Now, please put your hands together for the founder and CEO of Roblox, David Baszucki.
Woo! Oh, my goodness. This is our Roblox RDC 2024. This is our 10th year, and this year it is bigger than ever. We have people from over 70 countries represented here. For example, we have people from Brazil, from Mexico, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Sweden. This is a worldwide creative audience. Welcome, everyone. Hey, when Erik and I founded Roblox, there is, there is one question that drove us: "How do we, as humans, connect through play?" 18 years later, same question is bringing us together right now, and many—I have seen some of you that have been through this journey with us ever since the start. Connection is at the center of our human evolution, and today, when many people feel isolated and alone, I believe we can be optimistic about the ecosystem we are building together. Your amazing content supports connection and ultimately lets us play.
We can be part of the solution to make human connection better. That's been our focus from day one. Today, we'll announce cool new products, we're gonna demo new tech, and we're gonna celebrate some huge wins from you, our community. First, we're gonna take a look at how far we've come. In 2021, at our direct listing, we talked about four growth vectors: growing around the world, of all ages, new ways of using Roblox, and ultimately improving our economy. At the time, we knew each vector had tremendous headroom, at least 2x each, and that's proven to be true. Last quarter, our daily active users grew by 21% year- over- year. We saw double-digit growth in every region.
We grew at over 20% in the U.S. and Canada, and over 30% in Asia-Pacific, and at double digits in Europe and the rest of the world. We are well on our way to bringing the world together with optimism and civility, and we are doing it with you. Thank you very much. Because of you, we have seen an explosion in content for all ages, and this has supported rapid growth for users over 17. Our daily active users are growing across all age groups, with over 58% of our users 13 or older now, and our 13-and-up cohort is growing at 26% year on year in Q2. As we grow, we do believe Roblox will become a daily utility for communication, shopping, entertainment, learning, and play.
To support this vision, we've been innovating with technology like voice, facial animation, chat, and in Q2 of this year, we had an estimated 3.8 million daily active voice chat users. That's more than double year- on- year, and we can see in our metrics that when people use voice, our engagement is growing. Your content powers Roblox, and we're constantly looking for ways to improve the business prospects for all of you. Our creator ecosystem includes many hobbyists. Of the millions creating on Roblox, over 20,000 are part of our DevEx program. The median creator now is receiving $1,645 during the 12 months ended June 30th, 2024. The hobbyist cohort is complemented by all of us in the room, professional creators, professional developers.
In the last 12 months through June this year, that Roblox creator community earned over $800 million, which is up 18% year- on- year, and we've seen this growth amongst all cohorts of creators. Our top 10 creators grew 5x in the past five years. Our top 100 and our top 1,000 creators are growing even more quickly. That all comes together as 79.5 million daily users on Roblox, and what makes it so fun is, I believe we're just getting started. What's next? We spent a lot of time envisioning what types of content will thrive on Roblox over time, and what technology is needed to get us there. If we had to gauge our Roblox community relative to an existing segment, it would be what's traditionally known as the gaming market, and this is a huge market.
3.4 billion people play games, and the industry supports over $180 billion in content revenue every year. For our next stepping stone, on our way together to a billion daily active users, we believe 10% of all gaming content worldwide will flow through the Roblox ecosystem. We'll do it with our partners. We'll do it with all of you. We'll do it with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony, Meta, and Tencent. We believe we'll hit this 10% of the global gaming market at about 300 million daily active users. We believe that about 80% of these users are gonna be playing, and of course, as we know, the rest are gonna be shopping, consuming entertainment, learning, connecting, and communicating.
Today, everything we're gonna share is a step towards our mutual goal of reaching 10% of the global gaming content market on Roblox. We're gonna highlight three areas we're accelerating. We wanna help you bring people together, we wanna help you scale, and we wanna help you build your business. I'll kick off. You're gonna hear from Garima, you're gonna hear from Anupam, Manuel, and others with more detail, but let's start with bringing people together. That's where we all together started this journey, 18 years ago. People play every day on Roblox in ways that are literally impossible in other places, and that's about to get easier. I'm exci- I'm excited, really excited, we've wanted this one forever, that next month we're releasing Party. Par- yeah. We are! It's finally here. Woo!
Party will allow friends nine and older to group up, easily join experience together, and later this year, we'll allow friends within a party to communicate with both voice and text chat within and outside of experiences. I've wanted this for 16 years. Yeah. In a way that only Roblox thinks about these things, of course, we'll add an API that will allow you to expand the Party experience. You'll be able to teleport party members to the same starting point, drop them into a private lobby, or prepare them into a team. Really psyched. Thank you, User Social. In addition to helping you bring people together, we also want to help you connect with your community. Our goal is to make it possible for you to manage your community from one place on Roblox.
Today, we're sharing that Roblox Groups is being rebranded as Roblox Communities, and Roblox Communities is gonna continue to grow with community-building tools for all of our creators, with tools such as forums, which are dedicated spaces for users to share feedback. Woo! All right. And discuss gameplay. Forums is gonna launch later this year. We know several large communities, like Blox Fruits and others, are already preparing to try them. We've seen already a great response with announcements that lets you share updates about your experience or, or other things, and this functionality is already part of Communities. 25% of the top 1,000 creators are already using announcements, so lots of work coming here. Okay, let's talk about discovery. Over the last twelve months, we've, we've put enormous effort into discovery to democratize it.
We've expanded this vision for search and discovery to be as fair as possible, to surface a lot of diverse content, and to make it as easy as possible for users to find experiences that are right for them. You've seen us, you know, augment our algorithm with Today's Picks. We're not just doing this on the homepage, we're starting to do this in the marketplace as well for you, avatar and asset creators. We're being really thoughtful about the long-term health of Roblox as we do this, as we, you know, incorporate editorial with Today's Picks. We've also increased sponsored on our homepage, over, it used to be about 1.6%. At the end of Q2, 8% of all impressions on our homepage is sponsored.
We want to give all of you a broader range of ways to boost experiences and find audiences quickly, and really surface a broader range of experiences. Today, we talked with a lot of you about search and discovery, and today we're going to share a commitment with you. That is to be open and transparent into search and discovery on Roblox. We're going to be open with the algorithm. We're going to share with you exactly what we value, how we reward attributes that drive distribution, and we're going to provide visibility to all of you into how your experiences are performing. Thanks for your feedback on that. We appreciate it. Today, there is a wider range of experiences entering the top hundred. It partially reflects our growth around the world.
For example, Hide and Sneak and Rivals, they had their daily active players double in the past month. All right, way to go, Hide and Sneak and Rivals. Woo! As the algorithm picked up their engagement. And here's a fun stat we're going to share. In Q2 of this year, there were 25 experiences on Roblox with over 1 million daily active players, or DAU. That's mind-boggling. This puts these experiences on par or better. Things we're very familiar with, Sonic Dash, Marvel Contest of Champions. Some of the titles, though, are bigger than things you would not imagine. We have experiences on Roblox bigger than Angry Birds, bigger than Among Us, bigger than Elden Ring, bigger than Overwatch. Some of the experiences on our platform have more daily actives than any one of these, so congrats to those experiences.
As we think about search and discovery, we don't want this to be a zero-sum game. We are starting to think about off-platform users finding content, as well as on-platform users. To support this, we are announcing today a Creator Affiliate Program that is going to reward you for new users you bring to Roblox. You'll be able to set up unique links for your experience. If users sign up and purchase Robux, you'll earn a share of the revenue they generate through purchases for the first six months. Yeah. We want to hit a balance between the benefit of your social bringing users from off-platform. We're going to test the program with a few creators. We're going to enable them to earn up to 50% on qualified purchases. We're going to onboard creators on a rolling basis as we develop the program.
We expect this to be available for all creators in the first half of 2025. Yeah. One of my favorite things, and we shared earlier that, you know, scale and perf is so important. We are really going to be focusing, and we continue to focus on scale for performance, safety, and creation. Last week, and this is actually a pretty common thing on Roblox, we did hit a record number of concurrent users. It is powered underneath it by infrastructure that we have built that is extremely efficient and cost-effective, that now runs on 27 data centers around the world. You might have seen it, but we have been driving perf and quality throughout our stack. We do believe perf quality is literally our biggest growth vector, and we are going to take this very seriously.
This year, you've seen focus on app launch time. We've increased streaming adoption, which speeds up join times, reduced crashes. We've really been focusing on, on getting to the point where Roblox never crashes. On Windows, we've eliminated over 300,000 crashes every day. Royale High saw 64% reduction in crash rates this year across all devices. Creatures of Sonaria reduced their crash rate by almost 31%, both their own investment and our platform-level physics perf improvements. These developers are really showing how perf and stability can, can supercharge an experience. We've also focused on frame rate and on lower-end devices. Really, the most difficult devices on Roblox are 2 GB and 3 GB RAM devices. We've improved average FPS by 24% for sessions with really low FPS.
You're going to hear more about it on stage today, the focus we have on that. The gains have come from our tech, along with our analytics dashboard, and we're just getting started here. A fun estimation, we estimate we're on track to add over 300 million hours per year of playtime purely from all our perf improvements. Once again, it's our biggest mic drop moment for just where we focus on growth. Okay, I want to share now a little hint of an overall vision that is driving our creator engine and user teams on our platform efforts. We know this is one thing we need to do.
