The Most Popular Video Game In The World Is Coming To Television
Two Roblox games, Creatures of Sonaria and Twilight Daycare, are being developed into episodic series by same studio that makes Invincible.
Asking anyone what their favorite video game is will elicit a wide range of answers, form those are correct and say Final Fantasy 6 to those that are wrong and pick say, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, ask younger gamers what they love playing and there’s a very good chance they’ll say the same thing: Roblox. Reporting from Deadline confirms that the massive game is being adapted into a series.
Technically, it’s not Roblox itself being adapted, as the game is basically a platform for other games created by users that can be shared with others. Two games are being developed into shows from Wild Sun Sky, the team behind Amazon hit Invincible. The first is Creatures of Sonaria and the second is Twilight Daycare.
Catherine Winder, a former Lucasfilm executive will be overseeing the process of turning the games into episodic narratives. Creatures of Sonaria, a survival game featuring exotic beasts competing for scarce resources, is one of the most popular Roblox games having been played over 382 million times since June 2020. Developed by Sonar Studios, Creatures of Sonaria will be the first of what might just be many such Roblox creations making the jump to other mediums.
Roblox isn’t the first game to be adapted into a series, HBO’s current smash hit The Last of Us started as a PlayStation 2 game, while Super Mario Brothers starring Chris Pratt is coming to theaters in just a few months. Another sandbox game, Minecraft, technically was adapted into a Netflix series as an interactive show with Minecraft: Story Mode after originally being available as a standalone title. A Minecraft movie was even announced over a decade ago and it appears to have become a victim of development hell.
Taking user-created games from Roblox and making full-fledged television series out of them opens the door for hundreds of creators to pursue similar development deals. It’s not unheard of for user-created content, including mods, to become more popular than the base game. Back in the early-aughts this occurred with a Warcraft fan-made game that spawned its own genre, leading to DOTA 2 and League of Legends, both of which have highly successful Netflix series.
While it may not seem like it on the surface thanks to Roblox’s kid-friendly graphics, the game is a billion-dollar enterprise listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Creators can charge other users to play their games using in-game currency which is then converted to real-world dollars and can make developers rich almost overnight. The top 1% of Roblox players have in-game currency values that can top $100 million.
Whether or not the exotic animals featured in Creatures of Sonaria result in a family-friendly smash hit series or not, just the news that it’s being developed into a series is a win for Roblox and everyone involved in the game. Twilight Daycare, the second game that has been optioned for a series, has been played over 1 billion times since 2021. Wild Sun Sky has their work cut out for them in making episodic television out of the pair of titles, but it’s amazing that major studios are even thinking about bringing user-created content to Hollywood.
