The latest report from data firm Newzoo shows that there is little overlap between players of Roblox and Minecraft and players of more traditional AAA hits.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at GDC Festival of Gaming, Newzoo director of consulting Ben Porter explained that fancy visuals have become less important. “I think there’s been a shift in the last 10 years,” he says, “where the idea of chasing graphics has kind of faded and now you see the most popular games on the planet are not the most graphically high-fidelity games.”
Roblox in particular has been at the forefront of this trend. “We saw that its playtime grew around 50% year over year, which is huge. A lot of that was driven by experiences like Steal a Brainrot and Grow a Garden, which are very viral things.”
He continues: “The question is, what else are those people playing? What is the implication for the rest of the games industry? And when we look at that, we see that Roblox and Minecraft players are playing a lot of the other really big top ten live service games.”
Those games include Fortnite (which has a 55% overlap with Roblox players and a 46% overlap with Minecraft players), GTAV (28% overlap with Roblox; 25% overlap with Minecraft), and Call of Duty (26% overlap with Roblox; 22% overlap with Minecraft).
But do Roblox and Minecraft players also play other titles apart from the above? “There’s a theory that these folks then drop out and play single player experiences and then they go back to their live service experiences,” says Porter. “And to some extent that is true, but what we find is that Roblox players underindex in what a lot of the industry would consider very ‘traditionally good games’.”
“The way to interpret this is that someone who played Roblox is about 0.4 times as likely to play Monster Hunter Wilds compared to the average player – this is specifically for PlayStation and Xbox.”
Some of the console titles that Minecraft players are least likely to play include games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Borderlands 4, Ghost of Yōtei, NBA 2K26, and EA Sports Madden NFL 26. The list for Roblox players is similar, including Monster Hunter Wilds, Borderlands 4, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Ghost of Yōtei, Alan Wake 2, and Hogwarts Legacy.
All of this seems to indicate that Roblox and Minecraft players sit in their own siloes, unlikely to drift away to more traditional AAA games. The fact that these players are often in the time-rich, cash-poor younger demographic also helps to explain their lack of appetite for buying relatively expensive AAA games.
However, Newzoo did find some overlap between Roblox and Minecraft players and other games outside the top ten live-service titles. “We do see that certain experiences like Gang Beasts, Among Us, and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, people playing Roblox overindex in those. They’re still a relatively small component, but they do get attracted to those games, which look a lot like the types of experiences that you might have within Roblox itself.
“So as a developer, you can’t really change what the Roblox audience likes, but I think it is important to be aware of this pattern. Especially because these are oftentimes younger players, this is their first experience within gaming, and that might set preferences for years to come. So there’s question marks: how does the gaming audience evolve from here?”
That remains the big question facing the games industry: will younger players keep the habits of their youth and stick with free-to-play live-service titles and sandbox games as they grow older? Or will they “graduate” on to more traditional AAA titles as they age?
If it’s the former, we might see titles like Roblox and Minecraft become ever bigger while the market for traditional AAA titles shrinks away. But when speaking to GamesIndustry.biz last year, former Sony Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden was convinced the latter will be the case, as young people’s taste matures with age. “As we all grow older, we all move towards different interests and different enthusiasms,” he said.
The Newzoo report also predicted that PC will overtake console revenue by 2028, and that the market will see its “first notable expansion since the pandemic slowdown.”