We are going to make it possible for you to host a high-performance, hundred-player, open-world sports or battle royale-type game on Roblox, have it run great on 2 GB of RAM devices anywhere in the world at good frame rate. We're going to do it. Awesome. If you know Roblox, we will not stop until that is possible. We're going to drive all aspects of our engine roadmap to do it. I'm going to show you a quick peek of our Harmony architecture. We're going to talk about it more. The vision is really, we're going to optimize all aspects of our engine, both client and server, balance CPU, GPU, RAM, and bandwidth, really to optimize for every user the best experience across all devices.
Yes, we are looking into a Roblox native architecture for server authority for competitive gaming. We want to make it easier for you to build great content with all this scale. We've been building AI into Roblox for years. You've seen it with some of our Gen AI tools like Code Assist, Material Generator, and Texture Generator. Three months ago, we launched an incubation project with 40 researchers and engineers to develop a Roblox-created 3D foundation model. This is an internal project. It's going to power generative creation everywhere on our platform. It's going to do it at super low cost, and our 3D foundation model will be open source and multimodal. It will power 3D generation through text prompts, video, and 3D prompts.
We see a future where not just in Studio, but a time where all experiences on Roblox will be able to incorporate Gen AI to power real-time creation integrated with gameplay. Yeah.
And once again, in the Roblox way of thinking, we want to make this available for all 79.5 million daily actives on our platform within your experiences. For example, we expect experiences like Build a Boat for Treasure to not just use their current creative mode, but they're going to be able to add text and voice prompts to help build boats more easily. We see this as being an opportunity for all of your experiences that support creation. Of course, as your content contributes more to the global gaming market, our commitment to safety and civility will never change. We've, since the start, provided a global safety system that's both increasingly accurate and cost-effective, and this lets you focus on creation. Our goal has always been to make Roblox the safest place for people to connect, regardless of their age.
This year, we shipped the Ban API and Alt Account Detection, which makes it easier for you to remove violating users from your experiences and to prevent them from rejoining. As your experiences grow, our vision is you'll be able to participate in running your own community as you see fit. This is just another part of building your business. Let's talk about building your business. The Roblox economy, we did some research recently, and the Roblox economy has generated 18,000 full-time job equivalents in the U.S. over the past seven years. We've taken step- yeah, that's a lot of jobs. Together, we've created a lot of jobs, so, yeah, thank you. Other people not here, thank you, too. We've taken steps to make it even more efficient.
We expect that automatic price optimization is going to help all of you and creators thrive. In the future, we expect users will have access to more premium and developer subscriptions. For developers, we're providing a platform for thoughtful native ads in your experience, and we're really double down on focusing on this as well. This year, brands like Walmart, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Fandango, and Warner Bros. started testing commerce on Roblox. For users 13 and older, they discovered clothing and beauty products in these experiences, and with a few simple clicks, these items showed up at their doorsteps. Users even bought movie tickets for Beetlejuice, the sequel, that happens to be coming out today. Awesome. Early next year, we're going to allow creators to sell physical merchandise directly from within your experiences, and we plan to integrate with various e-commerce platforms.
We're thrilled to announce our first partnership today with Shopify. All right. This means that if any of you sell physical goods with Shopify, you'll be able to sell them, those exact same products, in your Roblox experience, and longer term, we expect creators and developers to pick any eligible item currently sold through any major online retailer and sell it within your experience. Yeah. We've also been doing some outside-the-box thinking on paid access games on Roblox, and historically, most experiences on Roblox have been freemium, powered by our super efficient, cost-effective safety and infra systems. Our teams have been up late running some numbers, and I wanna share with you what they've come up with. Today, we're announcing new economics for paid access experiences.
You'll be able to price your paid access experience in real currency value, and we're gonna support a higher rev share for paid access games. Experiences selling at $9.99 will receive a 50% revenue share.
Experiences selling at $29.99 will receive a 60% revenue share.
Yeah, if your experience is priced at $49.99, the rev share is gonna be 70%. This will all be paid in real fiat currency. We're gonna start rolling this out for users on desktop this year, so stay tuned. Wow! Okay, we've shared today our belief that together we can support 10% of the global gaming content revenue on Roblox. We're gonna now dive into more detail on how we plan to help you bring people together, how we plan to help you scale, and how we plan to help you build your business. I really have never been more excited about the future of Roblox, and we can't wait to see what you're gonna build this year. Thank you all.
Please welcome Roblox Vice President of Engineering, Anupam Singh.
Wow! Thank you, Dave, for that inspirational start to the morning. I'm Anupam, and I'm going to talk to you about artificial intelligence today. AI is already everywhere at Roblox, but why do we do AI? Why do we invest so much time in AI? It's so that you, as creators, can automate as many repetitive tasks as you have to do to create your experiences. Let's walk through creation itself. Let's walk through storytelling. When you have a story to tell or an experience to create, what do you start with? A text script. Once you have the text, you want to add vivid images to it. Once you have the images, you want to add some sound to it. Images that don't move are really boring, so you add video.
You want to see everything from different perspectives, so you add 3D, and eventually you build it up into a scene. This entire cycle of creation can be helped with artificial intelligence, and I'm going to walk you through some examples today on what's challenging and what's interesting about AI in the context of creation. Show of hands, how many of you use AI in your daily life today? Around 50% or so, and most of us use it for text. We use it to predict the next word in our sentence, you know, a hyper-powered autocomplete, if you will. Then we want to predict images. We want to predict where pixels go. Next, when we start adding audio, that's when artificial intelligence faces some challenges today, because it's difficult to take temporal data and build prediction into it.
What I'm going to say next needs sound and words and many other modalities. If you want to add video, now you want to predict where these pixels will go. It's not just where the pixels will stand next to each other, but where will they go? You're predicting pixels. Eventually, it becomes like a Rubik's Cube. You're trying to predict these pixels in many, many different perspectives, and then you build up to a functional scene. Think of a scene as a set of cubes that have to be collected into scenes. That scene that you see on your screen is a bunch of cubes that have been put together. A world where things don't move, a world where things are not functional, is pretty boring.
We want to take this scene and make it fully functional, and that's what we call as the fourth dimension, and you'll see that small car move a little bit. Now, I promised you that this is about bringing your vision to life faster, and I know what most of you are thinking: Am I getting a lecture of artificial intelligence early in the morning, right? It's pretty boring. I understand that. Let's make it real. Let's take each of these things and see what Roblox is doing it. Dave showed you a sneak preview of building a racetrack experience using AI. What was really happening behind the scenes in Dave's video was all these cubes were going one after the other, predicting on how to build a racetrack, then build a mountain in it. Then once you build the mountain, you want to build the background.
You'll hear me say the word cube again and again and again. I want to make it nicer, so I build a desert. This is what we call enhancement, and then I want to expand it, which is the trees and the forest that we added to this scene. We went from the idea of a scene, to generate it, then enhanced it, and then expanded it. All of these is powered by the 3D foundation model. As Dave mentioned, we have 40 people working on a foundation model that will create scenes, that will enhance scenes, that will expand scenes. Our intention is to open source most of the weights of this foundation model. Next, if you have a racetrack, you want a driver. How to get that driver?
In the world of AI, your user would just put in a text prompt, and I want that driver to look more than just a driver. Because this is Roblox, we want to make it look like an astronaut. We take that avatar, enter our text prompt, we can take a bunch of sliders back and forth, and boom, you have a racetrack driver that looks like an astronaut. Very cool, and we've been working on it as the Avatar Auto Setup feature. We've already had it in development, and 8% of avatar bodies are being auto-set up. That is the racetrack and the driver, but what about the car? Making a car fully functional in artificial intelligence, a pretty difficult problem. What you just saw was our ability to take a car chassis, add doors to it, add wheels to it, and that is the fourth dimension.
This is active area of research. Roblox is one of the few companies on the planet that can actually build a four-dimensional functional world. That car was pretty generic. Again, we wanna make it a little bit more Robloxian. What we are going to do is we're going to take that car, and we are going to lop off the top of the car. All we'll have is a chassis. All of you who deal with geometry every day can think about taking the chassis, and then we are going to make it into a sofa car. Who doesn't want a sofa car here, right? A sofa and a car together. All of it can be done simply by putting a text prompt, saying, "Give me a sofa car." That's predicting shape and geometry. You get the gist.
We are predicting much, much, much more than just text, which is what most of the large models do today. This feature, we call it Text to Shape, and it is in development, and we will ship it soon. We took the car, we made it into a sofa car, but we want to make it more attractive, so we are going to take some decals. We are going to take that image prompt and say, "Put it on my car," and that's it. This part is called textures. We've released it. It's in development, but we've released it to some of you, and 420,000 textures have already been generated. Every modality in 3D is being generated across Roblox. We have the racetrack, we have the driver. What do we need now? Maybe we can have Dave kick it off.
Today is a beautiful day for a race at the Roblox racetrack. [Foreign language]
What just happened? I did not know Dave could speak Portuguese. I do not think so. It is actually speech translation by our AI model, which in line went from English to Portuguese without us doing anything. Today, you can applaud. Today, we have translated 17 billion chat messages, which is a very large number, per month using our text-to-text translation. We are now working on text-to-speech, speech-to-text. All of this will be available to you as creators to incorporate into your experiences. When you put two drivers on a racetrack or more, what happens? We get competitive. We start being rude to each other. We start cursing each other. I am guilty of it. This is Roblox. Safety and civility are so important to us as a community, as a company.
