Roblox Corporation (NYSE: RBLX) today announced new innovations at its 12th annual Roblox Developers Conference (RDC), an invite-only event for Roblox’s creator community of developers, artists, designers, brands, and influencers. Celebrating 20 years of platform innovation alongside its community, the company unveiled updates that aim to expand play, give creators the game engine and AI tools to build things that weren’t possible before, and usher in the next chapter of growth for creators.
Play: New Ways to Connect, Communicate and Enjoy Games
Last quarter alone, players spent 29 billion hours on Roblox¹, across more than 180 countries. Today, Roblox shared updates designed to let players join games anywhere, on any device or platform; stay connected between sessions; and play new formats and gameplay styles:
- Play Roblox Everywhere:Roblox Everywhere will help creators reach audiences where they already are. Soon, creators will have the option to make their games available as standalone apps across mobile, PC, and consoles, with Roblox powering the technology and services underneath.
- Play on the Web: By the end of this year, players will be able to join a game in-browser on Chrome (additional browsers to follow) from a game’s Experience Details Page, with no app or install required. A shared link, anywhere on the web, becomes a direct path from discovery to play.
- Play Offline: Players can keep playing, even if they’re in the air or service is spotty. Creators will be able to combine online and offline modes in one game, opening up single-player campaigns and sessions away from a network.
- Play New Kinds of Games: Roblox is best known for 3D multiplayer worlds, but some of the most-played games in the world are 2D and puzzle games. Roblox is expanding its engine capabilities to support 2D games with a new orthographic camera, animated image containers, and direct sprite-sheet import. New UI features, including blur, text shadows, and improved gradients, will enhance the look and feel for games, and a new notification system will support turn-based, asynchronous multiplayer games.
- Stay Connected Between Games: The new Friends chat tab follows players across games, so friends can coordinate and move into a new game together, and newly released voice typing lets players talk rather than type while playing.
Build: Expanding the Game Engine and AI Creation
Roblox has built what is effectively a cloud operating system for gaming and is now building an AI creation layer on top of it: not a single tool or model, but a system built for the complexity of games.
- Build Expansion: Build, a tab in the Roblox app that lets anyone create and publish a game just by prompting, is now expanding to public alpha in Serbia and Singapore.² Following the alpha launch in New Zealand this summer, creators have used Build to publish approximately 9,000 games, and 71% of the thousands of users who’ve created a game with Build had never used Roblox Studio before.3 Roblox is also adding new tools to give creators more control, including a new asset library, desktop access, and iterative control. Today, creators can quickly review analytics and add monetisation, and soon they’ll also be able to launch ads for their games from their phones.
- Scene Generator:Arriving later this year, Scene Generator will bring prompt-to-scene functionality to both Build and Studio, with greater creator control available in Studio. Creators supply a text prompt and a reference image, and Scene Generator returns a fully functional layout they can then refine in Studio.
- NPC Capabilities: Roblox is expanding what NPCs can do on Roblox with two new behaviours by year-end, including NPCs that playtest.
Grow: A New Chapter for Creator Monetization and Game Discovery
Since launching DevEx in 2013, creators have earned more than $5 billion on Roblox. In the past 12 months, creators have earned approximately $1.7 billion.4 Today, Roblox introduced the next evolution in creator earnings on the platform.
- Roblox Wallet: A financial account built to scale with creator businesses, Wallet lets creators earn directly in real currency, get paid automatically each business day, and move funds to other Roblox accounts or an external account, with richer earnings analytics in Creator Hub. Wallet is an account provided through Roblox’s financial partner5 and is a foundation for helping independent creators grow into business owners. Roblox Wallet rolls out later this year to eligible U.S.-based independent creators 18 and older and will begin expanding globally next year.
- Roblox Card: Connected to Roblox Wallet, Roblox Card lets creators spend their available balance anywhere the card is accepted. Roblox Card will begin rolling out next year.
Great games should be easy to find, whether on the Roblox homepage, in Moments, or on any browser or device.
- Moments:The Moments tab, where players watch gameplay videos and click to play, is now fully available in the United States.² Coming soon, videos from a game’s Experience Details Page will begin appearing in Moments, players will be able to tap any avatar to buy the items shown, and Build games will be playable in the tab.
- Discovery Ranking: Roblox’s discovery ranking system now optimises for both younger players, who tend to engage best with shorter-form games, and older players, who are drawn to deeper games they return to over time, looking beyond the first week to the first 28 days and beyond. Roblox is also testing optimising for direct growth, measured by how many new players a game brings to the platform.
For more information and details on additional products announced at RDC, please visit the Roblox Newsroom.
