In 2013, ROBLOX surpassed 50 million registered accounts. Just a couple weeks ago, we saw more than 160,000 ROBLOXians logged in simultaneously. Needless to say, our bustling community creates more games, worlds, avatar accessories, and assorted media than any single person could ever hope to explore. Once in a while, a creation catches such fire that it becomes a trend – and the benefits snowball from there. In this article, we are looking back at all 365 days of 2013 to find out what user creations performed the best and resonated the most.

For a recap of the year from our team’s perspective, make sure to check out our four-part mini-series.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 10 most purchased gear (excluding promotional items)

Top 10 most purchased shirts

Top 10 most purchased pants

Top 5 most re-sold items

Top 5 most traded items

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

Top 5 most discussed blog posts

Top 5 most viewed blog posts

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?