Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki announced a number of new AI technologies for game creators and he said creators will earn 8.5% more rev share.
It’s all part of the company’s plan to capture 10% of all gaming content revenue, Baszucki said. He said that means all of the people in the vast keynote room were participating in that game economy. The event is being attended by about 2,000 Roblox developers.
Nick Tornow, senior vice president of engineering (creator and engine) at Roblox, in a press briefing highlighted the effort.
“This means is that we want Roblox creators to participate in generating 10% of global gaming revenue that’s flowing through the Roblox ecosystem and distributed amongst our community of creators, and we’re well on our way,” Tornow said.
Roblox also highlighted more new technology for keeping kids safe — a lightning rod issue for the company as it gets hit by more lawsuits from angry parents. The event opened with a plea for people to not disrupt any of the proceedings in anticipation of protesters.
Roblox said its community is soaring to unprecedented heights. With over 111.8 million average daily active users (up 41%) and more than 390 billion visits to experiences, the platform is thriving as a dynamic ecosystem where imagination comes to life.
“Now, with numbers like this, sometimes it’s useful to try to put them in perspective. The most recent Super Bowl had about 127 million viewers. So this past quarter together, it’s as if we had a Super Bowl on Roblox every single day,” Tornow said.
Roblox recently broke records last month with more than 45 million concurrent users playing games like Grow a Garden, Steal a Brainrot, and Dress to Impress. The company has opened a new data center in Brazil in an effort to serve a fast-growing market as it builds a substantial AI infrastructure supporting inference at a massive scale.
“The new releases we’re here to talk about today are designed to help Roblox creators build compelling content and bring it to life across our platform, scaling across our global audience and increasing their earning potential,” Tornow said.
Users are playing more than ever, visiting an average of over 21 experiences a month, and as a result, creators are earning more. This exponential growth has opened up life-changing opportunities for creators.
Over the past year, creators have earned over $1 billion through Roblox’s Developer Exchange (DevEx) Program. And more creators are finding success on Roblox, with thousands of independent creators globally earning full-time job equivalents in their regions- positioning developing on Roblox as a potential career path for many. More than 100 developers have reached more than $1 million in revenue.
At this year’s Roblox Developers Conference (RDC), Roblox is sharing its latest innovations focused on arming creators with the tools they need to bring their ideas to life. The announcements ladder up to a broader goal—that 10% of all gaming content revenue will flow through the Roblox ecosystem and be distributed within its community of creators. In order to get there, Roblox is investing in every stage of the creator development lifecycle, from creation to monetization, all built on a foundation that promotes safety.
Growing earnings: DevEx rate increase
Once a creator has a dedicated community, the final step is to look at ways to earn on Roblox. The company said it has built an economy where creators of any size can succeed, and it is always looking for new ways to support creators as they build thriving businesses on our platform. Starting today, Roblox is increasing the DevEx rate for all creators.
“We want to grow our business costs much slower than we grow our top line, and so we have more money to distribute to our creator community. In line with this goal, I’m excited today to share news about our DevEx program. This is what allows Roblox creators to exchange their earned Robux for real money,” Tornow said. “Starting this Friday, Roblox is increasing the DevEx rate, delivering 8.5% more to our creators when they turn their earned Robux into cash.”
Creators will now earn 8.5% more through DevEx when turning Earned Robux into cash. Now, 100,000 earned Robux will equal $380, rather than $350 when converted to cash. Increasing DevEx is one of the most direct ways we have to reward the incredible value creators bring to Roblox. Baszucki got his biggest cheer from the crowd on this one.
AI tools to accelerate creation
To achieve the mission of connecting a billion people, Roblox needs creators around the world building at massive scale. Today, the Roblox creator community is full of small, agile, talented teams building incredible experiences.
The company believes the majority of the top 1,000 experiences were built by some of the smallest teams in the industry (with, on average, fewer than 10 people). By providing incredible tools including first-of-their-kind AI tools and an Assistant they can use to increase their productivity, Roblox wants to enable smaller teams and even solo developers to open up new, dynamic gameplay mechanics.
4D Objects: Today, Roblox announced a new way for creators to generate fully functional objects starting with select vehicles and weapons categories. This moves beyond generating static 3D objects to fully interactive scripted assets.
