Everyone’s known about these issues for years, and they’re only getting worse. It is harder than ever to develop on Roblox because the resources and public domain are at their lowest quality yet, and it is less engaging than ever because the product prevents communities from achieving critical mass at smaller scales. This is a discussion about Roblox’s ability to convert users into creators. If you are just measuring engine improvements such as new lighting or productivity improvements such as team create or collaborative editing, you’ll miss the forest for the trees.

This is the part where I have to admit to the one or two VC’s still reading that this isn’t close to the first time that I’ve caused a big stink over issues similar to and including the ones I’ve listed so far in this post. I’ve been a very vocal advocate of these issues for a long time. I’ve seen many employees notice these problems and attempt to address them, only do be deprioritized from above. I could keep going for a very long time about what’s been neglected and ignored. But recently the sheer volume of these problems, their massive impact on the morale and livelihood of the peers that I grew up developing alongside, and the inattention and inaction they have received has forced me to notice a new issue…

Roblox’s leadership does not understand where the company derives its value.

At the Roblox Developer’s Conference, Roblox CEO David Baszucki told a crowd of lifetime Roblox developers that one of the company’s main goals is to achieve a Roblox game development company with 100 employees. That isn’t an outlandish goal, either. The team behind the biggest game on Roblox, Adopt Me, is already a quarter of the way there based on their recent job listing.

When Roblox’s leadership thinks about the needs of developers, they think about the Adopt Me team. Product is focused on studios, not individual creators. The company benchmarks its success by looking at how many players the top games have and how much money the top teams are making. Developers are seen as a fundamentally separate cohort from normal players and there seems to be a widespread belief that developers will keep pouring their hearts into the platform as long as the wad of money being dangled over their heads grows bigger and bigger, even as it strays farther and farther out of reach.

There’s plenty of 100 employee studios in the mainstream video game industry. If there’s a lesson to be learned from Roblox’s early success, its that throwing more workers on a game doesn’t make it better. That with the right tools and environment a single individual can create something amazing that would never be attempted by a risk-averse company. The Adopt Me team isn’t going to create the next big thing no matter how much money and attention you funnel at them, but the platform cannot and will not evolve without creative masses tugging at the boundaries of what is conceivable in games.

If you piece apart Roblox down to its magic X factor, you’ll find the crux of it to be the product’s ability to convert ordinary players into creators. The innovation that Roblox created was a platform that dropped the amount of time and resources needed to create a fun game by an order of magnitude — simplifying an overly-difficult process. What we are seeing now is Roblox moving away from that innovation and coming closer in line with the rest of the industry. With that view, the growth Roblox is experiencing now can just be seen as riding on the waves of its earlier innovation.

“Roblox has also spent the last couple years moving to non-English markets across Europe, Latin America, and Asia as well. So what comes next? The metaverse.”

If there’s anything that can make Roblox investors’ dreams of owning the real-life equivalent of the OASIS from Ready Player One come true — it isn’t the path Roblox is on now.

If anything can pave the way to such a magical reality, it is the powerful, self-sustaining player-to-creator engine that Roblox owes every cent of its valuation to — the upkeep of which has been neglected. Consider this a check engine light.