly different mechanics but the exact same core.

If it isn't gambling, it's encouraging you to AFK. If it isn't that, it's telling you your empire of money-making brainrot characters works offline, overtime, to make sure you come back the next day. If it isn't that, it's these +1 games that are the big trend nowadays where you click the screen and become marginally stronger at a certain something which allows you to break down increasingly HP inflated walls which allows you to gain more currency the more walls you break down which allows you to buy items which make you stronger at a marginally faster rate.

What has happened to this platform? What has happened to entertainment as a whole? I don't mean to be an elitist judging what people can and can't enjoy, but I do not understand how things have changed in such a short amount of time? What has social media and the internet done to the new generation?

If I check my Roblox home page as of writing this, here is what I'll find. I'll go so far as to categorise it into the different formulas the game falls under and their concurrent player counts

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+1 games - Click the screen --> Stronger --> Break big wall --> Gain currency --> Buy item --> Stronger faster --> Break bigger wall --> More currency - "+1 speed keyboard escape" (112k), "+1 loot to forge" (70k), "+1 stone skipping" (25k), "+1 damage fps" (4k), "+1 wings for eggs" (24k), "+1 strength for eggs" (20k) "+1 car vs platforms" (6k)

"Steal A" games - Buy something from a conveyor belt that occasionally produces something extremely valuable based on luck (usually brainrot) --> Put it in your safe and secure base --> It makes you money --> Invade other peoples safe and secure base by either being a sneaky boy or paying money to fuck them over - "Steal an Egg" (1.9 MILLION), "Steal a Brainrot" (82k), "Break and Steal an Egg" (52k), "Steal a Verity" (16k), "Steal from the Rich" (20k), "Open Sea for Animals" (9k)

"Pet Gambling" games - Gamble with currency / items --> Get a pet which generates you currency / items --> Gamble with greater odds to get lucky - "Ride a Pet" (232k), "Anime Dice" (74k), "Roll a Fisherman" (9k), "Adopt Me!" (173k)

I could go on and on but I get lazy

Insanely unorganised ramble.

At the end of the day, the point I'm trying to make is that the direction that entertainment is heading towards is one I'm afraid of. Whether it's searching for that dopamine hit, or resorting to something overly formulaic and simple because you don't want to put in the effort to exercise your creative juices and create something genuinely entertaining, or catering towards people with short attention spans by making slop games which encourage you to put little to no effort into something.

I can only hope that the youth are currently being raised well and that this is just a phase. At the risk of sounding like an old geezer, which I swear I'm not, I wish that the entertainment landscape would give children the option to discover and try things that ask more of them instead of being so predatory in its practices. I hope that the newer generation can, metaphorically, break the shackles of brainrot and low-effort content and discover other forms and pieces of media which allow them to broaden their perspectives yada yada. Entertainment is something we don't give enough credit to when we think about our upbringings, so it concerns me to see THIS is what children are being fed nowadays, content which doesn't really do anything.

Of course, it's not all doom and gloom. Throughout my researching process, it has been nice to see that some old classics on Roblox still get the recognition they deserve and I understand that Roblox is not representative of the whole of Gen Alpha and Beta and that most people aren't eating up all this slop, but it is still something worth talking about in my opinion anyways. An intriguing post-dinner rabbit hole to fall into, if nothing else.

xx

(2717 words are you kidding me :crine:)

(this has taken me 2 hours to write)