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> In short, Roblox isn’t a game at all: it is world in which one of the things you can do is play games, with a persistent identity, persistent set of friends, persistent money, all disconnected from the device that you use to access the world. That is the transformational change.

Second Life, The Sims Online. We’ve been here before. Those platforms didn’t nail it like Roblox, but Roblox did not transform anything.



Remember that sweet time when marketing departments of (aspiring to be) trendy companies where rushing to create their "digital presence" in Second Life... Yes, we will interview candidates, meet our business partners, talk to our customers in there, etc. We had a good laugh.


We had a professor who held office hours in second life.


I almost worked for a startup whose goal was to offer MS PowerPoint and Excel in Second Life ... for presentations


I'm curious where I too could run into such exciting opportunities


Did they get funded?


VRChat is becoming one of those platforms. Creating is easy and I spend way too much time playing a faithfully recreated 3D VR of Among Us in there!


Second Life and The Sims Online are wildly different from Roblox. You're right that the particular sentence you've picked doesn't capture what Roblox did different, but it did transform the building of virtual experiences.


You can add MUDs and MOOs to that list.


Roblox got mass adoption by integrating with educational platforms. Massive quantitative change is often qualitative enough to be transformational.


This is a classic "Sometimes it's the early bird that gets the worm, sometimes the second mouse gets the cheese..."


Honest question (not a gamer) - did any of those platforms allow 3rd parties to develop games on their platforms?


Second Life


Wasn't this the same rhetoric as Fortnite too?




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