It seems Minecraft fans and Roblox fans don’t always get along. They tend to think their game of choice is better than the other, and they are stubborn about it at times. Today we’ll look at how the games do in a match-up against each other.
Introduction
Minecraft, a game that’s been called the grandfather of sandbox gaming. It was developed by a Swedish guy called Markus Persson. In 2014, he sold the game to Microsoft, who wanted the company and the intellectual rights. This soon led to the magazine Forbes putting the young Swede on the list of the world’s billionaires. That tells you just how many people loved his creation. It’s kind of funny now that when he sold his first few versions he was ecstatic that he saw 150 dollars in his PayPal account. He said in later interviews that he never expected to be rich in his life.
Roblox doesn’t have the same awe-inspiring romantic fairytale background. You could say, though, that a lot of effort and time went into creating this game. In fact, the earliest development of it goes right back to the 1990s, but it wasn’t until much later that it was released as Roblox. The two creators were called David Baszucki and Erik Cassel and on April 6th, 2006, they released Roblox, formerly called Dynablox, to the public. By November the game had 1,000 signed up players. In December that grew to 10,000 users, and within a year that number was 100,000 users.
Minecraft Vs Roblox
Minecraft had an astounding 91 million active players monthly. But that hasn’t changed much, and if you look at lists of games with the most active monthly players you’ll find today Minecraft still has around 91 million active monthly players. Just so you know, it was fourth on the list. In front of Minecraft were League of Legends, Pokemon Go and way out in front, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Which game was right behind Minecraft? Yep, it was Roblox which today is said to have around 90 million active monthly players. In this respect, we could call the games neck-and-neck.
Minecraft can take one of the biggest accolades in gaming, though, because it’s the best selling game of all time. It’s said to have sold over 176,000,000 copies.
Roblox is different in this respect as it’s completely free. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t make any money of course. In Roblox you can purchase virtual currency for in-game upgrades or accessories for avatars. People can also buy a “Builders Club” membership, and that offers special privileges such as getting your hands on premium items for better avatars, getting rid of advertisements, and getting an item trading system.
What does all this mean in terms of making money?
It’s hard to say just how much cash Microsoft has made from Minecraft. The company bought Mojang for a cool $2.5 billion, so that was, to say the least, quite the expenditure. But when you consider the number of copies sold and the going price right now of $26.95, a lot of money is being made. For the last few years you might have paid between 20 and 30 bucks for the PC version and console version.
Microsoft also made money from things such as selling skin packs for Minecraft and as we speak new versions of Minecraft are being developed by Mojang.
Microsoft hasn’t released an exact figure, but some people have done the math and come up with the number 1.65 billion dollars. That’s what Microsoft might have made so far, but let us tell you this is a very rough estimate. Some sources also tell us that the net worth of Minecraft right now is in the region of $1.7 billion.
In 2019, reports told us that Roblox has grossed $700 million globally on mobile alone. The website Think Gaming tells us that the mobile game overall has a revenue of $1,554,586 daily. But again, as for how much the game has made in total it is very confusing. Even if we look at net worth estimates they differ from source to source. One source tells us that Roblox for web has a net worth of just over $1.6 billion, while late in 2018 Variety reported that Roblox the company was worth in total $2.5 billion, which would make it more valuable than Minecraft. There seems to be very little between them, and all we can say is that both games are pulling in lots and lots of money.
One of the big differences in the games is the astounding amount of money developers have earned in Roblox, though of course the company takes a cut of this. It was reported that in 2018 in total developers in the game made over $70 million.
One of the selling points of Roblox is that young people have an incentive to learn coding. They can do well from creating games in the game. Business Insider wrote in that year, “One top creator cleared $3 million in earnings, while two more claimed $2 million.” Lots of others earned thousands of dollars, which is a really big incentive to get writing code.
Minecraft doesn’t have such an incentive, but there is the Minecraft Marketplace where creators can sell content they have made. We are not sure how much Microsoft has paid to creators in total, but reports in 2018 said that in a few months the company had paid out $7 million to 45 Minecraft content creators.
This is quite different, though, from Roblox, that reported in 2019 that in 2018 over 300,000 new games were published on Roblox.
It also wrote this –
Under a Creative Commons license, we built out an educational curriculum that reached over 48,000 students across 22 countries in 2018.
So, while Minecraft no doubt is a good educational tool, Roblox can really get young people making money fast.
Which Game is Better?
As for which game is better, well, as we said at the start both games have their fans. You could say that Minecraft is better for lonesome virtual adventurers who enjoy going on their own way. Minecraft has multiplayer options, but Roblox was made to be a social game. As we have said before, the social environment could be seen as a personality building exercise for players, although parents have raised concerns because a lot of strange stuff has been created in the game which you could say is definitely not child friendly.
So, in terms of social aspects and learning coding, you’d have to say Roblox is the game of choice. If you’re a parent, you’ll just have to take Roblox’s word for it that its human moderators are policing the game and they will keep it child-friendly. While Minecraft might miss that social element for the most part, some kids just aren’t social creatures and as creatives they can really succeed in this game. They can be the masters of their own domain, builders of worlds, rulers of virtual kingdoms, and that in itself is a great thing. It really depends on what kids want to do, but we think both games can provide a great educational experience.
Both games can promote collaboration, problem solving, math skills, thinking and reasoning. Both games promote creativity. So yes, we won’t tell you which we think is the better game in this respect. It all depends what kid likes.
