Why roblox changed games to experiences

Roblox now defines itself as a massively popular "experience" creation tool, rather than gaming platform, after the distinction came up in the ongoing Epic Games v. Apple trial.

Credit: RobloxCredit: Roblox

Over the past few days, Roblox has combed through its website and replaced the word "game" with "experience." A tab that once read "Games" now says "Discover," and the company has replaced the word "player" with "people." This all appears to be in response to the ongoing Epic Games v. Apple trial, according to The Verge

In its arguments, Apple wants to prove that "Fortnite" is a game and that Epic Games is a game-making company. Doing so will allow it to defend its App Store rules as consistent across categories, and will also shore up defenses of its ban on cloud gaming services.

Epic Games, on the other hand, has been attempting to prove that "Fortnite" is a "metaverse" or "experience," rather than a game. That's because this would push the scope of the trial from games apps to the entire App Store.

That's where "Roblox" comes in. The platform has blurred the line between a game and a game engine, since players enter individual experience created by users rather than a shared world. There are, in fact, game studios that build entire games within Roblox.

Back in 2017, that murkiness had Apple concerned. Apple senior App Review director Trystan Kosmynka said he was "surprised" that "Roblox" had been approved. Epic Games brought up the approval in court, hoping to poke holes in Apple's review process.

However, Kosmynka defended the approval by claiming that "Roblox" -- and experiences within it -- are not games.

"If you think of a game or app, games are incredibly dynamic, games have a beginning, an end, there's challenges in place. I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences that are in Minecraft. These are maps. These are worlds. And they have boundaries in terms of what they're capable of," he said.

He went on to argue that experiences built within "Roblox" weren't games because they were contained within the sandbox of the actual app, which Apple had approved.

That's important, because Apple bars third-party app stores and doesn't allow cloud gaming services that package multiple titles within a single app. Epic Games has hammered the Cupertino tech giant on this point during the trial.

Other debates between the two companies centered on rules that bar developers from advertising about non-iOS platforms and whether or not iOS users play "Fortnite" on other devices.

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It would appear that Roblox is undergoing something of a branding shift, the timing of which is interesting to say the least. Apparently, the game has silently started to change parts of its verbiage, renaming “game” to “experience” and renaming the “Games” tab of the browser to “Discover” instead.

According to a Roblox spokesperson, this is totally a normal and expected thing to do:

“The term ‘experiences’ is consistent with how we’ve evolved our terminology to reflect our realization of the metaverse. 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 lobbies to virtual concerts — that people can enjoy together with their friends.”

While this explanation tracks with references to a metaverse that Roblox has made before, the timing is also curious since the Epic vs. Apple trial has been predicated on how games like Roblox aren’t games at all, an argument raised by testimony from Apple marketing head Trystan Kosmynka when he testified, “I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences that are in Minecraft. These are maps. These are worlds. And they have boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of.”

The definition shift may also have something to do with Roblox’s attempts to make itself profitable, especially considering the revelation that the game is absolutely hemorrhaging money since it went public last year. Whatever the reason, the games aren’t games now, supposedly.

source: The Verge via Kotaku

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Enlarge / Just some of the characters that don't star in games anymore, according to Roblox.

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 roblox.com/games/ address). 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 term 'experiences' is consistent with how we’ve evolved our terminology to reflect our realization of the metaverse," a Roblox spokesperson told The Verge. "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 [obstacle courses] to virtual concerts—that people can enjoy together with their friends."

What’s in a name?

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. It also plays into Epic's argument that the company should be allowed to run its own competing game store on iOS.

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. 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.

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In the most basic definitional sense, the vast majority of the individual user-created "experiences" Roblox provides could be considered games. Many ape popular existing game genres and titles in providing interactive play spaces with clear rules, goals, and even scoring. 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.

At the Epic Games v. 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. Games, in Kosmynka's mind, need to have a well-defined beginning and end, as well as challenges in place for players to overcome. "I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences in Minecraft," he said at one point. "These are maps. These are worlds. And they have boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of."

But in a 2017 email thread presented at trial, Kosmynka asked the App Review team if Roblox (which he mistyped as "Roboblox") "follow[s] our guidelines" and said he was "surprised this was approved" by the review board. 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.

App Review policies aside, when it comes to raw dollars and cents, Roblox is playing ball with Apple's requirements. 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. Those are the kinds of fees that Epic was explicitly trying to avoid when it launched its own Epic Direct Payments option in Fortnite on iOS, setting off this whole legal drama in the first place. Epic almost certainly wouldn't agree to a similar cut for Apple even if it were allowed to host its own "store-within-a-store" game offering on iOS, akin to Roblox.

But when it comes how Apple's content review process, the Roblox situation helps highlight the double standard in how the company treats content in games versus content in non-gaming apps and where it draws the line between the two. That's true whether or not Roblox calls these games "experiences" or "meep morps" or anything else it might come up with.