On a weekday afternoon, 10-year-old Vishwas, who wishes to go by his first name, leans over his laptop that seems to nearly envelop his adolescent head. His fingers hover over the trackpad, measured, methodical, as if strategically placing crosshairs over a virtual target.
But all this posture and precision is not about aiming in a game. It’s about designing one.
Vishwas wants to build a game that travels far and wide. He is strategically placing microtransactions in a tycoon game where players compete to earn money, climb leaderboards, and steal collectable digital creatures called “brainrots”—the hook of his game.
He is designing the game so that when players buy special passes, he will earn Robux, the primary virtual currency on the Roblox platform, which hosts user-generated 3D games. He can then spend Robux on other games. It is a closed loop of value creation and reinvestment, described with startling clarity by a child who has not yet learned basic algebra.
He discovered Roblox the way many children now discover digital worlds—through YouTube Shorts. Strategy videos led him to Blox Fruits—another popular action-adventure game hosted on Roblox, which now has over 150 million daily active users, and around 56% of them are under 17, according to TAR.
He initially tried using AI to build the game, but gave up quickly when he found an alternative that allowed him to build it himself—Luau.
Reinventing the Gaming Architecture
Roblox runs on Luau, a scripting language derived from Lua and designed to be lightweight and embeddable within larger systems. It features simple commands, a forgiving syntax, and rich tooling that automatically flags common errors as you code, making it easier for beginners to learn within an integrated environment.
Dhruvanandan V, a medical software writer, explains why that matters. In medical software, customers need flexibility to customise validation logic without touching the core infrastructure. Roblox applies the same principle to millions of creators.
“It is lightweight and embeddable, used to configure functionality for other languages. Roblox has created a tiny sandbox for Lua code to run inside the main software,” he tells AIM. “Lua can be embedded. This is very important.”
The sandbox is the quiet enabler. Children can write scripts, design worlds, and experiment with logic without breaking the system itself. They operate inside guardrails, but within those guardrails, they have astonishing freedom.
Twenty years ago, building a game required downloading engines, navigating forums, and editing files that could crash your computer if handled incorrectly. Creation was a niche hobby layered on top of consumption. Now, the architecture has changed.
Building As You Go
Ridhav Surya V, eight years old, discovered Roblox through a friend. For him, the platform has a more social value. “I play with [my] friends. It is a little addictive,” he says, adding that it is fun because “we can kill non-player characters (NPCs) by stealing brainrots while communicating through in-game chats.”
But he also wants to build.
He imagines a feature he calls the ‘Red Carpet’, a game where players compete to grab limited brainrots. The idea is not about narrative or art, but competition. He understands that making such a system work is difficult. “Coding is hard,” he laments.
And yet he wants to learn. That’s because Roblox makes it easier with Luau, playing a considerable role in lowering the median age at which children encounter coding logic, from middle school to primary grades. Around 73% of Roblox’s users are under 18, and they are learning scripting, multiplayer system design, and user engagement loops.
And then there’s monetisation.
Roblox operates a virtual economy built on Robux, where players spend real money on in-game items, upgrades, and access. Developers earn Robux from these transactions and convert it into cash through the DevEx (Developer Exchange) system, where 1 Robux is approximately $0.0038 as of 2025, according to the Roblox DevForum.
While creators may receive a significant share of in-game spending in Robux terms, effective real-world earnings are lower, often estimated at around 20–30% of total user spend, the forum data shows. Roblox does not disclose a fixed, universal revenue split.
The scale of payouts, however, is substantial. Roblox paid $923 million to creators in 2024 and has crossed $1 billion in annual payouts, according to its economic impact report. At the same time, earnings are highly uneven. The top 1,000 creators earn over $1 million annually on average, while the median creator earns roughly $1,000–1,500 per year.
The New Arcade
The shift is dramatic. From competitive and social multiplayer games like Fortnite and PUBG that defined Gen Z gaming, Gen Alpha prefers more interactive, immersive gaming that blends user-generated content with communities.
Just a generation older, Vinodh MC played games that were far more contained. Finite.
“The conversations about gaming I had with my friends concerned how good we were at sniping enemies or how smoothly we could handle platforming in games,” the 26-year-old data scientist recalls.
Now, he observes, the focus is on trading and collecting objects with other players online. “Skill has very little to do with the gaming of today.” It is not that modern games lack complexity. However, ownership, scarcity and timing often matter more than dexterity.
The rise of creator-led ecosystems like Roblox has also marked a sharp departure from traditional game development, where building games required formal training, expensive tools, and studio backing. The new platforms collapse these barriers, offering built-in engines, Lua scripting, and instant global distribution.
