Last weekend, ROBLOX reached a milestone: 100,000 concurrent users. This achievement inspired us to do some research about where this figure stands in the greater scheme of gaming and online entertainment.

Before getting to the facts, note that “100,000 concurrent players” means 100,000 authenticated ROBLOX users were playing games, building in ROBLOX Studio and browsing Roblox.com at the same time. It does not include every visitor at Roblox.com – that would make it a much larger number – nor does it represent guests (players who are not logged into a ROBLOX account). We estimate there were 20,000 guests playing at the time.

Steam Games

One interesting comparison is Steam’s Game Stats. As you can see in the below chart, generated on Wednesday the 14th, one Steam game, Dota 2, had peak current players above 100,000 (140,023). The two next-highest entries are Counter-Strike (peaked at 51,809) and Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s Multiplayer (peaked at 51,428). These figures change based on the day of the week and time of day, but it puts the number of simultaneous ROBLOX players in perspective.

These numbers skyrocket on occasion; for instance, the Escapist reports that Skyrim’s all-time, record-setting peak number of Steam players was 280,000. This occurred within the first 24 hours of its release.

Non-Steam Core Games

According to this VentureBeat article, ArenaNet claims that Guild Wars 2, an MMO released in August, 2012, reached a peak of 400,000 concurrent users. The same article cites analyst estimations that BioWare MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic averaged roughly 350,000 concurrent users at its peak. World of Warcraft is a fixture in the traditional MMO market. We couldn’t find an exact figure for peak concurrent users in the recent past, but it’s sure to be respectable, even in spite of declining subscription numbers.

There are obvious differences between ROBLOX and these traditional MMOs – namely, we iterate on and add new powerful tools that give users the freedom to create fresh content, while MMO developers spend significant time building expansions and new features in order to retain users. ROBLOX, having grown steadily since its 2005 launch, has also outlasted most MMOs that have been released since then. While not a traditional MMO, ROBLOX has massive content offerings that create a similar experience. Therefore, we also like to compare ourselves to games in that category.

League of Legends, a popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), is one of the stickiest games in existence. It has attracted enough total players to peak, according to Riot Games, at 3 million concurrent (that’s an average of daily peaks over the course of a month). EVE Online reported peak concurrent users of 63,170 players in 2011; that sounds relatively small, but all players were in its universe, New Eden, on a single server.

Engagement

There’s a wide range of reported concurrent players across the gaming spectrum, and there’s no defined standard for how the figures are collected. What makes 100,000 concurrent ROBLOX players particularly substantial is the amount of time those players spend in-game. With roughly 3 million active accounts, players log upwards of 29 million in-game hours (or 1.74 billion minutes) per month. That’s 580 minutes per account, roughly equivalent to 29 television shows (assuming they’re 20 minutes) a month. We believe we’ll radically increase our reach with a mobile experience targeting all major platforms, starting with ROBLOX for iPad.

Also, according to September, 2012 comScore data for Games sites, ROBLOX is second only to EA Online in terms of minutes spent on Roblox.com (this is separate from game play). ROBLOX users spend significant time participating in our multi-layered platform – and we haven’t even touched on building in ROBLOX Studio.

Thanks to all of the users who helped us reach 100,000 concurrent players last Saturday. You’re a part of ROBLOX history.