A 16-year-old takes his shot at Roblox fame as a native game maker
Ammon Runger has been playing games on Roblox since he was 10. Then he started making games. And like many others building games on the popular user-generated content platform, Runger wants to move up the ladder to making a living creating those games.
He’s part of what I call the Leisure Economy, where we get paid to play games (and create them), and he has already amassed a lot of experience for someone so young.
Now, at the ripe old age of 16, the Washington state native and high school student has more than 47,0o0 Twitter followers and 11,000 YouTube subscribers. He has worked for two years as head of marketing at Schwifty Studios and his trailers have generated more than five million views. He also runs the “Creator Spotlight” segment posted on the official Roblox social media channels.
“What’s fun about Roblox itself is just the diversity of experiences that are on the platform,” he said. “There are so many different games that are on it. One of my favorite things about being on Roblox itself is just the sort of ecosystem that we have. There are tons and tons of people on like that are connected via Twitter or Instagram or Tiktok. And we all like a huge family. One of the cool things that I like about it is the freedom to be creative and just hop into Roblox studio and make whatever you really want to make.”
Runger has helped the Schwifty Studios‘ Mad City YouTube channel hit 95,000 subscribers. Mad City is a cops-and-robbers game that is the 14th-most-played game on Roblox with 1.7 billion visits. And he is working on the side for Backbone, which makes a handheld controller for the iPhone.