Unlike conventional pipelines, where developers build for players, these ecosystems let players become developers. Kids are drawn to this model not just for creativity, but for ownership, visibility, and the ability to monetise their ideas early, making game design feel participatory rather than professionalised.
India’s interest in Roblox picked up in Q1 2024, when the platform saw a 58% year-over-year jump in the country. But this was long coming. The COVID-19 lockdown saw a surge in online gaming, with India becoming the world’s fastest-growing mobile gaming market in 2020, per KPMG. Now, the country is estimated to have more than 500 million gamers, with Grand View Research projecting the market to sustain a double-digit growth till 2030, reaching $35 billion.
More Indian studios are building original intellectual property, experimenting with scalable formats and aiming for global audiences. That reflects in the massive popularity of Indian IP games like FAU-G, Ludo King, and Indus Battle Royale.
YouTube also plays a powerful role in shaping how children approach gaming, with the massive popularity of gaming channels like PewDiePie, IShowSpeed, Kai Cenat, and Techno Gamerz. These creators play popular titles with a mix of high-energy commentary, humour, and creative gameplay.
“The kids are introduced to gaming via YouTube, and they learn how to play based on what they see,” Vinodh comments.
Anuj Sahani, Head of KIGI and Director of Publishing at KRAFTON India, says India has transitioned from a largely consumption-driven gaming market to an emerging development ecosystem.
“A significant change in the ecosystem is that young users are increasingly learning logic, design thinking, and programming fundamentals by building interactive experiences, not just consuming them.”
“This expands the entry point into game development beyond traditional engineering pathways,” he highlights.
The rise of game engines, creator platforms, and embedded scripting tools has dramatically lowered technical barriers. But scale is only part of the story.
Imitation, Aesthetics, and the Loop
From an industry perspective, an eight-year-old experimenting with Luau is not just playing. They are accumulating systems-thinking experience.
Vinodh sees both the opportunity and the risk.
“Game design is a very interesting problem, and I like that so many kids are into building their own games,” he says. But he worries about imitation.
“Like anyone who starts a new hobby, kids start with imitating games that they see, but some games have concepts of gambling in them and some monetary system that will be traded,” he warns. “This makes gaming mostly about how lucky you are, which increases the time you spend in it.”
He is particularly struck by his younger cousin’s [Vishwas] motivation. “The only reason he wants to build a game in Roblox is to earn Robux by selling his game and then spending that in other games to collect various brainrots.”
Modern gaming platforms have developed extraordinarily sophisticated behavioural systems. They now use reinforcement learning to design a game, teaching an AI agent to learn to play through trial-and-error and using those strategies to create challenging NPCs and game levels. They optimise incentives, timing, and reward schedules at scale. They blur the line between entertainment and economics.
Creation then becomes a means to design monetisation and accumulate currency through predatory game mechanics.
“Roblox's slot-machining model doesn't have a lot to do with player skill or honing it,” Vinodh highlights.
There is also an aesthetic difference that troubles him.
“When it came to graphics and the look of the game, optimisation was an important conversation we had with friends growing up,” he says. Hardware limitations made optimisation a point of pride.
Today, even mid-range laptops come with 8GB of RAM, and the games children gravitate toward are often deliberately low-poly to support massive multiplayer environments. “There’s no aesthetic pleasure to be had in this low-effort game created over a weekend,” he argues.
Vinodh sees modern online games as perpetually unfinished, endlessly updated to sustain engagement. His sharpest critique lingers. “Roblox games have come to represent everything wrong with the internet: gambling, engagement farming, micro transactions, and collectables being paywalled for real money.”
An Editable Childhood
But there are some safeguards.
Roblox uses a tiered age-verification system that combines facial age estimation and optional ID checks to unlock features such as chat and voice, according to the platform’s safety guidelines. Users are grouped into age bands that control communication and content access, with stricter limits for under-13s. Guardrails include chat filtering, parental controls, content ratings, and moderation systems.
However, since basic access doesn’t require verification, risks remain on this large user-generated platform. The UK research and innovation agency Revealing Reality found “deeply disturbing risks” in an investigation last year, identifying that children could still encounter inappropriate content and interact with adults despite safety controls.
“More concerning still, these environments offer plenty of open but secluded corners of virtual maps where users can pull someone aside for what amounts to a private voice conversation, away from other players,” it noted.
Despite these concerns, what makes this moment historically significant is not simply that children are spending time online. It is that they are building within those spaces.
Back at the laptop, Vishwas is still designing his tycoon game. He talks about leaderboards and brainrots with equal seriousness. Meanwhile, Surya admits that coding is hard, but is determined to try.
They do not see the game, any game, as a finished world. They see it as editable.
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