Our safety team decided to build an inline, real-time voice safety model, that if two drivers, in this case, are being rude to each other, we would immediately give a warning, and if you continue to be rude, we will suspend you. Okay? The technology is amazing, and this is the real-time voice safety model, one of the best on the planet. Only our safety team could have done it. I would like to give them a round of applause for keeping the internet safe. This is in production. Thirty-three million voice messages have been moderated per month, and then we decided, "Why not make the internet safe rather than just Roblox?" We open-sourced the model. Anybody can go to GitHub, download it, and use this model to make their experience safe, not just Roblox. Amazing work.
Next, when I started programming, you had to open manuals, and then you had to Google something, and then you have to figure the syntax out, and while I'm saying all this, Roblox Assistant just took a prompt and generated a ton of code. I can't even keep up with it. It's so fast. It's taken a daytime racetrack, converted it into a nighttime racetrack, added streetlights to it, and those streetlights switch on and off depending on whether it is day or night. Everything that I explained to you is a ton of work by our creator team to build Roblox Assistant for all of you so that you can code faster. A round of applause to our creator team for building this amazing product. Again, this is in production. 1.5 billion tokens.
It means 1.5 billion times we have helped some creator finish their thought in code, which is pretty, pretty exciting for a geek like me. It's already live. Okay. I promised you, AI is everywhere at Roblox. We have 250 models in production. Anytime you create on Roblox, anytime you use Roblox, you might be accessing one of these models, and because we're very proud of invisible infrastructure, we don't want you to know that, "Oh, I'm using this model versus that." I wanted to list all 250 models and describe each one of them, but the marketing team sadly said, "No." I am going to give you just a sneak peek of the models that you already use, Docs AI, Code Assist, Avatar Auto Setup, Recommendations, Search, Moderation models, and many, many more.
We will continue to invest in AI so that you can create faster, you can automate most of your tasks, repetitive tasks, so that you can get to building an experience faster. Finally, I know most of you access some large model or the other. Almost every creator in the world, every programmer in the world, is accessing large models. We are working on APIs to access any large model, whether it is open source, whether it is closed source, in your daily programming, and you'll hear more about APIs for large models in the next few months. Thank you very much. Have a great RDC.
Please welcome back David Baszucki, with Roblox Senior Product Director of Engine, Josh Anon, and Senior Engineering Director of Platform Excellence, Carenina Motion.
Okay, welcome back. In the middle of my talk, I talked a little about perf quality and scale and why it's so important to us. We've got two members of the team out, Josh from the engine group, Carenina from the user group, and we're gonna talk perf and scale, and you'll get to hear what we're working on. I want to start with something you might not all know, which is a huge focus on something as insignificant-sounding as app launch time. You know, the CEOs in Silicon Valley compare scroll speed and app launch time of all of their apps. We're really focused on this. Why is it so important?
It is incredibly important. We found that... We all know pretty much, that we love snappy-feeling apps. When you launch the app, that means that you're not waiting. If you're waiting for that to load, that's a lot of time taken away. The faster the app loads, the more time people are engaged with the app, and we see a correlation between the two.
Okay, and then what is our slightly humorous, target that we're always talking about for app launch time?
Your ambitious goal that you mention at every meeting?
Yeah.
Yeah. It's zero.
That's right. Okay. Which no one in the world does, so it's impossible, but that's our goal.
I'm glad you realize it's slightly impossible.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll get there. We'll get close.
Okay, so we-- I, I know, we launched PlayStation less than a year ago. It's a specific area where we put incredible focus. We're doing it on every device, but let's use that as an example. What's happened on PlayStation for all of us who build for PlayStation or play on PlayStation?
We've saved about 40% of that launch time. We've had about a six-second reduction in the first half of this year, and it's a bit about relentless drive and focus to improve the launch time. In that case, what we've done is we've optimized the network calls, and done the homepage prefetching before we load the Lua app. We've done similar work across PC, and in that case, we've optimized our data model. Also, seen maybe we don't need to load the audio and the video because you don't need that for the homepage. We've done that sort of work in order to improve the launch times across different platforms.
Okay, I can feel it every time I launch our mobile app, and I think... You know, I shared earlier, our research was 18,000 full-time job equivalents in the U.S. Talking about people's time and other metrics, I know you might have a number around just raw time people have saved with app launch time.
Yeah, this year, we are now saving nearly 40,000 total hours daily.
That's crazy!
By shortening the time people wait to launch. Yeah.
Forty thousand, that's like a thousand person weeks of work, so-
It's an annual savings-
Okay
... of 15 million hours.
Oh, my gosh. Okay. We're literally making the world a better place.
Yeah
... by cutting app launch times.
We're trying.
Okay, awesome.
We're trying.
We're on a crusade of app launch time. Hey, Josh, a nother theoretical question, crash rates, which is, every app crashes at some frequency. What's our target for crash rates?
Our target is zero.
All right, yay. Whoo!
That is not a joke.
Notice it here.
Okay, that's serious.
That is serious.
We believe that's almost achievable.
Yeah.
So-
We're gonna keep working at it.
What are we, what are we focused on there?
We've been doing a lot of things. One of the biggest things we've been doing this year is really putting a microscope to every single aspect of the engine, and we're not just looking at things like how much memory we use. We're looking at really technical things, like how fast we ask for that memory, because in some devices, if you ask too fast, it can cause crashes and other problems. We've made huge improvements. Like in our voice chat library, we've reduced the allocations per second over 20 times. That's a huge win.
That's huge
... in user experience.
Okay, just like I shared earlier, our aspirations on supporting a 100-person sports open-world battle royale, what's the most difficult devices for memory?
Oof! Resource-constrained, 2 GB Android devices. There are so many of them globally with so many chipsets, so many manufacturer customizations, so many driver challenges. It is really hard.
Yeah.
That's what we're focused on.
Yeah, and just highlighting, we're very appreciative for those devices. They sell for very low cost. They allow a lot of people to play Roblox. W e still see 2 GB Android devices. When we climb the chain to streaming, can you share a little bit about our vision if someone happens to be using a streaming experience, and the experience is, say, the state of California, what's the benefit for memory on that situation?
Yeah, so what's great about streaming, you know, it's funny, is even today, this morning, we've talked about streaming's benefits for join time. Streaming really lets us dynamically manage what's loaded and not on your device, and that makes it so that we could have California loaded on one of those resource-constrained devices. What we're really-- what we're seeing that's really cool is, as developers adopt streaming, their join times aren't just getting faster, their crash rates are plummeting.
Yeah.
Jailbreak just adopted streaming a bit ago, and their crash rate is down almost 75%. That's a huge win with a pretty simple change.
Okay, so, I keep asking if we, if a creator has streaming on, and then we add Harmony, which is balancing CPU, GPU, RAM, you know, networking, all of that.
Mm-hmm
... that does create the, a theoretically no-crash environment. Can you talk more about Harmony?
Yeah, Harmony and streaming is absolutely how we're getting to zero crashes. Some of you know that our engine actually automatically scales based on your device's capabilities. It's pretty unique to Roblox. The past couple of years, we have been completely overhauling how that scaling works, and we're improving two key things. One is we're making the system predictive, and the second is that we're making it so that it can orchestrate all aspects of the engine. Now, it's a little confusing to understand, so how about we look at a video?
Yeah, cool.
Can you play the video? All right, what we see here is we have an experience where we're using streaming to load it in. You see it load readily, but then in the background, we get to the set of buildings, and Harmony is able to predict that a crash is about to happen, and it's able to work between streaming and LOD to stop that crash from happening. It's a pretty nice improvement.
Yeah, so I think, so ultimately, theoretically, we should be able to never crash if we're using streaming and Harmony. We'll load as much of the world as possible.
Yes.
You mentioned Harmony, or we talked about it managing GPU as well, which leads us into something else we would all like, is 240 Hz on every device in the world, including that low-end Android device, which is really difficult. How are we doing with FPS?
We're making some really great progress. This is a video showing where we were at about January this year and where we were recently. If we can play that again quickly, you'll see that we've made some improvements that, in this case, we're about 1.5x faster, and this is on a low-end device. Now, there's something really special in this video, too, and if we did our job right, you don't see it. There's a number of things that are hidden behind those buildings and walls, and we're not drawing them anymore. Starting now, and in this video, we have automatic dynamic occlusion culling.
Woo!
Yes. So-
Now, I know the answer to this, but I'm gonna ask it anyways, right? Which is, there's some functionality we do sometimes that improves every single experience on the platform without a code change or any change to the experience. Is this one of them?
This is one of these magic moments where we just release an improvement, and everyone gets it for free.
Okay.
No work required.
Awesome. Yay, that's very Roblox. It's very similar to our-
Yeah
... Luau interpreter. When it went high speed, everything started running faster. Really excited about this. Any-- and just give us a update on occlusion culling. Anyone testing it right now, when will it roll out?
Yeah, so we're testing it in a couple experiences right now, Dress to Impress, Anime Fighters Simulator, and a few others, and over the next few weeks, it's gonna roll out to everybody. Again, you don't have to do anything. Your users will just press play, and it will be faster.
