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Game creation platform Roblox will belatedly launch for PlayStation 4 and PS5 in October.
The hugely-popular title arrived for Xbox in 2015, following earlier releases on PC, iPhone and Android. A PlayStation launch has taken far longer to materialise, however, reportedly due to concerns from Sony’s Jim Ryan around the game’s popularity with children.
Comments made by Ryan in 2022 – surfaced this year as part of the FTC vs Microsoft trial – stated that PlayStation had historically been cautious around Roblox due to its millions of young users and “anything that could potentially exploit them”. However, Ryan also signalled a thawing of the company’s attitude to the game, noting that he had a “hope” the situation would change.
And change it now has. Roblox announced its arrival on PlayStation today at its annual Roblox Developer Conference, which runs until tomorrow in San Francisco.
A full launch for Meta Quest 2 headsets is coming later this month, meanwhile, after a million downloads of Roblox’s Quest 2 open beta.
Roblox also announced a number of new features, including Roblox Connect – a kind of in-game avatar chat service that can call your mobile phone and launch the game. Users are represented by Roblox avatars in virtual surroundings, with facial movements and expressions mapped.
For those who use Roblox to create games, the company announced Assistant, an AI companion for the game’s built-in development studio to aid newcomers and accelerate advanced creators by quickly suggesting functions or lines of code.
Exactly what caused PlayStation’s opinion on Roblox to change following previous reports which highlighted failures in its moderation processes, we don’t know. However, the platform has recently released stats which show its audience is now aging up, with 38 percent of Roblox’s most active users over the age of 17 in 2022.
There’s also the enormous popularity of Roblox, which PlayStation surely wants on its platform. Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney stated that Roblox had 250 million monthly active users earlier this year, compared to Minecraft’s 100 million and Fortnite’s 70 million.
