San Francisco, May 16
Taking a cue from the ongoing legal battle between Epic Games and Apple over the App Store policies, popular virtual gaming platform Roblox has replaced the word 'game' with 'experience' on its website.
The move is because Apple maintains consistent and user-friendly policies distinguishing "apps" from "games", amid the debate over the definition of a video game.
Roblox has changed "Games" tab with "Discover" on the web, although it still points to an address of "roblox.com/games."
Developers can create and manage "experiences," and experiences have "max people" allowed, reports The Verge.
The word "game" has been replaced by "experience" across nearly the entire Roblox website.
"The term 'experiences' is consistent with how we've evolved our terminology to reflect our realisation of the metaverse," a Roblox spokesperson told The Verge.
"Roblox is an online community where people do things together in virtual worlds, and over the years, we began referring to these worlds as experiences, as they better represent the wide range of 3D immersive places that people can enjoy together with their friends," the spokesperson was quoted as saying.
In the case of Epic Games, its popular game Fortnite is a "metaverse" rather than a game, pushing the trial's scope to cover Apple's entire App Store instead of just games.
"Apple wants to prove that Epic is an almost purely game-related company," the report mentioned, thus treating Epic Games differently that app developers.
Half of Roblox's audience of more than 30 million daily users are kids under 13.
Roblox, which was launched in 2006, has been a runaway hit during the pandemic, giving socially distanced kids a social space to gather online.
ians
