There was a time when going online as a kid meant going somewhere built just for you. You logged into Club Penguin and waddled around as a colorful cartoon bird. You raised a Moshi Monster, or grew flowers to lure Moshlings into your garden. You solved themed puzzles in Poptropica, or roamed Jamaa as your favorite critter on Animal Jam. These weren’t corners of a bigger platform. They were the whole platform, and they were built with one audience in mind: children.
That world has mostly disappeared. Club Penguin, which once claimed more than 200 million registered accounts at its 2013 peak, was shut down in 2017. Moshi Monsters ceased operations in 2019 and is only now attempting a fan-funded comeback. Poptropica closed its servers in 2024, but still clings to life via fan-made archives and a preserved version of the game provided by Coolmath Games.
Animal Jam, though still active, has seen a decline in its users. The game reached 130 million lifetime registered players and 3.3 million monthly active users a decade into its run, and while developer WildWorks hasn’t published a current monthly active user figure, third-party trackers point to a steep-drop off. Concurrent players on the game’s Steam client, a small slice of its overall audience since most kids play through mobile or browser, fell 84% from its own recent peak, down to just a few dozen players online at once. It’s an imperfect measure, but it fits the broader picture: Animal Jam’s real numbers are a fraction of what they once were.
Meanwhile, almost every kid who wants to play online today ends up in the same place: Roblox. The platform was created in 2004, when David Baszucki and Erik Cassel, who previously built physics simulation software together, began developing what they called DynaBlocks before rebranding it as Roblox. It wasn’t considered a kids’ app originally; the founders pitched it as a tool for building and sharing 3D, physics-based creations, and its earliest users skewed toward teens and adults drawn to the creative and technical side of building games rather than young children.
That changed as Roblox’s free-to-play model, endless supply of user-made games, and social features (customizable avatars, chat, virtual currency) drew in a steadily younger audience, and by the 2010s it had become a default digital hangout for kids and pre-teens. That shift shows up in the numbers: Roblox averaged 132 million daily active users in the first quarter of 2026, up 35% from a year earlier, and pulled in $1.4 billion in revenue over that same stretch. It’s a platform built for everyone that ended up mattering most for kids.
That distinction, “for everyone” versus “for kids” turns out to matter enormously. It shapes how a platform handles chat, how it makes money, and how well it can catch the things that put children at risk, which is exactly what’s at stake in Roblox’s most consequential move in years: a 2026 overhaul that finally introduced separate, age-based accounts for younger users. It’s a real attempt, even 20 years later, to solve the problem of children’s safety that’s made the lack of online spaces for young people such a hot topic.
Lance Priebe, creator and co-founder of Club Penguin, says he didn’t originally build the platform for kids in the marketing sense; that framing came later. “I never really made [Club Penguin] for kids in that particular sense of the word, that just became a marketing thing later on,” Priebe tells Den of Geek. “I was just always wanting to create a fun place that was safe for everybody to play online, and in doing that, you have to build safety first, which of course made it safe for kids.”
That ordering, safety first, audience second, is close to the opposite of how current online spaces for young people grew. Roblox opened its doors to any creator and any player in 2006, then had to build safety systems to catch up to the scale that resulted, a scale that now includes more than 44 million user-made games and experiences.
Clark Stacey, founder of Animal Jam and co-founder of WildWorks, doesn’t think that method was necessarily dishonest, but he identified it as a choice with consequences. “I do think it’s a little disingenuous to claim that you’re not a kids platform, when substantially most of your users are kids,” Stacey says. “I know that they’ve invested significantly in their safety systems and moderation system, it’s incredibly expensive.”
Stacey argues the deeper issue is structural. Roblox does not make its own games or run its own social spaces, it provides the tools and the servers, and lets millions of independent creators build on top of them. “They’re a tool base and its servers. And that allows them to escape a lot of liability for what their users might do.”
Club Penguin and Animal Jam worked the opposite way. Everything a player could do, the mini-games, the igloo/den customization, the central hub areas, was fixed; kids logged into a finite set of rooms and games everyone else had access to.
The difference in who builds the world is exactly what left games like Club Penguin and Animal Jam exposed when the money side stopped working. Club Penguin ran on what Priebe called a “freemium” model, free access with a paid membership for extra perks, the same velvet-rope system many kids’ platforms used. The problem? It wasn’t especially lucrative. “Only less than 2% of the whole audience paid,” Priebe says.
Roblox runs on something else entirely: Robux, a virtual currency purchased with real money that generated $6.8 billion in player spending across the full 2025 calendar year alone, much of it spent inside millions of user-made “experiences,” many of them algorithmically promoted simulators and clicker games built to maximize spending rather than creativity.
Compare that to the freemium model that came before it and the battle pass, the modern alternative to free-to-play. Club Penguin and Animal Jam’s freemium systems asked for one flat membership fee, if a player wanted the extras at all.
