[ Reading time : 5 minutes | Date : 7, February 2023 | Author : Teresa Brown ]
Roblox won't just stand by and see the rise of the unquestionably popular simulation genre. RobloxPlayer.exe is the core file for the popular online gaming platform, Roblox fans of simulator games like The Sims now have a wide range of possibilities thanks to the efforts of many developers over many years.
In simulation games, the user controls one or more virtual characters or lives them (human or otherwise).
One option for such a game is to simulate an ecosystem or to focus on people and their connections. Little Computer People's formula was improved with the Sims, which went on to become the most popular artificial life game ever made.
The Sims is a line of life simulation games that Maxis developed and that Electronic Arts sells.
With almost 200 million copies sold globally, it is one of the most popular video game franchises ever. The Sims games are primarily sandbox games because they lack any defined objectives (except for some later expansion packs and console versions that introduced this gameplay style).
The "Sims" are created by the player, who also provides them with homes, supports their emotional regulation, and satisfies their desires. Players have the option of building their own homes or putting their Sims in pre-built ones.
The variety of things a player could do with their Sims increased with each expansion pack and game in the series.
3 Roblox Games Like the Sims
1) Mega Noob Simulator
This is definitely for the gym bros. Mega Noob Simulator is a bizarre Roblox game in which players slaughter "Bacons," which are simply individuals, in order to gain in-game metrics.
As players progress from "noob" to "master," these stats are added together to make their character enormous. If players enjoy Roblox warfare, this is a nice game to play.
Along the way, players will need to purchase upgrades, use coins to increase strength, get companion pets, and buy new weapons.
Each time a boss is defeated, players advance to the next zone, where the foes are more difficult.
2) War Simulator
War Simulator is a game that will take players on a journey through time. The game begins with simple weaponry at an early age and players can work their way up to the "Future." Players can kill waves of AI warriors with various tiers of weaponry from each era.
Over 500 thousand people have favorited this incredibly popular game, which has nearly 100 million visits.
War Simulator is also updated on a regular basis, with the most recent additions being a new Ancient Era and Western Era with new armaments to try out.
3) Eating Simulator
In Eating Simulator, players can eat whatever they want, and no one will ever tell them off.
The mission is to consume everything that comes in the way but eat wisely because some things can be sold to help level up the character.
This one is listed as "Spooky" on Roblox, but if players are looking for something truly terrifying, have a look at our list of the top horror games.
The more players eat, the bigger they become until they're stomping about all the new players, flaunting their massive stomachs.
How many children play it?
Roblox doesn’t split its 100 million figure between children and adults, though it does say that 40% of them are women and girls.
In the UK alone, there are around 1.5 million children playing Roblox, according to research firm Kids Insights. Its data, based on an annual survey of 20,000 British children, suggests that 24% of 10- to 12-year-olds here are on Roblox – more than on TikTok (13%) and Snapchat (20%) and nearly as popular as Instagram (25%).
The company adds that 19% of seven-to-nine-year-olds in the UK are playing Roblox, some way behind YouTube (43%) but ahead of TV brands like CBBC (11%), Nickelodeon (10%) and Cartoon Network (8%).
Why is Roblox popular?
“We’re not a company that does a lot of marketing. The No 1 way that someone finds out about our platform is they get invited to play by a friend. And the second way is they’ll watch people playing on YouTube,” says Roblox’s chief business officer Craig Donato. “So it’s very much an organic phenomenon.”
He also suggests that one reason for Roblox’s popularity is its emphasis on “unstructured play” in an era when many children are more restricted in their physical-world activities than previous generations were.
“When I came home from school, I’d get on my bike, go out in the woods, do pick-up baseball.
But we live in a world today where it’s hard for kids to go out and have unstructured play with their friends,” he says. “Most of the experiences on our platform aren’t just about the object to win. It’s an experience you have with other people: a shared experience.”
How do people make games for it?
Anyone can make a game (or “experience” – they can simply be virtual spaces) for Roblox by downloading its separate Roblox Studio software.
