A video game you've never heard of has turned three teens into multimillionaires — and it's just getting started

About three weeks earlier, Balfanz and his business partner had published a cops-and-robbers video game called "Jailbreak" on Roblox. Although Balfanz and his partner had created Roblox games before, "Jailbreak" was their first overnight success, hitting about 75,000 simultaneous players on the day it launched and maintaining that level afterward. "Jailbreak" is on track to generate "seven figures" in revenue this year, and Balfanz said he's already made enough to cover the entire four-year cost of his undergraduate education at Duke University, where he plans to study artificial intelligence starting this autumn.

Now, Roblox's developer relations department wanted to pick Balfanz's brain about the game's success and figure out how they could work together. It was just the exclamation mark on a period where he had to manage both the last few months of his senior year of high school, and a growing community of paying players.

"That was pretty crazy," said Balfanz, who lives in Florida "A lot of things happening at once."

The same might be said about Roblox. The company offers a massively multiplayer online platform that encourages anybody and everybody to create games for its mostly-younger audience to play together.

This past weekend, Roblox held its annual conference, an invite-only event for the platform's top developers. At the event, Roblox officials said the company expects to pay out $30 million to developers this year. One young programmer is on track to bring in $3 million. Two more could hit $2 million each.

I was on the ground at the conference, aiming to hear more about Roblox, the massive entrepreneurial opportunity it's creating, and how it's turning teenagers into media moguls. Here's what I found out.

The big deal

If you're older than, say, 15, there's a good chance you've never heard of Roblox. Although it's been available for PCs since 2005, it exploded in popularity only over the last few years as the newer smartphone, tablet, and Xbox versions of the app have opened it up to a new generation of players.

Nowadays, Roblox boasts 56 million monthly players. That actually puts it ahead of Minecraft. Earlier this year, Microsoft said about 55 million people play its hit game every month. Meanwhile, by some measurements, more people search for Roblox's website than for Lego, company officials boast.

Roblox's platform is open; anyone with the requisite skills can make a game for it. That openness is reflected in the tremendous variety of games on offer. Beyond "Jailbreak," popular games include "Roblox High School," a high school role playing game; "Work At a Pizza Place," which is pretty much what it sounds like; and "Pokémon Brick Bronze," a multiplayer homage to the Nintendo franchise.

In conversation with Balfanz and other Roblox developers, one thing became clear: Most people who make Roblox games started out by playing games on the platform when they were younger.

Take Andrew