Okay.
So-
I'm trying to get my head around that.
Awesome.
Okay, we talked, right at the start, I talked about in addition to app launch time, CEOs, like, I look at the scroll speed of every other app, and we, like, how good is this, right? It's like, if we were working on cars, we'd be checking the transmissions out. Let's talk about just raw quality on the user and maybe lead in with, like, scrolling and other things you're working on.
Yeah, scrolling is one of those things that is very obvious, intuitive to the user. You want it to be super responsive. We have a video to demonstrate some improvements with side-by-side scrolling. If you wanna put the video up. On the left, you see where we had the midsize UI in Marketplace, and it wasn't scrollable unless you took it to full, full screen. We optimized by making that midsize UI very scrollable, super snappy, and we found that this really had a big impact. It increased marketplace searches and click-throughs, as well as overall, overall Roblox spenders. It really helps to have a UI that's very responsive. We've made some other-
Yeah, what else are we working on?
Big changes. We've been working on more. This is part of this relentless pursuit, everything from, "Why does my text look blurry when I've switched my monitor?"
Right, if I ever see uncrisp text, you get an email, right? Like-
Yes.
Okay, good.
Yeah, we get a lot of emails, and it's one of them.
Yeah
... but that we hunted down. You know, it's like: Okay, well, every OS behaves slightly differently, and on Mac, you gotta have dynamic updating, DPI, in order to know that you're modifying your assets, so your assets don't look fuzzy and your text doesn't look fuzzy. That is now crystal clear, so no more emails on that one.
Okay, and then there's one other one where a lot of us context switch all day long on our mobile app or on our desktop, and when we context switch, we just wanna be right in it.
We wanna be right there.
Can you share what we did there?
Yeah, so on iOS specifically, when you go into the background, sometimes came back in, you had to wait for the assets to load. We were trying to fetch the assets before the network was ready. Figured out, "Okay, we should really wait. Let's... The OS will tell us when the network's ready, then we'll fetch the assets," and that makes it feel ultimately snappy.
Yeah.
There's one other that we built.
Oh, what else?
Which is really exciting, which is I spend a lot of time when I open up Roblox having to wait for an update.
Mm-hmm. Ooh!
Yeah. You do, too?
I do, too. I've probably waited for an update over 10,000 times in the last-
How many times would you like to wait for an update?
Well, I might miss it, but I guess zero.
Zero, right. We are in the process of launching background downloads.
Oof.
Hopefully no more-
Woo!
Waiting for Roblox to update.
Okay. So that means-
Yeah
... on my PC or my Mac, that I'm not gonna see that dialogue?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
When we release an update-
Woo
... if you're, you've got Roblox open, it'll download in the background, so the next time you launch, you're just launching with that fresh version.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Okay, awesome. Okay, so one more thing, and this dovetails into our discussion around hundred players. We started giving more CPU based on the size of the experience. We just talked about, actually, I didn't talk in my-- Can you tell me, tell us what we're doing for memory on RCC?
Yeah. For the past few years, whether you've had one player or 100 players, you always got about 6 GB of RAM on the server. We really wanna let you build these bigger worlds, and that's not just about making the engine more efficient, it's about giving you more resources. Rolled out right now, we have what we call dynamic memory. Your server memory now starts at 6.4 GB, and you get 50 MB of additional memory per player in your experience. If you build a 100-person experience right now, you get twice as much memory, almost twice as much, as you did a month ago. We think that's gonna be a big enabler.
Woo! If I'm a creator, I go to my creator dashboard, I'm assuming, I'll be able to do more without crashing. I'll probably be able to see this. Can you just share what I might see?
Yeah, so it's been a really big week here, not just because of RDC, but we also released some new creator analytics this week, and they let you see things like how much memory your experience is using on the server. You'll see these new caps reflected there.
Yeah, so I think this is just a part of that getting to hundred-player high perf just as fast as a five-player memory CPU. We'll be watching low-end heartbeat rate. We'll be watching all kinds of stuff, so really exciting. Hey, perf quality, biggest growth vector in the company. Appreciate all the work. Any other closing comments or things we should be thinking about?
Yeah. This is a fantastic opportunity, so I want to encourage people to check out the engine lab in the booth area. We'll have an opportunity to get some hands-on help with your experiences, where you can get help on anything from how to adopt streaming, which we talked about, or just optimizations.
Okay, thank you both. It's been great talking about that. We're going to now start talking about building our businesses. Stephanie Latham's going to come on out. Welcome, Stephanie, and thank you, Josh and Carenina.
Thank you .
Thanks, David.
Please welcome Roblox Vice President of Global Brand Partnerships, Stephanie Latham.
Hello, RDC! I am so happy to be here today because one of the best parts of my job is getting to connect with all of you, our creator community, and help you connect with brands to see what you uncover and unlock together. We've been busy on the brand partnerships team. We now have over 400 activations, and for those of you who were here last year, you may remember that's double. Brands are coming to Roblox to find and connect with new audiences, and with them, they're bringing millions of new users to connect with you, too. In fact, as I hope you'll see in our next few minutes together, there has never been a more exciting time to be a part of our brand ecosystem on Roblox. Let's start with the team at Dress to Impress. Woo!
In case you missed it, they've been having a pretty brat summer, thanks to their first brand integration with Warner Music Group's Atlantic Records. You don't have to take my word for it, though. I'm happy to introduce you to Umoyae from the DTI team to tell their story.
Hi, my name is Umoyae, and I'm the manager and representative for Dress to Impress. When people think of Dress to Impress, they think trendy, fashionable, and self-expression. When integrating our first partner into the experience, we had to make sure it made sense for our game, and the reaction from our community has been amazing. People are loving the themed digital fashion, makeup looks, and of course, music. Working with partners has brought in new audiences for us, and we had over 15.6 million players engaged with our brand-themed challenges, and it brought in 2.4 million new players who had never played Dress to Impress before. Plus, we broke our highest CCU yet at a staggering 641,000+ CCU.
In the future, we are so looking forward to working with brands that are as fierce and amazing as our game and community is, and we are so excited to bring more cultural moments to the Roblox platform. Thank you, and much love from the Dress to Impress team. Bye.
Let's hear it for DTI! So much love back to all of you, too. Here's what's really exciting, though. These types of partnerships are now transcending all categories on Roblox. Let's take automotive, for example. Lamborghini recently integrated with Voldex's Driving Empire. They simultaneously launched the new Lamborghini on Roblox and in the real world, bridging the gap between the digital and the physical. For Driving Empire, the launch was a major success, significantly boosting both the visibility and the player engagement. During launch weekend alone, 6 million mi were driven in the new Lamborghini, and Voldex reported a five-time increase in traffic to the Lamborghini Lab experience. This is really just the beginning for Harry, wherever you are, and the Driving Empire team. Woo!
Licensing and integrations with automotive brands has now opened up more doors for Voldex, who are now working with Jaguar, Land Rover, McLaren, General Motors, Audi, and just wrapped a really successful collaboration with NASCAR. Now, jumping over to entertainment, our studio partners are always continuing to push the boundaries with new releases. As you heard earlier, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice premieres today, but thanks to the development of Escape the Afterlife, an experience created by Nick and the Sawhorse team—woo!—Beetlejuice already has 23 million visits as of this morning on Roblox and has cemented its place as one of our top theatrical experiences. What I also love is Escape the Afterlife also integrated with four other top Roblox experiences, bringing the community even more together.
I don't know about all of you, but it was pretty fun to test out that Fandango integration and purchase my first movie ticket on Roblox. We are also seeing this type of innovation and impact transcend to our avatar marketplace and item creators. I love seeing partners like Whos X, WhoseTrade , and Rush_ X, working closely with brands like Adidas to design collections and items for our marketplace. Recently, Adidas and Whose Trade launched an exclusive virtual necklace that was bundled with two pairs of physical shoes. When they launched this on Roblox, it sold out instantly for 2 million Robux. Adidas, too, is just getting started, and they continue to partner with other developers and creators, like Matthew and the team in Dubit, with lots more integrations to come.
These are really just a few ways that brands and creators are coming together in our community. This is all connected to what Dave mentioned earlier, which is how focused we are on creating more ways for you to build successful businesses on Roblox. Now I'm going to take you on a trip to the future and share the three places where we're focusing our investments to bring more brands and creators together. First, growing your business by enabling you to publish ads within experiences. Last year, we launched immersive ads with image and portals. This was the first time that you could earn by showing ads in your experiences.
You gave us a lot of feedback, thank you, but we're happy to hear from many of you, as Alex from Jailbreak shares, "This is working." So far, over 3,000 of you have earned Robux as ads publishers. This is awesome to see, but I know, and we know that you want more ways to earn from showing ads. Earlier this year, we launched immersive video ads, and this is already bringing new brand partners and advertisers to the platform. My team has been hard at work educating the largest global brands and media agencies about the power of reaching this highly engaged community, and in turn, growing ways for all of you to earn. Let me share with you the results from our initial video ads research.
