Roblox Is Minting Teen Millionaires
Roblox creators are raking in hundreds of thousands a month from simple games like ‘Fisch,’ even as major studios cut jobs and cancel blockbusters.
Illustration: Zoey Kim/Bloomberg
The line separating work and play has always been blurred for Roblox teen millionaire Nate Colley. As a kid with an iPad growing up in a Nova Scotia trailer park, he could have almost any job in the company’s online game world — a food server in Work at a Pizza Place or a logger in Lumber Tycoon. He just couldn’t be a fisherman.
So in between homework and a part-time job at a Chinese restaurant, Colley invented Fisch, a popular game on the 144-million-member Roblox Corp. platform. Today, at 19, he’s collecting $400,000 a month for his creation, including royalties from Lego A/S and Walmart Inc., which advertise on Fisch’s digital fishing rods.