I've played it with my kids. It's a simple and fun tycoon type game. You buy seeds, plant them, harvest crops, sell crops, repeat. Upgrade your crops, etc. There are gacha eggs that grow into pets that you buy with free game economy money . The few items that cost robux (which you buy with real world money) are not heavily advertised.
It's cool that this generation has their own tools to get into writing games
Probably a heck of a lot less clunky than the 2000s too! That era you had to either mod something that already existed, or attempt to make a source mod (+fight with Hammer to make maps).
Plus there weren't too many good free 3D tools, but now Blender is as good as commercial software. On top of the huge selection of good IDEs and documentation for the coding bits.
Glad to see there's still a scene around just making things for the fun of it!
The article does not analyse why it became popular or what makes it unique. A shallow article.
This is actually weirdly very inspiring! It makes me feel that I should be more bold with sharing early versions of the things that im building without being too worried about how polished they might be.
The game: Grow a Garden (on Roblox)
Does Roblox work on Linux or they still excuse not supporting it even in Wine with some bogus arguments?
Clickbait
My son makes games in Roblox. He just turned 14 and I highly encourage it. As a result he learned how to use an IDE and how to write LUA. Fantastic way to learn to code. He even downloaded blender and watched youtube tutorials on how to create 3d models.