In addition to offering millions of free games (with upgrades and in-game purchases), Roblox also offers a full suite of programming tools that allow users to create their own video games that they can launch publicly on the site in the hopes that, like Balfanz's Jailbreak, their games will one day be played by millions of people. In fact, Balfanz says he started learning to write computer programming code when he was about 9, and Roblox was one of the first platforms where he honed his abilities. 'Jailbreak just blew up.'īalfanz and his high school friends had made a few different games on Roblox before Jailbreak. 'I had no idea that it was going to ever get to the level it was,' Balfanz tells CNBC Make It about the game's immediate, and lasting, popularity. They have easily cleared 'seven figures' in overall profit, which they split evenly, from Jailbreak since it launched. In a little more than two years, the game made Balfanz and his partner millionaires, he tells CNBC Make It.

(Jailbreak would eventually top 150,000 concurrent players, Balfanz and Roblox tell CNBC Make It.)īalfanz says he made enough money to pay for all four years of his college tuition (which, based on the cost of attending Duke, is over $300,000), in just a couple of months.

The game had 60,000 people playing concurrently on day one, and 90,000 by the next afternoon. Jailbreak, which is free to play but makes money when players buy new vehicles or weapons in the game, took off immediately.

In January 2017, just months before the end of his senior year at Trinity Preparatory School in Florida, Balfanz and a school friend released Jailbreak on Roblox, a popular online gaming platform with over 150 million users that also gives players a toolbox to create their own video games.īalfanz says he and his pal (who prefers to remain anonymous) created Jailbreak, an 'open-world, multiplayer cops-and-robbers game' after school and in their spare time.

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