Today, I’m excited to announce that my first company, RTrack, has been acquired by Gamebeast.
RTrack began seven years ago as a tool looking to fill a significant blind spot in Roblox developers’ ability to understand the platform, their own games, and the games they’re competing with. When I built the first iteration, I had no experience with web development, and no coding experience outside of Roblox itself. I was still a teenager at school who had spent the last eight years captivated by the incredible freedom and empowerment of programming and building experiences on Roblox.
Growing up with the platform, I’d never seen a time when Roblox was not relentlessly growing. The platform is and has always naturally been extremely competitive – there was no marketing money, no companies, no industry knowledge, just kids like me who were hooked by the incredible opportunity of it all. If you didn’t make something people wanted to play, you lost. The community learnt quickly that this was a basic truth of the ecosystem. The best developers weren’t just better at making games; they were the best at handling failures, picking themselves up and starting something new without looking back. Despite how competitive the space itself was, that community became a very tightly knit group, always ready to share and support each other.
In 2019, the platform was relatively tiny compared to today, and ‘UGC Gaming’ as a recognised, distinct section of the gaming industry didn’t exist. At the time, Roblox wasn’t seen as a professional game development platform, and developers weren’t regarded as legitimate professionals. But to anyone in the ecosystem, it was blatantly clear that this space would never stop growing. Games became more and more polished and technically advanced, real consideration for game design, monetisation, collaboration and marketing was becoming more common – but there were no analytics. There was nothing to tell you how your game was performing over the long term, where it sat on the platform, who you were competing against or what people wanted to play. As was the case for the decade before, the Roblox developer community was progressing faster than the platform itself could possibly keep up with them.
I had faith that the platform would professionalise, and that real market research tooling would be needed. RTrack embodies this faith and it’s that faith that kept me going on this project over years of slow, marginal gains. Being early to a market isn’t easy, there is no playbook, there is constant doubt and constant questioning, but no real answers. The answer to whether you’ve built the right thing only comes with time. But that is this community. That is what developers continue to deal with every single day. None of us knew whether our games would be a hit, but we continued to work at them because we had faith.
RTrack wouldn’t exist without the support of that community. From the first moment I posted on the DevForum about this simple tool I’d made in a few evenings after school, I had support from people I’d never met, from all over the world, who wanted to support me. That support continued throughout the years, so many people were always willing to give feedback, suggestions, and confirmation of what I was doing, for the sole purpose of pushing the ecosystem forward. When I first released subscription plans, people I had never met before or spoken to subscribed and supported RTrack, yes, because they wanted to use the tools, but in so many cases, largely to support the project.
Looking back on that time today, UGC gaming is a completely different place. It is larger and smarter than, I think, any of us could have ever predicted. I always like to describe it as the democratization of gaming, this is a ruthless space, but one that rewards adaptation, and forces the reinvention of the playbook for play and gaming in general. That combination means it is constantly evolving and constantly pushing forward. RTrack has evolved with it, and so has the need for tooling.
I have as much faith in this space now as I did seven years ago. We’re not rewriting the playbook from conventional gaming, or trying to catch up, we are writing our own. That’s why this space needs its own tooling, made for and as part of that playbook, and that’s why RTrack will continue to innovate, experiment and grow in this space. We, at RTrack and at Gamebeast, are incredibly excited to build the next generation of tooling, for the next generation of games.