A user-generated games platform is a platform on which players make their own games with the platform's tools, publish them, and play each other's games online. The best-known one is Roblox. On such a platform, millions of games are made not by a studio but by its players, many of them teenagers.
The platform provides three things. First, it gives a free editor, which is a simple game engine. In it, a player builds a world from ready-made blocks, and writes the rules in a simple programming language. Second, it runs servers that host every game, so that players from anywhere can join. Third, it runs an economy. Players buy the platform's virtual currency with real money. They spend it on clothes for their characters, or on extras inside a game. The creator of that game receives a share of the currency. A creator who has earned enough can convert it into real money.
Take, for example, a 17-year-old in Nagpur who builds an obstacle course, in which players jump between moving platforms. It takes him two months of evenings. He publishes it, and the platform's lists of games show it to new players. Within a month, 50,000 players have tried it. Some of them buy a speed boost inside his game for a few coins of the platform's currency. He also watches the platform's figures: how many players finish the first stage, and how many come back the next day. These figures are a simple form of game analytics. He makes the second stage easier, and more players finish it.
The hardest problem for such a platform is safety. Many of its players are children, and strangers can chat with them inside games. So the platform must find unsafe games, chats and accounts among many millions. Software flags suspected cases. Then a person in the platform's trust and safety investigation team decides what to do. Platforms also check how old a player is before allowing chat with strangers. One way is age estimation, which estimates a person's age from a picture of the face.
How is it different from an ordinary game? An ordinary game is made by one studio, which controls every level. A user-generated platform makes almost none of its games. It earns from the currency that players buy, and it pays creators part of that money, so that they keep making games. Every new game brings more players, and more players attract more creators. This is an example of the network effect. Each game is also a live service game, which its creator keeps updating.