Minecraft Challenger Roblox Just Raised $92M In Funding With 48M Users Worldwide

For years, Minecraft has been the go-to juggernaut of a gaming platform when it comes to free-form sandbox building simulators. However, a new contender in the form of Roblox has been making waves and threatening the Microsoft property with its growing popularity. With over 48 million users worldwide and having just raised $92 million in funding, this new player’s prospect is ballooning fast.

What makes games like Minecraft and Roblox so enjoyable, aside from the freedom to build anything that the player can imagine, is the matter of social interaction. Both games allow users to not only show their work to others, players can even invade each other’s worlds, which does not always have good results.

The biggest difference that Roblox has with Minecraft, however, is how up-to-date the graphics style seems. Whereas Minecraft mostly has pixelated blocks, Roblox offers smoother, almost Lego-like characters and environments. This has allowed the game to grow exponentially, with over 23.8 million players from North America alone.

As for the huge fund that the company just raised, it did so with the help of Meritech Capital Partners and Index Ventures, Forbes reports. The massive amount that the campaign managed to scrounge up will be used to reinforce Roblox’s infrastructure and to expand its already massive influence all over the world.

The most astounding aspect to the game’s rising popularity is the fact that much of it can be attributed to word-of-mouth. Advertising for Roblox has been few and far in between, which makes it similar to what Minecraft did in its early days.

One of the results of the successful round of funding is the addition of Meritech Capital Partners and Index Ventures executives on the board of Roblox, Craig Sherman and Neil Rimer, respectively. It seems that bringing the pair on board is part of the deal that made raising $92 million possible.