After what Roblox describes as a successful first wave in 2026, the company is looking to grow its Incubator and Jumpstart programs.
Roblox chief creator ecosystem officer Vlad Loktev shared Roblox’s plans to expand its Jumpstart and Incubator programs in an interview with GamesBeat on Sept. 12 at Roblox Developers Conference 2026, the company’s annual conference for developers in its creator ecosystem in San Jose, California. Loktev specifically said Roblox plans to “scale and expand both Incubator and Jumpstart,” although he declined to share more specifics regarding exactly how much the company is looking to grow these programs. Roblox covered GamesBeat’s travel and lodging costs to attend RDC 2026.
“There will be more cohorts; the cohorts will be larger,” Loktev said. “There will be more global [cohorts].”
Roblox officially announced its Incubator and Jumpstart programs in a blog post authored by Loktev in March 2026. Both programs are part of a broader push to grow the platform’s number of “novel games” — games that introduce new genres, gameplay mechanics, or visual styles to Roblox, often with older players in mind. The Incubator program is a six-month, milestone-driven program intended to take a promising game through development to a full commercial launch, with 26 studios in the program’s inaugural cohort. The Jumpstart program is for smaller teams that are new to Roblox or experimenting with a novel game, and uses rolling applications, rather than a fixed, time-limited cohort.
“Oftentimes, we see really interesting content that’s being developed elsewhere, and we just start having a conversation and learn about what that creator is doing, and then we talk about whether it makes sense for them to come to Roblox,” Loktev said. “And I would say, in all those cases, the answer is yes.”
Although Roblox’s Incubator program is intended to help support experienced developer teams, many of the teams involved in the program’s first cohort come from backgrounds outside Roblox. Incubator program member Look North World, for example, is a longstanding user-generated content studio that was previously focused on Fortnite development, whose co-founder Alex Seropian made his name as a former co-founder and president of Bungie.
In an interview with GamesBeat, Seropian said the Incubator program had provided his company with the support it needed to confidently invest time and resources in developing on a new platform. Look North World’s first Roblox title, an extraction shooter named Drifters, is slated to come out this winter.
“A bunch of teams have tried battle royale, so we decided to take this extraction shooter pitch and sort of meld it with this creepy-pasta-like liminal space backrooms-esque style that the Roblox audience has shown an attraction to over the course of like multiple games,” said Look North World creative director Kyle Marks in an interview with GamesBeat.
Michael Loconte, the founder and chief executive officer of the Incubator-participating studio Ignition Switch, credited the program for giving his team access to deeper technical support, which helped Ignition Switch experiment with more immersive physics and graphics for Octane, its upcoming racing game.
“When you’re building such a big game with such a big vision, naturally you’re going to come to points where you’re like, ‘How do we achieve this? How do we go about this new feature that nobody’s ever done before?’” Loconte said in an interview with GamesBeat. “And I think it’s that kind of support, and having those discussions and that design conversation, that has been the biggest help for us, especially because we’re a small team.”