Nearly three in four Roblox users agreed that they enjoyed an experience advertising on Roblox, and 87% had a favorable opinion of our rewarded video ads, which this makes sense because we're seeing much higher completion rates, and in turn, this is translating into higher payouts for all of you. Looking ahead, we want to make sure that we launch a range of formats so that you're in control and you decide what best fits your experience. I'm delighted to share with you in the coming months, we'll give you more options for when and where the ads appear. For example, we want to give you the ability to trigger the ad from anywhere, whether it's in your menu or in experience stores.
What's really cool is that these videos play as an overlay, so you have control over how to incorporate the ads and, of course, the reward. Next, let's talk about commerce. First, a huge thank you again to our partners at Walmart, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Warner Bros., and Fandango for helping us test this idea. As David mentioned this morning, we're expanding our offering and are thrilled to bring Shopify on board next. Let me bring this to life a little more for you. Soon, you can bring your product catalogs from Shopify directly onto Roblox, and in addition, we're investing in the ability for you to easily attach a digital benefit, whether that's an avatar or an experience item, and this can all happen seamlessly within the Creator Hub.
Do not worry, we will have you covered with inexperience APIs and webhooks to help you manage merchandising, checkout, and order confirmation. I think why this is so exciting is it now means for all of your 13 and up users, they can discover and purchase your products to be enjoyed both in and outside of Roblox, which grows the opportunities for you to build fandom and loyalty. Last, but certainly not least, we have heard from so many of you that you are looking for more ways to create seamlessly together with brands. I am excited to tell you that in January, we will be expanding our Roblox Partner Program. Our goal when we launched this program was to empower developers that wanted to work with our brand community. Good news, it has been working.
Current members regularly share and tell me that being a part of the program has helped them unlock many new business opportunities. We are excited to welcome more of you into the fold, and we will be posting all the details on this in a DevF orum post later today. All right, this brings us to the end of our few minutes together, but I hope in our time today that you are able to see and feel what I get to see and feel every day, which is that the opportunity for brands and Roblox creators to work together has never been greater. I want to thank you for helping us build this incredible ecosystem, and thank you for your feedback, thank you for your creativity, and most of all, thank you all for your continued collaboration.
Now, I'm happy to introduce you to Garima, who will be talking more about bringing people together on the platform.
Please welcome, Roblox's Senior Product Director of Social, Garima Sinha.
Do I go right now? Video didn't play.
Go.
Wow! This is an amazing audience. This is so amazing. I am so happy to be here. I think RDC is my favorite time of the year because I get to see all of you, and it's so much creativity and so much innovation that comes out from people in this room. It inspires us. It inspires us to build the best platform in the world for all of you. Roblox is on a mission to connect 1 billion people to come together and have fun. Every experience you all build on Roblox helps millions of people to come together every single day. Playing games is one of the most social things people do when they're together, whether it's your Sunday tradition or your Christmas tradition. It makes sense that people wanna come together, play games, and hang out.
Maybe it's a lot more about sometimes just having a great coffee, or maybe it's about going to a concert and having a fun night out. Every experience on Roblox, and every moment on Roblox is just that, people coming together to have a great time. Over 579 million friendships are formed on Roblox every single month. Think about that. Can someone do the math real quick? It translates to 10,000 friendships formed every minute. That's huge! Over 36 million people communicate on Roblox every day, whether that's text chat or voice chat. The main thing is, they're coming together and expressing, and that's a lot of fun for them. All this leads to over 1.5 billion hours that people spend with their friends. That's huge. That's a lot of human connections and a lot of fun that people are having on Roblox.
Why does it matter? What all this tells us is when people come, they can find their friends, they can connect with them, they can play with them, they can communicate with them. It's magic. Every single time a user can come together and play, just like that, they love Roblox even more. They spend so much more time, and eventually they spend so much more money. It really is a no-brainer for you all to integrate amazing, easy social features that will drive more engagement and a lot more monetization of your experiences. We've been at this for a long time. I think a lot more of you have been at this for a long time. How many of you were building on Roblox over five years ago? Can I see the hands? Wow, that's a lot of you. You must remember some of these launches.
Remember that 200 friend and block limit? Who remembers that? Yeah, I see, I see a few hands. What about three years ago? I think spatial audio and text chat are some of the things we have been talking about for the last two, three years. I think more than half of you use the new text chat service. You know how important text chat is in every experience. Just in the last year, we've shipped all these new social capabilities: Audio API, Captures API, Screenshots, immersive communication, and a lot more. The main thing is, social is getting more and more powerful every single year. Let's look at a few examples from the community. Is Murder Mystery in the room? Do I see them? Maybe not. It's an amazing, amazing experience. I enjoy it so much.
Let's take a look at what goes on here.
I don't like tight spaces. I get very claustrophobic, and gasping. All right, hands where I can see them. Oh! Oh, he has a gun. He has a gun. Oh, no! Hands where I can see 'em. Hey, get, get back over there. Get back over there. Oh, what? You can go- Oh, I got--
It's a really fun survival game where every user is assigned the role of a murderer, an innocent, or a killer, and you run around trying to survive, trying to problem-solve. An addition of voice chat to this earlier this year took this game to a new thrilling level. It's so much fun problem-solving with your friends, using voice chat, running around, as you just saw. With that, I'm so excited to share that now 69 of the top 100 experiences on Roblox are voice-enabled. That means... Yeah... Voice is really helping people drive more engagement in their experiences, and it's just so much more fun for users.
Over the last year, we've been really hard at work in trying to expand Voice globally, and true to the promise of Roblox, we wanted to do it safely and make sure the optimism and civility on the platform is maintained. Safety is core to everything we do at Roblox, and with that, I'm so excited to share that Voice is now available in over 32 countries worldwide. Like Dave mentioned, over 3 million users are using Voice every single day. That's double of what we shared last year. I am more excited for the future, the future where we can make sure every single user has an amazing, magical experience on Roblox. They come together, they find their friends, and they can play together, and it works. It should work every single time. Where do we start?
Let's start something very simple that we all think should actually work, and that's playing with each other. This is how it goes today when people use many different apps: "Do you wanna play Roblox?" "Yes, I am already on." "Wait, what server? How do I come to you? I wanna join. I don't know, it's not working. I'm getting kicked out of the experience. Hold on, hold on. I'm gonna call you. I don't know what's happening. I'm getting stressed. I can't join. I need to join. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait." It does not work. You might think, "Why doesn't it just work?" The thing is, what if we can make it work? Dave shared this a few minutes ago, Roblox Party. It's a way that people can come together, coordinate, join servers together every single time.
I wanna bring this to life, but I can't have this party alone, so let's invite Dave back on stage. I would love to invite Nicholas. Hi.
Hello.
Nicholas is one of our biggest video creators for Roblox content. If you know him, he has more than 2 million followers.
Yeah, yeah, across-
Welcome
... platform, which is insane. Can't wrap my head around it, but yeah.
That's amazing. Dave, are you excited for a demo?
I'm really excited.
Great. We did a demo last year, and it was nerve-wracking, and we wanna see if we can make it work this year for Roblox Party. You will find out just in a minute if it works. Let's get started.
Okay, cool.
We'll go over here. Okay, so, what you're seeing... I'll give it a minute to show up. You are not seeing it.
Whoo!
It's coming. It's coming.
It's so awesome. Oh, my God. Can't believe it.
Ah, there we go.
All right. Yay.
Whoo!
You gotta wait for the nice things in life. Okay, what you are seeing on the screen, in the middle of the screen is my phone. To your left is Dave's phone, and on your right is Nick's phone, and we're gonna show how you can party on Roblox. I’m gonna get this party started. It's really simple. I just go to my chats. I say, "Hi." Are you all ready?
Yes, I'm ready.
Okay, I'm gonna go to the top right and hit join.
Okay, I'm joining.
I'm joining.
Tariq is backstage, and he will be joining us, too.
Hi, Tariq.
Hello.
Hi!
What's up?
We can all hear him over voice chat.
Yeah. Good to be in here.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Whoo.
Which experience should we pick? I just click the Play button, and I can go pick any experience.
Okay, we'll follow.
Picking a driving one?
Ooh, yeah, that sounds fun.
Like it. I'll follow.
Okay, I love cars, so let's do it. I'm picking Highway Hooligans. Whoo. I'm now gonna click Join with Party, and we will join the same server together.
I'm grouping up.
Yeah, I'm grouping up, too.
All right, me too.
Okay, awesome.
Eight seconds. Are you ready?
So ready.
Four, three, two, one.
Whoo!
What happened on my phone? I just joined Highway Hooligans.
Yes.
That's a good thing.
That's a good thing. You did. I was like, "He really did not think it through," but it does work.
Just happened magically. Whoo.
It makes sure that we all join the same experience together.
Okay, awesome.
Okay, so we are all in.
I'm in.
Hello.
Whoo.
Yes, yes.
Good to be here.
Whoo! Whoo. Whoo, whoo, whoo. Pick a car, Garima.
Dave is... Oh-
Sick
... I have a custom car.
I have a pink one.
Where's the '59 Caddy? I want that.
Okay.
Okay.
Let's get started. I'm gonna hit Drive. Let's go. Let's race together.
Okay.
All right, I'm letting in.
Gonna crush it. Look out for me. Okay.
Great. Let's go!
Oh, I'm already winning.
Oh, I'm...
Oh, no. Um-
Garima, you're far behind, I fear. Wait.
Am I?
Yeah.
Where are you?
I'm at 2,000. She just went past me. Ah!