Fortnite’s battle pass works the same way: a single seasonal bundle of content, similarly optional. Robux, in contrast, is a currency that spends inside millions of separately monetized experiences, each with its own prices, upgrades, and purchase prompts. There’s no single toll to opt out of, and no ceiling on how much a player can spend.
Priebe watched free-to-play evolve and started building mobile games himself. He doesn’t love where the model landed. “That system became very popular, and the idea was that instead of charging a premium, you just pay for what you wanted,” he says. “But now it’s become quite predatorial. Free-to-play tends to have a behavior now of walls stopping you, so that if you don’t pay, you can’t keep playing,”
Animal Jam took a deliberately different path, one Stacey ties directly to the age of the audience. “Kids the age that are playing Roblox, playing Animal Jam, don’t have the cognitive hardwire yet to resist the kinds of pressures that free-to-play games can bring to bear,” he says. “That was a very deliberate design decision on our part, that we didn’t want to shut kids out of any of the core content that made up Animal Jam. You could play for free forever, and most kids did.”
That contrast carries over to what these platforms feel like to actually be inside. Roblox’s scale isn’t just a monetization story; it’s a community one too. Priebe, who built Club Penguin’s design around ideas from Seth Godin’s book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, says a real community needs three things; a shared identity, a shared purpose, and a persistent shared space.
He’s not convinced something like Roblox has any of them. “This is where I actually struggle with things, like some people say Roblox is a community. I don’t really think it is,” he says. “It doesn’t have anything to really…what are you celebrating, right?”
Where Club Penguin and Animal Jam had a central map with different internal locations for people to hang out in, Roblox is a sprawl of millions of disconnected minigames. “There’s probably millions of children or people making their games all by themselves with no community, just because they have a tool to make games,” Priebe says. “Do you really gather a community or anything around that? I don’t know, I can’t speak to that.”
Both men are careful to separate that kind of structural loss from simple nostalgia. Priebe points out that Club Penguin existed before smartphones, when kids had a scheduled “appointment” to play rather than an always-on device in their pocket, a shift that makes any old-style kids’ platform harder to recreate today regardless of how it’s designed.
“You gotta remember how the behavior was. Children still played, you went to school, you played. You came home and scheduled a time to play. That is gone. How do you design for always on, always available, no appointment? I’m just bored and I turn it on. That is a very different experience.”
Priebe also points to a related shift; the disappearance of scarcity as a force that used to hold communities together. Club Penguin built its identity partly around recurring but temporary events, monthly parties that existed for a limited window and then vanished for good.
“It was looking forward to an event that’s coming. What actually is important is that the event was removed after you were finished. That’s rare, that doesn’t happen in other games. It created a shared unity. You went back to your class and said, ‘were you there?’ Because when people say that, ‘I was there last year,’ it creates this friendship, and that’s part of the community building as well.”
He sees that same kind of scarcity eroding everywhere now, not just in kids’ games. “We’ve lost a lot of this, well, even movies and film have lost this, this idea of going to an event. It’s gone.”
He’s watched the pattern repeat in the newer virtual worlds he still experiments with today: announce an event, and it gets consumed “within about two or three hours worldwide,” recorded and uploaded almost immediately, until more people end up watching it on YouTube than experiencing it live. That leaves him without a tidy answer, only a harder question. Is it even possible for child-centric games online to exist with an intractable business model in place?
Stacey, for his part, traces his own nostalgia back further, to university-run text games that predated the web entirely, and says communities like these are simply mortal by nature. “Those communities emerge organically. They persist and grow for their period of time, and inevitably they change, and they either change into something else or die altogether.”
Which brings the story back to what Roblox is trying to build now. Its 2026 update, which introduced Kids and Select accounts with restricted chat and content by default, is the platform’s biggest attempt yet to import the safety-first design that Club Penguin and Animal Jam had from day one.
The scale of that rollout is itself telling: age checks became mandatory for chat access in January 2026, and within a month, roughly 50% of Roblox’s daily users, tens of millions of children and teenagers, had gone through the process. But the rollout has already experienced the exact problem bolted-on systems tend to produce: age checks that can be fooled, a trust-based bypass that critics worry predators could exploit, and a black market where verified accounts get resold for a few dollars.
Stacey boils the lack of those good ol’ online spaces down simply. “I think there is a need [for safe online kids spaces]. It’s just a really, really difficult need to fill and walk the line between what parents want, what regulators want, and what kids want because you’re going to have two out of the three angry at you no matter what you do,” he said. “So it’s not that there isn’t a demand, I think there’s a strong demand. There’s just too much liability in providing service for that demand.”
That’s the uncomfortable answer underneath the whole story. Kid-first platforms may truly be an outdated concept, even if the desire for them is still longlasting. All-ages approach to platforms became the default because they allowed for more scale, marketing, and money. But it leaves a final question: are those elements more important than what our beloved simple, self-contained worlds offered us all those years ago?