The user or creator can provide the prompt (“a sleek, futuristic red sports car”), and the application programming interface (API) provides a functional, interactive car that can be driven. From there, creators have full control. They can add their own logic like cars with doors that open and wheels that turn to extend or replace the base functionality to create content that works perfectly within their unique experiences.
This will be a powerful, new way for creators to give their users the ability to create within the experience itself, while making sure everything they build works smoothly with the experience’s mechanics. 4D is coming by the end of the year, Baszucki said.
In a demo, they players create objects using the AI Cube as part of the gameplay. The creators get to control the generation and set the guardrails. The players get to express their imagination. A dev showed off a sea urchin car. The prompt gets interpreted by the AI to create an enriched prompt. Devs can bring control into the style of the art. You as the creator can directly influence the style of the generation of the art.
Text-to-speech and speech-to-text APIs: Roblox also announced a series of APIs to help creators speak, respond, and connect with users—all in their own native language. With new Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text APIs, creators can build more immersive and interactive experiences.
The Text-to-Speech API makes it easy to add narration and character dialogue instantly, with options to customize voices with 10 English presets (more voice presets coming soon), like a non-player character (NPC) who gives you directions to navigate from any location in a world.
The Speech-to-Text API allows for voice-based interactions, enabling game mechanics around voice commands, like firing a ship’s cannon when a user says “Fire!” When combined with our Text Generation API, these tools let NPCs have dynamic, contextual conversations with users through text and voice.
In a demo on stage, Karun Channa, director of product, showed off speech-to-test on stage and text-to-speech. A 4D gen demo showed off a gun that shoots watermelons and was shaped like a banana. Then he asked for a flying magic carpet and the vendor told him it was coming and was an “excellent choice.” He showed off both the watermelon launcher and the magic carpet while live on stage.
I asked how Roblox moderates its real-time voice communications. Roblox has a real-time voice moderation system based on AI models that have been developed in Roblox, which the company open-sourced last year. The key innovation with those models is that the moderation happens directly from voice, without having to take the step of going from voice to text. That’s really important because when you’re talking about voice moderation, it’s often required to understand the intonation of people’s voices and how they’re speaking, not just the words that they’re using.
Real-time voice chat translation: Additionally, Roblox’s new Real-Time Voice Chat Translation capability will instantly translate voice chat into the listener’s native tongue, connecting users around the world speaking different languages, starting with English, Spanish, French, and German.
Singh said, “We have been working very hard on translation. We first did text chat translation, but now we are taking it to the next level with voice chat translation. So in real time, as you’re saying, ‘oh my god, did you see what just happened?’ It will get translated into another language for the other player.
Karun Channa, director of product, did a dem on sage of the live translation.
Assistant improvements and MCP: Roblox also shared a significant upgrade to Assistant in Roblox Studio, enabling it to communicate with third-party LLMs and applications via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This means that creators can now use Assistant as an MCP client to orchestrate activity across third-party programs that integrate MCP.di
For example, they can lay out a UI in Figma or create a skybox in Blockade Labs and have Assistant automatically import it directly into their experience in Studio.
This is an industry-leading approach, as Studio is operating as an MCP server while Assistant is an MCP client – functionality that no other major engine natively supports. These improvements also allow Assistant to orchestrate much more complex, multistep tasks across multiple tools.
These AI updates follow the Generative 3D creation tools introduced earlier this year.
An engine to support high-fidelity, competitive experiences
Server Authority: Server authority is a new mode from Roblox with two core benefits—it reduces in-game cheating and makes in-game physics interactions more realistic. This is especially impactful in competitive multiplayer games, like shooters, racing games, and sports, where fairness is key and realism immerses players.
With Server Authority, the bad actors can be curtailed and access is opening for Server Authority tomorrow, Baszucki said on stage. He said the effort to create high-fidelity worlds has been happening for years. In something known as cloud level of detail, Baszucki said there can be multiple levels of detail in meshes transcoded in the cloud and stored there. This includes video assets as well.
Roblox is introducing SLIM, a compositor that takes a model from many meshes to a single one. It will also offer unlimited asset. It’s also bringing native makeup to Roblox next year to support blush, eye shadow and lipstick. It will work on any face. It is supporting rigs with 200 joints and beyond, as well as native hands and fingers.
Brazil data center
Roblox’s Sao Paulo data center is now live, months ahead of schedule.