Okay.
Oh, uh-oh.
My car-
Let's keep going. Let's keep going.
I'm trying to figure out what kind of car I'm getting in.
I feel like crashing.
Ooh!
Okay. I'm driving in reverse.
Dave, you are so far behind.
That's all right. It's an open world game. I'm just having fun.
I just rammed a truck, too.
Oh, oh, I rammed. I rammed. I'm going in the other direction. Maybe we should—
Okay
... switch game. Oh, oh, oh.
I am so far off.
Ooh!
Oh.
Thirty thousand points.
Okay, I am dead. I need to pick up a new game. Let's—
Let me find something that's—
Okay
... that's more suitable, maybe.
Okay.
Okay.
All right, let's try Natural Disaster Survival?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
Okay, I'm joining up.
I'm grouping up.
Grouping up.
I grouped up.
Voice keeps on going throughout experiences?
Yes.
Oh, that's so—
I'm not in any experience.
Okay, we're still hanging out. Great.
Yes.
Waiting for others to play.
Okay, I'm ready.
Waiting.
Okay, there I go.
Yeah.
I'm in. I'm ready. Yes!
Woo!
I'm really good.
Woo! Where are y'all? Oh, I see Nick-
Woo
... by the stairs.
Yeah, I'm at the top. This was the first mobile game I ever played on Roblox, by the way.
Woo.
Yeah. Woo!
Okay-
Okay, I'm in here.
... I think if we keep playing, I'll spend all day.
We can't stop. We wanna keep-
We-- I gotta get back to my presentation.
Okay.
I will let you two keep going. Nick, what did you think of this?
I loved it. I mean, I can finally play Dress to Impress with my buddies, so I'm happy.
Woo!
Woo.
All right, thanks for having me.
Great.
Great.
Wait, David, you promised me a selfie earlier.
Totally.
We need to get one.
Let's do it right now.
Okay.
Post one.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's do it.
Okay.
Woo, woo, woo, woo!
Smile.
Nice.
All right.
Cool.
Quite like that.
Yes.
Thank you. Awesome.
Great.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Nice.
Yes! Okay, thank you.
Finally, it's here, Roblox Party. An easy way for people to connect with each other, communicate, coordinate, and play. They can pick any experience they want, the voice keeps working, or they can use text chat. It's seamless, and it gets them into an experience every time. Not just that, in the classic Roblox way, we're gonna ship this with a Party API, that you all can use to build amazing experiences to keep people together. One of the core use cases of this could be just teaming up friends together, because you can see when people are joining with each other as a group of friends. You can team up into the same team, or maybe you want to team up into different teams so they can compete with each other. Or you want to give them special items or special powers in your experiences.
I wanna be a part of that cool blue jacket squad because I brought three other friends with me. That's amazing. You can keep them together and teleport them from one spot to another in your experiences. You know about the secret spots in your experience. You know the high moments. You know the best things that might happen. Keep the group of friends together, and much more. I cannot wait to see what you all dream up with this and what you build. I'm really, really excited. This will be shipping later this year, and honestly, it's been such a long time coming and cannot wait to see what you do with this. Once people are together, they wanna capture those amazing, fun moments, right? You saw what Dave and Nick just did, that selfie.
Or maybe you wanna share it and make someone else jealous, or you wanna show off. Every time people are together and they're having a great time, they wanna capture that moment. Earlier this year, we announced Captures API, and just in a short time, over 360 million screenshots are taken every month across hundreds of thousands of experiences. This is already happening. People are going to your amazing experiences, taking these screenshots, sharing out. You know what's better? Some of these integrations that we've seen. Is Twin Atlas in the room? Woo! It's one of the most clever and actually on-point integrations of Captures API we've seen on Roblox. I'll let it play for a second.
This is a game where people can tame their horses, and the moment the horse is tamed by a user, it just triggers a capture. A camera mode gets unlocked, and you can just save that capture. It's a really brilliant execution of this idea that you know your experiences best, and you know when to highlight certain pieces of content that can be captured. What's next? These 360 million screenshots that are being taken, they can be so powerful for all your experiences. These can be so, so, so powerful if others can see, discover new things. We are so excited to share that now people can actually not just capture these screenshots on platform, but also share them to Roblox. These will show up on users' profiles. Yes.
These will show up on users' profile or on top of Home in the Friends sort, and people can discover new content. They can see all the fun moments that their friends are having and just join right from there. It's going to be so easy to use all the human connections and drive a lot more discovery and engagement of your experiences. One last thing. Woo! I promise, last one. What is better than taking a photo? Taking a video. Video. Is it? Video! One more time. Video. Let's do it. Video! Okay. You said it, I didn't. Here, that was videos. Of course, that comes with a Video API, again, that you can use to trigger the best moments in your experiences.
You can capture rolling videos, and when an amazing moment happens, a highlight, a secret spot, someone wins, you can trigger that video and prompt people to save it or share it on the platform. Here is an example. There it is, a highlight capture that could be triggered by you all in your experiences. I think this is going to be magical. Lastly, oh, actually, one more thing. For Video API, I was kidding before. For Video API, if you want to learn more, we will be doing live demos in our social booth. Please come stop by. You can try it out in your experiences. It'll be fun, or you can learn more about it in the social session tomorrow. I hope you were as excited and as inspired to build for social as I am.
I really am looking forward to this future where we can have a lot of parties on Roblox, we can have video sharing on Roblox. I can't wait to see what you all dream up. Thank you.
Please welcome, Roblox Senior Product Director of Creator Content and Services, Greg Hartrell.
Hey, everyone. I'm Greg Hartrell. How's everyone's RDC going? Yeah! I'm hyped. Let's keep this going. See, at Roblox, we talk a lot about the culture of our community and how to make emerging genres thrive through discovery and other tools. If we want Roblox to become 10% of the video game market, a very diverse set of genres has to emerge from creators like you worldwide. Some context first: there's never been a better time to be a Roblox creator. Earlier, our CEO shared that active users are up over 20% year- over- year in most of our regions. This includes over 50% year-over-year user growth in Japan, a top gaming market with lots of interest in Roblox creation. On top of that, hours of engagement and monthly unique users are growing.
Platform hours are up over 20% year- over- year, and that drove monthly unique payers to reach an all-time record at the end of Q2, up 22% year- over- year. Amazing growth. We also see a lot of genre innovation behind this, and as a result, more creators are punching above their weight. In the past 12 months, millions of experiences have been created on the platform, with many of them reaching new milestones. We've seen 1,211 experiences crossing 5 million visits, and we've seen 660 experiences crossing 10 million visits. That's experiences like Clone Playground and Mega Princess Tycoon. I love it. Forty-six experiences crossed over 100 million visits, like Death Ball and LifeTogether. By the way, does anybody else love that at Roblox, we can celebrate a Death Ball next to a Mega Princess Tycoon?
I think it's hilarious. I want the mashup. All right. Look, we've reached an entirely different milestone. This year, we reached over 100 experiences with 1 billion visits, with 30 more joining this club in a little more than a year. This includes incredible games like Pet Simulator 99, Sonic Speed Simulator, and Toilet Tower Defense. We had to get some Skibidi in there, didn't we?
All right. This all means that Roblox is one of the most diverse 3D co-experience ecosystems, creating more opportunities for creators everywhere. That brings us to our discovery mission. We want to connect every creation with the right audience, and we've made a load of progress on this in the last year. We've seen a 181% increase in unique experiences recommended with user plays. This is critical because more creators creating compelling experiences are finding it easier to get discovered on Roblox than before. It's amazing. This is high impact for this community, and I want to share with you what's behind the improvement. We attribute it to two key investments. First, we're better at finding you an audience, and we're better at tapping into the culture on Roblox. That's harnessing this community's voice to decide what we promote next.
For audience finding, we're better at matching users with experiences than before. Our discovery algorithm now prioritizes intentional engagement, reducing accidental clicks and joins. This improves recommendation accuracy, makes a better experience, and gives impressions to all of you. We also enhanced search with a machine learning-based tech stack that better understands user intent. Let's say you search for driving simulation, now you'll find more relevant results, like crash simulators or everyday driving. Lastly, we implemented real-time recommendations. A Roblox user now gets more relevant suggestions instantly during their session, with up-to-the-second inputs. Next, I wanna talk about how we tap into culture on Roblox. We already focus on helping hidden gems get discovered through curation and platform events that celebrate this community's uniqueness. Our Chief Product Officer, Manuel, will come on next to share with you shortly.
We also see that Roblox culture is greatly influenced by Charts, and we've seen a lot of excitement for the return of genre sorts. You may have all seen in May that we revamped the Discover page with Charts, making trending genres more accessible through various sorts. That page now includes top trending, up-and-coming, and various genre breakouts, driving user tastes and diversifying what people try. Charts are not just for discovery. We know that you monitor the trends and use them to inspire your next creation, and so we're continuing to invest in them. Later this year, we'll add more filters, like breakdowns for country, device type, and new sorts. I'm excited that we're working on revamping the genre taxonomy to include unique Roblox subgenres. We'll also update the genre picker, so you all can express a preference.
