SPAIN – 2021/03/30: In this photo illustration, the Roblox app seen displayed on a smartphone screen and a Roblox logo in the background. (Photo Illustration by Thiago Prudêncio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
In late 2024, Zach Letter says Wonder Works Studio was running out of cash.
The Roblox developer had already cut most of its staff. Its work-for-hire business was drying up and Letter believed the company had time for one more attempt. That attempt became SpongeBob Tower Defense, pitched to Paramount in September and released that December.
The game had passed 600 million visits. Letter says it saved the company. It’s a dramatic turnaround with a fascinating story in the skills behind it.
Letter spent more than a decade making gaming videos on YouTube before starting Wonder Works. His experience taught him how algorithms distribute content, how audiences respond and why creative work needs to keep changing after publication. Those skills now influence how his studio builds games.
Roblox is a game platform with a discovery model many YouTube creators will recognize. And that is changing what game development looks like.
Roblox’s discovery system rewards creator skills
The majority of discovery on Roblox happens through its home page, where a recommendation system decides which games to show each player.
Roblox says that system measures qualified play-through rate, time spent, repeat visits, spending and how often people deliberately play with friends. An experience that performs well with an initial group can receive wider distribution.
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
Presentation matters. Developers can test different thumbnails with different audiences, much as YouTubers test the packaging around a video. Roblox says experiences using thumbnail personalization saw an average 8.5% increase in qualified play-through rate during its testing.
Letter recognized the similarity. “YouTube, TikTok. Roblox. They all use an algorithm to identify content,” he said during an interview for The Business of Creators.
Before building SpongeBob Tower Defense, Wonder Works studied Discord communities for competing games and read comments beneath YouTube videos about them. Letter says the team looked for repeated complaints, chose a genre with clear demand and paired it with an intellectual property that could help the game stand out.
Wonder Works had used a related model before. Its early Roblox game Overlook Bay grew from a business connected to an established creator audience. The studio knew how to attract attention and involve players in the development process.
Then it expanded. Letter says the company hired aggressively after raising outside capital and began adopting longer, more conventional production methods. Its attention shifted from making better games to running a much larger organization.
The company’s later contraction raises a sharper question: how does a creator-led studio hold on to the habits that produced its first success?
ForbesWhy OpenAI And HubSpot Are Buying Creator BusinessesBy Ian ShepherdDistribution is becoming part of game development
Wonder Works says it developed SpongeBob Tower Defense in roughly 2 months. The company still needs to document the exact production timeline, but the wider difference in development speed is well established.
Roblox advises studios to publish smaller updates every 1 to 2 weeks and plan ongoing live operations before release. A game can gain a new audience, receive feedback and change while people are still playing it.
That pulls distribution inside the creative process. Thumbnails affect who starts playing. Early retention affects whether Roblox recommends the experience. Updates give players a reason to return and give YouTubers something new to cover.
A launch spike helps. A game that holds players for months builds a business.
Roblox made that distinction more explicit in June 2026, when it expanded the period used by its recommendation system from 7 days to 28. The updated system places more weight on sustained play, repeat visits and long-term spending.
Alex Seropian, the co-creator of Halo and founder of Look North World, has experienced both production models. His company develops games for Roblox and Fortnite while working with creators who grew up inside those communities.
“We have been making games for decades and we’re masters of this craft,” Seropian said in a separate Business of Creators interview. “But there’s a ton that we don’t know and we did not grow up here.”
Look North World runs game jams and a publishing program to find platform-native talent. Its experienced developers bring production knowledge. The creators bring an instinct for the culture, pace and social behavior inside each platform.
ForbesWhy Celebrities Are Choosing YouTube Shows Over Late-Night TVBy Ian ShepherdIndividual taste eventually needs a team
Creator-led development has its own weakness. The person with the idea can quickly become the person holding everything up.
Professional modder Sean Philip van Zyl, known as Garuga123, described doing most of the modeling, texturing, animation and game integration behind his Ark creature mods himself. As demand grew, he began looking for other modders who could share the workload without losing the character of his work.
That problem will be familiar to almost any successful YouTuber. The creator’s taste drives the business, but the business eventually needs more output than one person can produce.
Game development adds another layer. A creator may understand audience behavior and platform culture while relying on specialists to build stable systems, produce artwork and operate a game for millions of players.
Letter says Wonder Works’ engineers use AI to speed up routine programming, but experienced developers still check the output. He remains closely involved in game design while depending on other people to turn those ideas into working products.
The stronger studio model combines these abilities. Creator instinct informs what gets made, how it is presented and how quickly the team responds. Professional craft makes the game reliable enough to survive its own success.
ForbesThe Creator Economy Is Coming For Late-Night TVBy Ian ShepherdPlatform knowledge improves the odds
Roblox recorded $1.5 billion in developer exchange fees during 2025, up 63% from the previous year. More than 23,500 creators received payments through the program.
Roblox also says it believes most of its top 1,000 experiences were built by teams averaging fewer than 10 people. The company hasn’t published the methodology behind that estimate, so it should be treated as a broad indication rather than a precise measure.
The rewards remain concentrated. Roblox disclosed that 51% of all time spent inside experiences in December 2025 went to the top 50 games.
Wonder Works understands that volatility. Letter says the studio released dozens of games between its early success and SpongeBob Tower Defense without finding another comparable hit.
SpongeBob’s global recognition clearly helped. Tower defense already had a large audience, Paramount backed the project and Wonder Works had experienced developers. Timing and luck mattered too.
Roblox’s use of spending as a discovery signal also creates a harder question. Many players are young, and studios must decide where healthy monetization ends and pressure to spend begins. Audience knowledge carries responsibility alongside commercial value.
Wonder Works and Look North World are testing a hybrid studio model: professional production paired with creators who understand the platform from the inside.
The teams that master both still won’t know where the next hit will come from. They’ll simply be better prepared to learn when players arrive, respond before they leave and have something new for them next Friday.
This article is based on an interview with Zach Letter on my podcast The Business of Creators.