The Year in Review, Part 5: Top Games, Items and Topics

January 04, 2014

The games

There are many things to do on ROBLOX, but if there’s one activity that unites almost everyone who participates, it’s playing the games. In this first section, we’ll dig into the most popular games of the year from multiple perspectives: most visited, top earning, most “favorited,” and highest rated.

Top 25 most visited games

A total of six games accumulated more than 10 million visits across the year, which is two more than there were in 2012. The list was capped by Paintball!, a long-successful competitive FPS with 2013 visits of almost 13.5 million and lifetime visits of more than 27 million. Congratulations to the game’s developer, daxter33, on the success.

Paintball! by daxter33 / 13,438,456 visits
Welcome to the Neighborhood of Robloxia by testin423 / 11,944,282 visits
Call of ROBLOXia 5: ROBLOX at War by litozinnamon / 11,601,133 visits
Catalog Heaven by Seranok / 10,837,131 visits
Base Wars: The Land by d4rk886 / 10,531,043 visits
Grand Theft Auto 5 by Janlari / 10,165,287 visits
Boys Vs Girls Island Wars! by tadcool / 9,980,885 visits
Apocalypse Rising by Gusmanak / 9,493,053 visits
ROBLOXity by 1dev3 / 9,165,274 visits
Sword Fighting Tournament by TheGamer101 / 9,043,332 visits
Survive The Disasters! by TheFurryFox / 8,426,079 visits
Kohls Admin House (NBC) by agspureiam / 8,358,002 visits
Build a Hideout and Fight by Voxhall / 8,293,933 visits
The Complex by spyro372 / 7,726,091 visits
The Super Fun Obby! by GPR3 / 7,401,334 visits
Creeper Island! by juststeven / 6,919,361 visits
Natural Disaster Survival by stickmasterluke / 6,406,815 visits
Grand Blox Auto 5 by thurston97 / 5,535,643 visits
Deadzone by DeadzoneZackZak / 5,284,139 visits
Skate 999,999,999 Miles Down The City! by SuddenRush12G / 5,040,284 visits
Battlefield by DeadzoneZackZak / 4,953,514 visits
Welcome to the Town of ROBLOXia by 1dev2 / 4,760,318 visits
Have a Family in the Town of ROBLOXia by Julius5005 / 4,392,313 visits
Flood Escape by crazyblox / 4,380,091 visits
Mega Fun & Easy Obby! by ZzthallaszZ / 4,305,844 visits

Top 10 monetizing games (game passes, gear commissions and paid access)

This year we continued to diversify the available means of earning ROBUX, our virtual currency, while also further incentivizing game developers to pursue game monetization. This presented a new way for developers to gain visibility without necessarily having to rack up millions of game plays. Games that had success in this arena generally also have high-quality gameplay, which is exactly what we anticipated we’d see.

Sword Fighting Tournament by TheGamer101
Pokemon REBORN RPG by Rukiryo
The Greenwood Town by Floppa98
Kohls Admin House (NBC) by agspureiam
Washington, District of Columbia by Nightgaladeld
The Hunger Games by Ozzypig by Ozzypig
Catching Fire: The Hunger Games Sequel by SmoothBlockModel
Skybound by Imaginaerum
AdventureBlox by NowDoTheHarlemShake
Broken Bones by BuilderZam

Top 5 highest-rated games (with at least 2,000 votes)

Thumbs up/thumbs down was a new feature for 2013. The following games have the best ratio of thumbs up to thumbs down, and have all accumulated no fewer than 2,000 votes.

The Stalker by CloneTrooper1019 / 95.62% thumbs up
Epic Mining 2 by Piedude777 / 95.61% thumbs up
Street Racing Unleashed by dragoniteshadow99 / 95.1% thumbs up
Call of ROBLOXia 5: ROBLOX at War by litozinnamon / 95.0% thumbs up
Distilled by tyridge77 / 94.9% thumbs up

Top 10 most “favorited” games

“Favoriting” a game essentially adds it to your personal playlist. It can be very powerful, as having a game slot with many favorites keeps it in front of players’ eyes until they remove it.

Welcome to the Neighborhood of Robloxia by testin423 / 140,310 favorites
Grand Theft Auto 5 by Janlari / 140,164 favorites
Catalog Heaven by Seranok / 127,847 favorites
Survive The Disasters! by TheFurryFox / 116,434 favorites
Apocalypse Rising by Gusmanak / 116, 406 favorites
Boys Vs Girls Island Wars! by tadcool / 108,177 favorites
Paintball! by daxter33 / 106,750 favorites
Call of ROBLOXia 5: ROBLOX at War by litozinnamon / 106,428 favorites
ROBLOXity by 1dev3 / 105,973 favorites
Skate 999,999,999 Miles Down The City! by SuddenRush12G / 92,553 favorites

Most concurrent players in a single game

ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013 attracted more than 19,000 simultaneous players on its launch date, which was (and is), by far, a ROBLOX record.

For more subjective, hand-picked ROBLOX game awards from 2013, take a look at the Hall of Fame winners announced at the summer BLOXcons.

The goods

You have to look good while you’re exploring all the great games and worlds the community has built, right? Right.

Top 25 most purchased virtual items

Top 5 most traded items

Riptide (41,584 trades)
Sword Pack (31,536 trades)
Sk9r Boi (28,780 trades)
Perfectly Legitimate Business Hat (26,853 trades)
POW! To the Moon! Egg (23,106 trades)

The buzz

2013 was a busy year and it ended with a lot of development in a little time. Here’s a brief look back at the hot topics and a totally subjective perspective of the best updates to surface last year.

Website traffic milestones

We logged approximately 4.3 million total visits on September 21st, the day of Virtual BLOXcon
On December 23rd, we broke 160,000 concurrent logged-in ROBLOXians

Best blog crash

The one on December 7th, when chiefjustus directed 7,000 BLOXcast viewers to this post at the same time.

Top 5 features of 2013

Dynamic lighting: this was not only a unanimously well-received feature, but a game changer. It dramatically affected the look of ROBLOX and opened many new building and gameplay possibilities.
Outfits: being able to save and load different looks for your character with a couple clicks is a convenience that millions of ROBLOXians have already harnessed.
Binary file format: this under-the-radar update created huge reductions in the file sizes of ROBLOX levels, which also means much shorter load/upload/test times.
Impulse solver physics: a new approach to simulating physics collisions has improved ROBLOX’s performance when lots of parts are flying around in games.
Developer Exchange: this is only a few months old in and we’ve already heard fantastic stories of hobbyist game developers supporting their lives and educations through ROBLOX.

Honorable mentions:

Whew. Information overload. What were your favorite things of 2013?

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