We'll hear more about this later this year. Let me talk about a creator agency. It's a really important principle for us. It's important that Roblox provides you tools to grow your audience and to understand your experience, and we've introduced new tools and are announcing more today to help you do just that. The most successful experiences host live events for their players, so we've improved how we support and showcase experience events. In June, we introduced larger thumbnails, and we streamlined an easier setup. To enhance visibility, events will soon appear in group pages, be highlighted in detail pages, and be periodically featured on the homepage. Later this year, we're gonna enable something super cool, place-specific events, which allows you to teleport users directly into your latest updates. It's super powerful. Okay, we've also rolled out notifications to enhance user engagement.
In March, we launched the Experience Notifications API, which includes a permission prompt. This allows you to send alerts for moments like a high score or to highlight a major update, and it's a powerful tool for helping you re-engage and reactivate millions of users. We've also spent significant time improving tools for thumbnails, the gateway into your experience. Currently, you can only display one thumbnail globally on the homepage, and that makes it hard to pick just one that will resonate with everyone. If you have to translate it, it even gets more complicated. That is why we're excited to announce the launch of thumbnail personalization, available in the coming weeks. With it, you can upload multiple thumbnails, and we'll automatically target the right one to the right user using factors like age and genre.
You will also be able to review performance metrics and figure out which user cohorts those thumbnails resonated with best. There is more. We are also announcing thumbnail translation within our automatic translation system. This optional feature will recognize text in thumbnails and offer you translated versions that maintain the original font style. It will be available later this year, supporting Latin-based languages, with more languages coming next year. I am so stoked. Lastly, let's cover tools for user acquisition. We have upgraded sponsored ads by moving it to a higher position with new promotion formats available to all of you. David mentioned earlier that we increased impressions available for sponsored ads, driving up on the homepage over 8% by the end of Q2, up from 1.6% in Q1.
Last month, we introduced search ads, a new ad format that allows you to promote your experience by reaching people based on their search terms. Ads are ranked based on their likelihood to convert, and we'll take the highest-converting ones and put them higher in search results, making them more compelling and relevant. We think it's a powerful tool for help you reach your ideal audience effectively. With so much going on to help you get discovered, I want to take a moment to invite someone to stage who actually knows a thing or two about getting discovered. You know him from many games that have together generated over 5 billion views, including games like Dusty Trip. Please welcome, the one, the only, Jandel. Great to have you on the stage, bud.
Oh, thank you, Greg. Hello, everyone.
All right, I wanna ask you a few questions. First, tell us how you got started on Roblox. Why, why did you choose it?
Yeah, back in 2017, I found Roblox. I was just playing Natural Disaster Survival a bunch. I thought it was hilarious, had a great culture, and then I just created a game. At the time, like, Unreal Engine and Steam were really hard to get games on, so yeah.
Awesome. Look, I wanna talk about Dusty Trip. It's, it's a shade under a billion visits right now. You're getting close. What's the story of Dusty Trip?
Yeah, I think we hit 998 million today, so pretty close, but sadly not enough. Yeah, the original creator reached out and asked me to buy it. I saw a lot of potential in the game. The first update we did, we just fixed a bunch of first-time user experience issues. Then, like, the next week, the game was on 40,000 concurrence. Yeah, it was crazy. We just updated weekly. We finally did a live event, and we peaked at 575,000. Yeah, it was just insane.
Congratulations. Now, that's such a good story. Look, well, another question is, is let's do the quick story of how you helped get Dusty Trip discovered. Tell us a little bit more.
Yeah, I think Roblox has, like, pretty great discoverability. Like, I think, like, a good game will get you 95% there. We really focus on great icons and great game icons. We really have a big focus on replayability, so all our updates are always focused on how do we build more retention into the game, especially in Dusty Trip's case.
Makes a ton of sense. Retention is so important.
Yeah.
Last question I have for you: What advice would you give creators who have similar aspirations to yourself?
This is, like, kind of great advice, I reckon. Like, I reckon just make as many games as you can. Like, I don't think I'm necessarily, like, very talented or anything. I've just made so many bad games that eventually I've made a few good ones. That's the advice I'd give everyone, just make a ton of games, listen to your community, and update weekly.
Sage wisdom. Jandel, thanks for your insights.
Thank you.
Everybody, give it up for Jandel.
Thank you.
All right. There was a lot about discovery, but before I go, there's one more thing.
There's no way we can talk about tapping into Roblox culture without a critical ingredient: music. Who loves that we can share music socially on Roblox?
Walking around with boom boxes?
What about genres built around songs from amazing artists? It's a pleasure to reveal today, in a very Roblox way, we're bringing public music tracks back.
Our vision is for Roblox to become the destination for immersive music experiences, sharing, and discovery. Imagine 80 million users helping you discover the next breakout music star or trend. Let's dive in. First, we've partnered with DistroKid, the widely popular music distributor used by solo musicians, bands, DJs, producers, with over 1 million tracks from independent artists. We'll support their catalog for artists that still have the rights to their music and to distribute across platforms, and if you have the rights to your songs, you, too, can use DistroKid to upload to Roblox. DistroKid... The DistroKid artists we've spoken to are stoked. We think it's gonna be a boon for them and creativity on Roblox. We're excited to share a little preview of these tracks from DistroKid, featuring The Holy Knives and The Strange Ones.
I wanna do a quick shout-out to creators EV1 and AllowSleep from TTD3 and the Clip It team for their contributions. Check this video out.
Hey, I'm EV1, and this is my partner in crime, AllowSleep. We're the duo managing Emotes, the studio behind TTD3. From cod kill edits to rhythm games, our creative journey has always been fueled by music.
Hey, it's Kevin from The Strange Ones. We've been playing music and video games from a very young age, so we're beyond stoked to be part of the global phenomenon that is Roblox. I hope you'll check us out.
Hey, guys, we're The Holy Knives. Yo, yo. We're super excited to be a part of the new Roblox and DistroKid partnership. I'm Kyle, this is Cody, and we're brothers from New Orleans, now living in Los Angeles, and we've been playing music together since we were teenagers, as well as video games. The idea of new fans discovering our music through games and experiences in Roblox is such a full-circle moment and so, so exciting.
It's so awesome. Word on the street is The Holy Knives will be performing at the Roblox Innovation Awards after-party tomorrow, so go check it out. Look, in the next few days, over 10,000 tracks will become available to all Roblox creators, with hundreds of thousands more well on the way. The store will feature new music sections and the ability to search for new songs and browse a range of genres. This is perfect for boom boxes, background tracks, or any music-based mechanics you can imagine. We can't wait to see what you'll create with this. Next, I wanna talk a little bit about how music listening and discovery will work on Roblox. Later this year, we're launching a What's Playing feature.
Whenever you hear an eligible track, you'll see a brief toast that will tell you what the title and artist is of the song, with the ability to upvote and support your favorite artist. We have also introduced, or we will be introducing, the first-ever Roblox music charts within our charts product line, featuring top music experiences and the most popular songs. This is a place where we hope to find the future breakout artists and a place for music experiences to get more visibility. You'll start seeing the basic chart later this year, with a roadmap into next, as a key way for the world to discover new music and see what's trending on Roblox. These three key platform changes create a flywheel that helps up-and-coming artists get discovered and enables music through experiences to thrive.
By bringing together the open music ecosystem and Roblox's creator ecosystem, we're bringing music to life in fresh and exciting ways. It's a future where artists can get discovered right here on Roblox, and one day go viral. All right, folks. So exciting. Look, that's all for today. We're thrilled to bring back music and to unlock even more ways for creators, and now artists, to get discovered on Roblox, pushing Roblox to the forefront of culture across every genre. Have an awesome RDC. Thank you.
Please welcome Roblox Chief Product Officer, Manuel Bronstein.
All right. Wow! Such an amazing day so far. I hope you've been enjoying it as much as I have. I always appreciate this opportunity for us to get together, to network, to learn, and to celebrate our joint success, because it's your work and your creativity what has made this platform relevant and amazing for millions of users around the world. It's been a monumental 12 months, with huge user engagement and monetization growth, driven by new experiences, updates to existing experiences, avatar items, tools, videos, and everything you've been creating. We crossed an incredible set of milestones in the year: more than 280 billion visits to Roblox experiences in the last 12 months. What was already a huge number grew 26% year- over- year. More than 65 billion hours of engagement on the platform. That's 20% year- over- year.
Just if you want to do some calculation, that's 7.4 million years of engagement, enjoyment, socializing, and learning on the platform. Today, I want to celebrate the creators and creations that are breaking milestones. Of course, the list cannot be comprehensive, or we'll be here for many days, but we want to share a few with you. If you heard from David today, on our path to a billion, connecting a billion users on the platform, we want to rally towards a phenomenal milestone: 10% of all global gaming revenue flowing through Roblox and shared with the community. To accomplish that, together, we will work on expanding and growing the existing game genres that are doing phenomenally well today on the platform, while expanding the platform capabilities to enable more and new genres and creators to scale and succeed.
Let's start with two set of genres that are very, very well known on our platform: role-play and avatar simulation, and obby and platformers. These continue to grow at an amazing pace, and it's not just the OGs. For example, two fan favorites surpassed major milestones in the last year. They were created, launched, and achieved close to more than 1 billion visits in less than a year. In role-play and avatar simulation, you guessed it, Dress to Impress. It's a game where you have five minutes to dress a part, walk the runway, and become a top model. Of course, I don't have to tell you that because many of you have already tried the game. In obby and platformer, this game has a favorite title of all time: Obby, But You're On a Bike. It's a super, super fun obby.
