01 / Keep the good part
Imagine your kid calling you over to see a dragon. A deeply questionable dragon. Six legs, one wing, apparently it lives on the roof of a pizza shop. They made it. Their friend built the shop. The two of them have spent an hour arguing about whether the dragon should deliver pizzas or eat the customers.
I want more of that. The weird little worlds, the games with rules that only make sense to the people who invented them, the moment somebody realizes they can change a thing on the screen instead of just clicking it. That's the part of a platform like Roblox that gets me excited. Give kids a place to build together and they will come up with things no adult would have put in a product roadmap.
Now imagine all of that with one monthly fee. The parent pays. The kid plays. Nobody has to stop the pizza dragon argument to negotiate a purchase. The person who made the game gets paid from a share of the subscriptions, and can spend their time making the dragon more ridiculous.
That's Cubacadabra. Instead of earning more when kids spend more, we want to earn more because more families want to be here. Creators get paid for making games people actually love, not for building better cash registers. No virtual currency to refill. No ads. No countdown telling your kid that the special thing will disappear unless you buy it right now. That alignment is the whole bet.
I'm building it now. There are games, a shared engine, a browser client, phone apps, and a desktop Studio taking shape. The subscription model, parent experience, and community safety work described here are where I'm taking it. You can check out the early preview and see how far it's come.
02 / Something better than a timer
A number that says your child spent 94 minutes in an app tells you remarkably little. They might have spent those minutes making an obstacle course with a friend. They might have spent them staring at a shop. Somehow both afternoons produce the same little bar on a screen time chart.
I want a parent dashboard that shows what your kid created, who they played with, and where safety interventions happened. You should be able to open it and understand the afternoon. There's the world they worked on. There's the group they played with. There's a report, what happened to it, and whether you need to do anything. That's the parent experience I want to build.
It also gives you a way into their world. You can ask about the bridge they built instead of starting every conversation with how long they've been on the iPad. Maybe they'll show you why it keeps collapsing. Maybe you'll have an opinion about the dragon. Now you're participating in something they care about. The subscription becomes a service for parents, with something useful on our side of the screen too.
You should be able to open it and understand the afternoon.
And I don't want to optimize Cubacadabra for maximum hours. A game can have a good stopping point. A kid can leave without losing a streak or disappointing a virtual pet that has apparently hired a collections agency. If they had a great time and went outside, I'd like us to be able to call that a successful afternoon.
None of this gets us out of making good games. Kids don't choose a game because the founder has thoughtful opinions about subscriptions. They choose it because their friend is there and something fun is happening. We have to earn that part.
03 / Let the game makers make games
Suppose you've made a really good cooperative game. It takes twenty minutes. Three friends solve a puzzle, do something funny, and finish. You'd like to make another one. Under a model that rewards spending or sheer time consumed, you have a problem. Now you're trying to find room for a shop, or a grind, or some reason for the players to remain inside it long after the interesting part is over.
I'd like that twenty minute game to have a home. A creator should be able to make a puzzle, a race, a forest full of secrets, or something I can't name yet, and get paid because families are glad it exists. The subscription pool gives us a way to try that. The payout formula still needs work, but paying purely by minutes would invite people to pad their games. We'd be back where we started.
Discovery matters just as much as the formula. My plan is no sponsored games and no paid boosting. A creator shouldn't have to buy an audience from the same platform that's supposed to help people find their work. I can't promise that every game will be a hit. I can make buying the front page something we don't sell.
The first creators may be people whose games currently earn nothing. For them, a smaller audience that actually finds their work could be worth more than a theoretical audience of millions. A useful monthly payment and some players who care can be a pretty compelling reason to try a new place.
I'd also like playing someone else's game to be how you start making your own. Open an example, move a platform, change the jump, see what happens. Eventually your version is different enough that your friend wants to play it. There doesn't have to be a grand decision to become a programmer. You can just get annoyed that the bridge is too short and fix the bridge.
04 / You can open the project
This is where the open source part becomes useful. A Cubacadabra game is already a folder with a manifest, Luau scripts, and assets. The manifest describes the world. The scripts describe what happens in it. The assets are things like images and sounds. The build tools turn that folder into a package the clients can load.
The engine is Rust. The browser runs it through WebAssembly, and the Swift iOS app, Kotlin Android app, and desktop Studio use the same Rust code natively. Rendering goes through wgpu. For a game maker, the useful consequence is that the same game package can run across those clients. You don't need to maintain four slightly different versions of what happens when somebody jumps.
There are examples you can read. Spellbound Schoolyard has players learning charms and casting them together. Signal Run is a cooperative relay. The newer examples include Whispering Wilds, with a forest trail and an old watchtower, and Stormline Outpost, where you gather supplies by day and keep a beacon alive through the storm. Their rules live in the games. The engine doesn't need a special opinion about watchtowers.
