With his company just a few years old, 22-year-old Bayou Gauche video game designer Grant Dunn and his development studio Dunn Games has now designed and released a handful of online games on gaming platform juggernaut Roblox. His business now supports five remote employees, some reporting to work each day from as far as the United Kingdom.
Roblox, trading on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker RBLX, is a $2.34 billion revenue online gaming platform similar to Microsoft’s Xbox, where around 66 million active daily users from around the world log in each day to play from a selection of approximately 50 million games.
As a platform of games, Roblox relies on independent game studios like Dunn Games to develop and support the various games players can select. Many of the game studios are run by companies like Dunn’s that are around the same size or smaller, but a few independent Roblox game studios have grown in size to include a much larger employee base.
“There are multiple [game] studios that have 100 employees,” Dunn said of some of his larger Roblox studio competitors.
Roblox has massive worldwide appeal, according to online sales and marketing data provider DemandSage. Tracking playing time by a unit of measurement called ‘engagement hours,’ Europeans played Roblox slightly more than US-based users in early 2023, playing 4.07 billion engagement hours in the first quarter of 2023 versus 3.4 billion engagement hours for US-based Roblox gamers. Roblox’s most popular game, called AdoptMe, had 27.3 billion all-time visits as of 2022.
Dunn says his studio Dunn Games ranks in the top 1,000 of Roblox revenue-generating studios, with the majority of the private company’s revenue currently coming from one key game.
While it’s typically free to play Roblox games, game designers like Dunn Games earn revenue by selling different features and items within the game that players are willing to pay extra enhance their playing experiences.
“For example, we’re one of the few farming games on the platform that primarily focuses on vehicles,” Dunn said. “The biggest thing that we sell [are our] vehicle packs – you can buy a tractor, a harvester and different equipment.”
Dunn says his interest in video game design began at an early age, and he began to learn bit by bit how to code and design games as he got older. He became particularly attracted to the Roblox platform while still in school, and began playing different types of games within Roblox.
“I [started] to play Roblox when I was a kid,” Dunn said, primarily because “[Roblox] makes it really easy for you to create your own experiences.”
Dunn designed his first Roblox game while in high school, which began to earn a few hundred dollars per month, funds he said “was a lot of extra cash for me at the time.”
After graduating high school, he entered LSU to study computer science. In his freshman year he began working on a new Roblox game called ‘Farming and Friends,’ designing the game with a few friends he met online that shared his same interests in coding and game design.
Dunn’s business grew rapidly in 2020 to a point where he made the decision to leave college to work on his game studio full time.
“We released [Farming and Friends] in early 2020, then COVID hit, and all of our numbers went way up,” Dunn said. “I ended up leaving school the summer of 2020 after lockdowns – that’s kind of what made me go full time.”
Dunn said he has big plans for his game studio in the next five years, and hopes to grow his team much larger over that time span.
“I would like to definitely have someone who basically does what I do – design games,” Dunn said. “I’d like to have a couple more projects out and have designers full-time on those games, and manage them instead of me doing it.”
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