The company already had 24 data centers, but now the Brazil data center makes 25. Previously, South American users were routed to Miami when they played and they encountered latency, or interaction delays, because of that.
And Roblox has moved from 10 AI inference pipelines to 400 plus AI inference endpoints. The company now has 400 models in production right now to support all of this growth.
Anupam Singh, senior vice president of engineering (foundation AI and infrastructure) at Roblox, said in a press briefing that more than 100 million players playing Roblox daily.
“But where our infrastructure really shines is when all of these people seem to show up at the same time. So just last weekend, we had 45.7 million people show up almost at the same time,” Singh said. “Ours is a very interactive, collaborative social platform, and we have to manage an infrastructure that can that can sustain this level of interaction, and the back end is essentially three trillion events processed per day. At peak, all of this creates an immense amount of pressure for our for our creators, but we have decided that we will not throttle our creators.”
Roblox works to predict capacity and then deals with it. A few weeks ago, the company ran out of capacity for a few minutes. It has gone to secondary sources of compute power from third-party providers, and it can now deal more flexibly with overages and concurrency traffic jams.
Driving Growth: Global IP
New IP: Mattel, Kodansha and Lionsgate are launching on Roblox.
Mattel is joining Roblox’s IP licensing program, making some of its most beloved brands like “Polly Pocket” and “Matchbox” available for creators to license. Kodansha is releasing “Blue Lock” and “That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime”, and Lionsgate is also adding “Blair Witch”, “The Strangers” and more.
Trust and safety issues
Matt Kaufman, chief safety officer at Roblox, said that safety is one of the top priorities of Roblox.
“That really goes back to the founding of the company nearly 20 years ago. This year alone, we’ve already shipped more than 100 updates to our safety systems,” Kaufman said.
Last month, Roblox its trusted connection system.
“We want to be more safe than the world’s safest amusement park,” said Baszucki. He said Roblox is expanding use of its age estimation technology.
“That’s where we introduce a new way to empower our 13 and over users to connect with other 13 and over users to chat more freely, and we’re doing that only when those users verify their age through an age check system that uses face-to-age technology to provide a more accurate number for how old they are, much better than somebody simply typing in an age when they sign up for an account.”
He added, “We’ve also in that system limited communications between adults and minors when they don’t know each other in real life. Another thing we’ve been investing a lot in is improving our chat and voice filters. One thing we’re particularly excited about is dramatically improved PII filtering.”
And Kaufman said, “What that means is, in our filtered chat system, how do we prevent users from sharing personal information, like their name or phone number or maybe an email address. What we know from a safety perspective is that the primary vector for real-life harm is people sharing PII and then moving conversations from Roblox, which has lots of built-in safety systems, to other platforms that simply don’t operate at the same safety standards that Roblox operates with.”
The company has also been expanding maturity guideline systems, and it has updated guidelines to be more clear about content that Roblox explicitly prohibits, including content that is sexual in nature.
“We’ve also taken more steps to push more content into our 18 and older categories, and finally, we are limiting access to unrated experiences.
“So what this means is, when you create an experience on Roblox, you fill out a questionnaire to tell us and tell the community what types of content are in that experience,” Kaufman said. “There’s a large number of experiences, however, where people have not indicated what type of content is there. And so starting at the end of this month, we will no longer allow the general population, the non-developer of a particular experience to access that unless a rating is available.”
Roblox said its goal is that by the end of this year, anybody who is using communication on Roblox, whether that be text or voice, goes through the age check system.
“We will through that age check system, we will measure somebody’s age through a face to age estimation algorithm or through verifying their photo ID,” Kaufman said. “We are also expanding our limits in allowing minors to communicate with adults, and that will apply to all of our communication systems, whether they are filtered or unfiltered. All of this is in our effort to ensure age-appropriate features on Roblox for our users, and to go beyond the simple self-reported age number that is given when people sign up.”
Roblox also announced a partnership with IARC, an international agency which is a consortium of local or regional content rating agencies.
“So today, we offer our maturity guidelines, which gives some indication to parents about the maturity level of content that they might find on Roblox. We’re switching to this new system, or partnering with IARC, to switch to the regional age rating agencies, for example, ESRB in the United States. We hope that this gives families and users more information about the content that they’re experiencing on Roblox, and also accounts for the nuances of regional cultural differences,” Kaufman said.