On its Developer hub, Roblox notes how 24.9 percent of the company's revenues go to App Store Fees demanded by platform holders like Apple, Google, and the console makers. In that thread, Apple's Stoney Gamble pointed out that the game was initially rejected in late 2014 because it was "streaming games which we don't like, since these games don't come into review." A month later, in early 2015, the app was apparently approved without any official complaints from the top-level "executive review board" that has the final say on these kinds of matters.Īpp Review policies aside, when it comes to raw dollars and cents, Roblox is playing ball with Apple's requirements. And they have boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of."īut in a 2017 email thread presented at trial, Kosmynka asked the App Review team if Roblox (which he mistyped as "Roboblox") "follow our guidelines" and said he was "surprised this was approved" by the review board. "I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences in Minecraft," he said at one point. Games, in Kosmynka's mind, need to have a well-defined beginning and end, as well as challenges in place for players to overcome. Apple trial, though, Apple Senior Director of Marketing Trystan Kosmynka tried to argue that the company didn't consider Roblox's offerings to be games at all. The creators of Roblox's most popular game-a virtual pet simulator called 'Adopt Me'-have even launched their own full-fledged studio called Uplift Games to continue work on that and other titles.Īt the Epic Games v. Many ape popular existing game genres and titles in providing interactive play spaces with clear rules, goals, and even scoring. In the most basic definitional sense, the vast majority of the individual user-created "experiences" Roblox provides could be considered games. But if each Roblox download is just an "experience," akin to a DLC map in a pre-existing game, then the legal parsing around Apple's review policies can look very different. If Roblox is allowed to make money streaming millions of subgames inside the Roblox app without submitting each one for individual review, it's hard to argue that other gaming apps don't deserve the same freedom. It also plays into Epic's argument that the company should be allowed to run its own competing game store on iOS. Those kinds of distinctions are key to Apple's arguments regarding the fees it charges for in-app purchases made on the iOS version of Fortnite and the control it exerts over Epic's game. That's because Apple maintains different App Review standards for gaming apps, especially gaming apps that stream unreviewed gaming content from the cloud, as Roblox does on iOS. "Roblox is an online community where people do things together in virtual worlds, and over the years, we began referring to these worlds as experiences, as they better represent the wide range of 3D immersive places-from obbys to virtual concerts-that people can enjoy together with their friends." What’s in a name?įurther Reading Apple allows streaming games on iOS, but there’s a catch The definition of what actually constitutes a game-and whether Roblox specifically hosts user-created games-has been surprisingly important in the Epic Games v. "The term 'experiences' is consistent with how we’ve evolved our terminology to reflect our realization of the metaverse," a Roblox spokesperson told The Verge. Individual games are now referred to as "experiences" across the website and the mobile Roblox apps, while the word "game" seems to have been scrubbed altogether. The Verge notes that what was once the "Games" tab on the Roblox website is now listed as "Discover" (though the URL still retains the old /games/ address). It's a seemingly small semantic change that nonetheless could have some major implications in the ongoing Epic Games v. Further Reading Putting Roblox’s incredible $45 billion IPO in contextRoblox, the massively valued user-created gaming platform, has removed any mention of "games" from its user interface.
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