Studio can already open a source project, run it, load its assets, and join multiplayer. The visual editing workspace is still early. There's plenty left to build before a kid can sit down and make that pizza shop without help, but the path from files to a running game exists.
There's a distinction here that I care about. Being able to pull some bytes out of a running game isn't the same as being handed a project you can understand and permission to use it. I want readable source, documented formats, licenses, credit, and an easy way to make your own version when the creator allows it. Real source files, real ownership, real portability. You should be able to keep the work you've done.
That doesn't mean every studio has to give away every secret. I want creators to be able to keep server code private and choose how they share their client work. They could keep it closed, let people read it, allow remixes, or release it under an open license. The runtime is open. What a creator chooses to share needs to be their decision. A proper project with permission to build on it is much more interesting than an argument about what somebody could theoretically extract.
05 / Who's in the room
Money isn't the only reason a parent hesitates. Who is my kid playing with? Can an adult approach them? If somebody reports something frightening, does a person actually look at it? I don't think a parent should have to become an amateur investigator to get answers about a service they're paying for.
Safety has to be built in from the start. There is already block and report plumbing in the backend, including private reports and filtering of blocked players. The next work is the people and process around it: verifiable reporting, structured community roles, and radical transparency about how we respond. I want records that let a reviewer establish what happened, with controlled access and clear retention limits. Parents need useful answers without anybody exposing children's private information in a public incident log.
People in a community will notice things staff miss. We should give them a useful way to help. The program I want would train and vet community guardians, give them reporting tools, and make their job very clear: flag the problem and escalate it. Don't bait somebody, pose as a child, or keep a dangerous conversation going to collect a more dramatic screenshot. Reports need to reach people who are equipped to act.
I'd pay people for doing that work reliably. Small stipends for trained moderators make sense to me; cash prizes for catching somebody create an incentive I don't want anywhere near this. We'd publish how quickly reports are handled, what action was taken in aggregate, and where we fell short. I'm going to need people who understand child safety and platform law to help design this. Software alone doesn't do the job, and hiring those people belongs in the budget from the beginning.
That's part of what the monthly fee is for. When a parent asks what they're paying for, the answer should include the people looking after the place.
06 / Okay, show me the math
If I were listening to this as an investor, I'd be reaching for a calculator by now. Ten dollars a month sounds lovely. Subtract payment and app store fees, servers, moderation, support, insurance. How much is left for the person who made the game? A creator cannot pay rent with my good intentions.
Take $9.99 as an example. A thousand paying families brings in $9,990 a month before costs. That is a budget for an early experiment, and it has to cover real bills. We need a defined creator pool we can afford, with a clear formula, instead of promising a fixed amount for every hour somebody leaves a game running. As subscriptions grow, the pool can grow. Whether the payments become worth a creator's time is something we'll have to demonstrate.
Then there's the more uncomfortable question: how do you get those families? Their kids already have games and friends. Nobody is waiting around for me to finish a Rust engine. The first places I'd try are parent groups, schools, and coding clubs. Put a good game and a small group of friends together, give parents a reason to feel comfortable saying yes, and see whether anyone asks to come back.
A parent doesn't need a lecture on user-generated content. They need to know whether this is fun, whether their kid can play with friends, and whether they're signing up for another argument about money. "A Roblox alternative with no Robux and no ads" is a pretty understandable invitation. The child still needs to enjoy the game after the parent clicks.
I'd like to get to a thousand paying families and a couple of dozen good games made by people outside the project. Then watch what happens. Do families renew? Do kids invite friends? Do creators earn enough to make another game? I'd be much more interested in those answers than a large signup number from people who came once.
And maybe it grows into a few hundred thousand families instead of taking over the world. At ten dollars a month, that's a business worth understanding. It still has to cover its costs, but I don't see why the only acceptable outcome is replacing every game a child has ever played. We can start by being the place a group of friends wants to spend Saturday afternoon.
Open source means someone else can use the code. What I hope will make people stay is the games, the people making them, and parents finding that we do what we said we'd do. That takes time. It's also the part of this I'd want an investor to care about. Fund enough of the experiment to see whether families and creators keep choosing it. The nonprofit question can wait until we know what we're building.
For now, come have a look at Cubacadabra. Run an example, poke around the source, tell me what you wish your kid's game platform did differently. If you make games, I'd love to see what you can do with it. There is a lot of room here for the first people who show up.
I keep coming back to the kid calling you over. They're proud of something. They want you to see it. I'd like to build a company where more of those moments is a good reason for the company to do well.