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Last July, Roblox announced the Game Fund, a program to give developers funding and support for Roblox experiences. Timed with the Game Developers Conference this week, the company is using those funded games to showcase the range of experiences possible with its tools.
There are a few parts to what Roblox is announcing on Tuesday. One is that Roblox is revealing for the first time that it’s investing $25 million as part of the Game Fund. Roblox had previously said it would be giving $500,000 minimum in each Roblox experience it selected for the Game Fund, but now we know how much will be given out in total.
Roblox has already announced three games getting support from the fund — Winds of Fortune, Rolling Thunder, and neonKnights — and it’s sharing “first looks” of two of those experiences on Tuesday. Winds of Fortune, from developer Sonar Studios, looks a little bit like Microsoft’s Sea of Thieves, featuring ship battles, mysterious islands, and even a giant sea serpent creature. Rolling Thunder, from Splitting Point Studios, is a gritty first-person shooter.
I recommend you check out both of them in a trailer below — I was struck by how they don’t have much of the blocky Roblox aesthetic you may be familiar with. Roblox tells me they’re each in pre-alpha, which means to me that parts of the game could change as development continues. If you want to try Rolling Thunder right now, it’s available for free on Roblox — though, in my five minutes of testing, I found it to be a pretty rudimentary military shooter.
Finally, Roblox is revealing three additional games that have received support from the Game Fund: Project Ruin, a competitive PvE roguelike; Riotfall, a squad-based multiplayer FPS (that is also available to try on Roblox, though it crashed every time I tried to hop into a match on my iPhone); and Secret Neighbor, a Roblox-based version of the multiplayer game that’s currently available on PC and consoles.
Jad Boniface, who heads up the Game Fund at Roblox, told The Verge in an interview that there is a larger list of games that have been greenlit, but “we’re just not ready to share details about those additional games yet.” And Roblox plans to keep applications for the fund open through July, Boniface told me, so it seems there is still opportunity for games to get picked to receive support. As for a second fund, “we hope that the results from this Game Fund will lead to a second Game Fund, but it’s still too early to say,” Boniface said.
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