It has been a while in the making but the giant social gaming platform that is Roblox is coming to Meta Quest, finally. Roblox and Meta have announced that the launch will take place in the coming weeks. Initially as a beta on App Lab before an official Quest Store release further down the road. This could open up exciting possibilities for developers and immersive social experiences, yet the popular platform has had its share of troubles too.
Roblox is a true multiplatform social app, supporting mobile devices (iOS and Android), desktops, Xbox and PC VR. So a port over to the Meta Quest platform always seemed like a natural progression. It’s also a big win for Quest as Roblox averages more than 66 million users per day, far exceeding the estimated number of users Quest has. All of those users have created over 15 million active experiences, although all of that content won’t be instantly accessible by Quest users.
A VR win for Roblox
As one of the leaders in online user-generated content, Roblox competes with the likes of Minecraft. The one thing VR can always benefit from is another major IP coming on board and Roblox certainly ticks that box.
It may offer a vast library of content but creators will need to make sure their projects are VR-compatible first. Hence why the open beta is taking place first, so the developer community can optimize their existing games for Quest. Or they can create entirely new ones if they so wish. Gaining feedback from Quest owners along the way.
Roblox says that: “developers will soon be able to publish their existing experiences to support VR with little to no additional coding effort required.” The platform also plans on “automatically publishing some experiences” to get things going. Roblox notes in a blog post: “We have automatically updated the Access setting for some of the experiences that use default player scripts to include support for VR devices. We have found that experiences that use default player scripts typically run well in VR without modifications.”
So there will be some content available initially, which we assume might be all the PCVR-compatible stuff.
VR social apps face huge competition
The appearance does raise some questions regarding other social apps on Quest. The likes of Rec Room won’t be phased as that already has a sizable following across multiple platforms. It’s more Meta’s own Horizon Worlds that could see a knock-on effect. The platform has struggled from the get-go, previously being roundly mocked for its basic visual style.
Furthermore, as it’s VR-only with a much smaller user base, creators will be drawn to Roblox and its revenue potential.
The other issue with Roblox is a much broader one, steaming from its core user-generated content policy. As has been widely reported, Roblox’s main user demographic is kids, and they create a lot of the content there. This has led to Roblox being accused of profiting greatly from their time and effort whilst also raising questions about online child safety.
This is obviously something Meta is keenly aware of. In its announcement blog post, it ends with: “Roblox on Quest will be available for people ages 13 and up. And parents can use existing Meta Quest parental supervision tools to help create a level of safety and supervision that’s right for their family.” This is even more telling considering the Meta VR age restriction was recently lowered to 10 years of age. In any case, Roblox on Quest is likely to make a big splash.
Roblox is coming to Meta Quest 2 and Quest Pro with Quest 3 support also confirmed.
Are you looking forward to Roblox on Quest? Let us know in the comments below.