The company says that it has more than 2 million “creators” – so around 2% of its players – with the most popular games being played by up to 100,000 people simultaneously.
For many children, creating a simple game or virtual room where they can hang out with friends is the limit of their ambitions, but others build bigger, more complex games, and even start to make money through taking a cut of in-game purchases using Roblox’s virtual currency, Robux.
The company expects to pay out more than $100m in 2019 alone to them.
“We have these teams forming businesses, and making millions of dollars a year,” says Donato.
Roblox is keen to foster this community in 2018 it launched its own curriculum, available under a Creative Commons licence, for educators to use. Donato says it reached more than 500,000 children in its first year.
Are people really making businesses out of this?
There are Josh Wood is one of the British Roblox game-makers. He’s 18 now, but discovered Roblox in 2013, and started to make his own games for it a year later.
“From there I continued to learn and collaborate with other people on projects until I released my most successful game to date, Game Dev Life, which has so far had over a million play sessions,” he says.
Wood has now set up his own company to make games for Roblox, hiring other developers, artists and testers, and even launching a line of toys based on Game Dev Life, in partnership with Roblox.
“With the money from my games I have been able to pay for my university education, and continue to reinvest in my business,” he says.
Another young British developer working on Roblox games is Abbie Leigh. Now aged 19, she started playing Roblox in 2011, but took the leap into development in 2017, initially creating assets for other people’s games.
She’s currently working on three games, including her own sports-themed title, and hopes to make a full-time career out of freelance development.
“It never feels like a job, which of course is the best part. I enjoy building and do so in my free time, and I’m simply rewarded when it comes to doing what I love.”
Game Dev Life by DoubleJGames. Players must try to build a successful game.
Is Roblox safe for children?
When Roblox has made headlines in the mainstream media, they have often been negative: from reports of adults trying to groom children on the platform in 2017 to, most infamously, a virtual sexual assault in June 2018, when a seven-year old player’s avatar was attacked by two male avatars, whose players had hacked the game’s code to show explicit imagery.
The following month, the Sun published an investigation claiming that Roblox was “a haven for roleplaying as jihadis, Nazi leaders and Ku Klux Klan members”.
The company says that it has been working hard to tackle wrongdoers and fix any loopholes in its platform.
“We’re not defensive if things have ever gone wrong. We hold our hands up and say, ‘This is what we’ve done to fix it, and this is what we’re doing to make sure it never happens again,’” says Laura Higgins, a British child-safety veteran hired by Roblox in January 2019 as its ‘director of digital civility’. Her job is to learn from those problems and prevent activities that could harm young players.
“We really do start with safety as our No 1 priority. We acknowledge that we have younger players, so you have to be as ahead of the game as possible in terms of safety,” she says.
“It’s an age-old thing: if people have bad intentions towards children, they’re going to gravitate towards where the children are.
We’re constantly reviewing the tools that we have, and looking at ways to improve them.”
How can parents keep informed about it?
Another measure taken by Roblox is to launch a section of its website called For Parents, which explains its safety tools – from algorithms blocking swearwords and names and addresses in text chats, to its reporting system for inappropriate chat or content. There’s even an algorithm detecting whether players’ avatars are wearing “appropriate attire”.
Higgins admits that parents can get “very frustrated” when there’s a horror story around safety on a children’s platform like Roblox: “You think, how hard can it be? [to stop these things happening],” she says. “And it’s very hard, is the answer. When things go wrong, it’s because somebody is trying very hard to break your systems.”
She’s keen to make sure that parents also see the positive side of the games that children are creating on Roblox, citing the example of a game made by a teenager whose father had recently died.
“He developed a game around managing mental wellbeing, mental health, as a journey for other young people experiencing those kinds of issues,” she says. “It was an amazing outlet for him, but it also helped many young people who played it, and were able to explore their emotions.”
That’s an aspect also highlighted by developer Abbie Leigh. “I absolutely love the developer community as a whole. We all stick together, support each other’s creations and help each other when we need it the most,” she says. “From feedback on games, to personal issues.”