VIRTUAL TYCOONS
I ALWAYS imagined being a shark would be quite straightforward. You’re an apex predator. You swim around; you bite people. But actually it’s much more stressful than that.
During my afternoon as a mako shark, a guy comes at me with a harpoon. Later someone shoots at me using a US navy destroyer.
“You can always upgrade to being a great white,” says my shark adviser, Simon Burgess. “No one will mess with you then.”
Don’t worry, no fish were harmed while conducting this experiment. I was simply playing Shark-Bite, an online game on the insanely popular gaming platform Roblox. Ask your children. Globally, 43 million of them immerse themselves in its 20 million games (or “experiences”) every day.
Roblox isn’t as cool as the slightly more mature games offered by the Fortnite developer or Minecraft, but it’s where you go if you want to break out of jail (Jailbreak has been played 5,2 billion times), adopt a pet (Adopt Me! has been played 23,8 billion times) or do something more prosaic such as run a pizzeria (Work at a Pizza Place has been played more than three billion times).
But the truly astonishing thing about Roblox is that, although it launched as a gaming platform in 2006, the company decided eight years ago to offer tools for youngsters to create their own games and post them on the platform.
If your game is successful, you can make a lot of money.
That’s what Simon, who’s based in Bournemouth, England, and his business partner, Max Entwistle (both 24), who lives