You have to complete 100 levels, and you guessed it, you have to do it on a bike. I want to give a huge round of applause to these two games for the milestones they achieved. Now, let's talk about two other categories that are mainstays of the Roblox platform. Known and beloved games in simulation and survival keep thriving. They've been updating often, they've been participating in platform events. In simulation, Bee Swarm Simulator released their annual Christmas update, Beesmas. Actually, they did it in July, and they're almost approaching 3 billion visits today. In survival, Pressure, a horror experience—yeah. It's relatively new. Horror experience on the platform. It's on a submarine, inspired by games like Doors, Iron Lung, and other on the platform, went from zero to close to a billi—a million daily active users in over a month.
Let's give it a round of applause. All right. Let's talk about sports. Anybody who play games, sports is a huge gaming category, especially on PC and console, where Roblox does really, really well. We're seeing great momentum of the genre on the platform. It's been growing 35% year- over- year, with great experiences like Basketball Legends, which lets you play games of five on five, 5v5 , and it's closing more than 300 million visits today. Untitled Boxing Game, I love this one. It lets you fight in styles, like Smash and Hitman, and it's approaching 600 million visits on the platform today. Based on a favorite sports at my house, probably the only soccer game in which I could beat my kids, Super League Soccer, it's boasting more than 500 million visits today.
Let's give them a round of applause. Now, the sport genre is thriving on the platform. In the second quarter of this year, we saw more than 18 million searches for sport-related topics on Roblox. People were searching for broad things like gymnastics, pool and billiards, and volleyball. We also heard people searching for very localized content because they want to play with their local teams, in their local competitions, in their local stadiums. I love to see this category continue to thrive and bring the vibrancy of sports more and more to Roblox in the coming year. Now, let's talk about another great game genre: racing. Racing brings the exhilarating competition and simulation of cars and vehicles, and the community has produced some great, great experiences here.
Vehicle Legends, with more than 1.5 billion visits on the platform, and Drive World, with more than 200 million visits on the platform, they both let players customize their cars before they take it out to a spin in the track. As you heard today earlier, Driving Empire, with close to 1 billion visit—1.5 billion visits, has established partnerships with great car manufacturers so that you can drive a Lambo in their experience. Let's give them a round of applause. Like sports, the racing category is also growing on the platform, and people want more. We saw more than 15 million searches in Q2 of 2024, and people are searching for things like stunt and driving tricks. They're also searching for localized content, like Japanese train simulation, blending some genres like role play, simulation, and racing in one.
I want to see us continue to invest in this one and see the racing category grow on Roblox. Now, let's talk about shooters. Shooters is one of the largest gaming category across the world and across devices, with first-person shooters, third-person shooters, and of course, battle royale. We're seeing great incursions on the platform in this category. You heard about Rivals earlier. It launched in May of this year. It's also already surpassed more than 400 million visits, and it lets you fight it out in 1v1 or team matches. Of course, we heard earlier, Jandel, on the scr- on the stage. Gunfight Arena, where are you? Okay.
It was created less than a year—about a year ago, and it has already surpassed more than 400 million visits, and I believe it recently released a new map, and I want to go check it out. As you heard earlier today, we're making investments on the platforms in things like performance, matchmaking, our avatar systems, and more, so that we can envision the creation of these games in sports, in shooting, in racing. Something maybe like a 100-person battle royale taking the platform for a storm, and I'm sure that people in this audience and people listening to this out there are going to be the ones creating those. Now, let's talk about our avatar items and our avatar creators. Our Marketplace community and our avatar item community is thriving. Total monthly earnings have increased 61% year- over- year in June of 2024.
Of the nearly 15,000 3D avatar item creator accounts, the median earned 1,500 Robux in the month of June, and we continue to invest. In April, we opened up Marketplace for everyone, and we took your feedback. We listened to it, and we did so thoughtfully to ensure the growth of a healthy ecosystem, and the results have been phenomenal. Just in the month of June, 4,800 new creators joined the platform. More importantly, this growth has been additive, and this is exactly what we wanted to see. The creators who were originally in the program before we opened up saw their earnings growth accelerate from 30% year- over- year in March to 50% year- over- year in June after we opened up the program.
Proving that actually making this marketplace and the items and bringing more people in just make the marketplace and the consumption of those items better on the platform. The creativity and the breadth of the creator community is unmatched. Here is a glimpse of some recently created avatars and items by our community. These are unique avatar bodies. Look at the attention to details. SoulScar, Fennecp aw, and EthRon Art. I do not know if you are here, but pretty amazing work. Favorites in Marketplace, hair and shoulder accessories. Love the fantastic creations by ECGG and Kpops. I want to give them a round of applause, and I want to thank all of our avatar item creators. A personal favorite this year, Capybara. Maria Capi was made by Brazilian creator, Caio Albarn. Caio's story is inspiring, like many of yours.
He's one of the first Brazilian creators to join the UGC program, and today, he has more than 19 million sales on the platform. Please join me in welcoming Caio to the stage. Welcome, Caio.
Thank you.
[Foreign language]
Hi, guys. I'm doing great. Thank you.
That's as far as my Portuguese will go. All right. I'm super excited to have you here, and your story is so inspiring. Why don't you share with us how you got started as a UGC creator and what changes it brought to your life?
Yeah. So my journey started in 2010, when I started playing Roblox for the first time, and then six years later, I started learning 3D modeling. In 2019, I enrolled in a design course, and I met a friend there, Guilherme, who showed me that the Brazilian DevRel was organizing a competition where there was a spot to become a UGC creator.
Okay.
After winning that, I managed to buy a new PC. I bought a house, an apartment. I moved out of a really dangerous neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, and I retired my mom. I'm paying for healthcare for all my family and also, I'm paying for the education of my nephew.
Wow! ... Caio.
I'll take the Robux.
I'm, I mean, out of words. Such an inspiring, such an inspiring story. Maybe now that we're here, and you've been hearing everything we're talking about, what are you most excited for your future on Roblox?
Yeah, thanks to RDC, last year I met a couple friends, and we are starting, started making games together now.
Nice.
Slowly, we are learning together what we can do to make the games fun, and hopefully we can release it this year. Because of that, how I started, like, studying game design, I kind of fell in love with game design, so I want to invest more time in that and see if I can make games even, like, funnier and, you know, even more entertainment. Lastly, I wanna give back to the Brazilian community, and I wanna find small creators in Brazil that are in the same situation I was in, and I want to invest in their games and help them accelerate their programs, you know?
Amazing, Caio. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Anything else you want to share with us today?
Before I go, I have a gift for you.
Oh, my God.
Since you guys like, like, so much the capybara, I made a Venezuela one for you.
Oh, my God! [Foreign language] . Thank you very much.
Yeah.
Caio-
You want me to take it out?
Please take it for me.
Okay, yeah
... as I continue, and I'll grab it afterwards.
Thank you.
Caio-
Shout out, Brazil!
Thank you.
Hi, Mom. Thank you, guys.
Okay, I have a Venezuelan capybara. I'm gonna wear it tomorrow all day. All right, before closing up on the Marketplace section, I wanted to share something new we've been working on. We want to allow our creator community to begin to merchandise full avatar bundles in the Marketplace. That's gonna allow creators, for the first time, to pair avatar bodies with clothing and accessories and sell them in the Marketplace, reflecting full looks. We've been testing this to date, and we're seeing great demand for people to buy these bundles, and I can't wait to see how your creativity shows up in this space. Now, we've been talking about experience creators, avatar item creators, but we cannot forget the Creator Store creators. This is a very meaningful part of our ecosystem.
Of all the experiences created and updated in the second quarter of 2024, more than 25% of them use at least an asset from the Creator Store. The creators of plugins, assets, and more enrich our platform and make creation a lot easier and faster. If you remember, last year I was on stage, and we announced a move from the Creator Store from Robux to real currency, and we were gonna share 100% of the revenue, net of taxes, net of processing fees, with our creators community. Yes. Since launching in April of this year, the creators' net earnings on the Creator Store have more than 2.5x. That's a change from before these changes. I wanted to highlight some of the plugins, top-selling plugins, of the last year, and many of you probably use them: Moon Animator 2 to create stunning animations. U...
Yes, UGC Maker Toolbox to turn mesh parts into accessories, VFX, create lighting patterns, like fireballs and explosions, and Data Store Editor for you to view and edit your data store even when you're not in Studio. We continue to see a lot of opportunities here. Think about people building performance profiling and optimization tools, or someone building NPC configuration and dialogue tree setups or maybe release management and more. Now, our community has grown well beyond our platform, and we have some outstanding influencers in the audience, don't we? Where are you? Okay, maybe a few here. With more than 1 billion views of Roblox video content every single day on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, live streaming of Roblox content is at an all-time high, and it's a global phenomena.
I really wanna thank our influencer community for the fun, entertaining, and informative artwork they do on our platform every day. We have five streamers that are gonna be streaming the Roblox Innovation Awards, the RIAs, in multiple languages. I wanna thank KreekCraft, who's gonna be streaming in English. Robin Hood Gamer in Brazil, in Portuguese.
Aba in German, Rovi23 in Español, and Maljan and HoonCha TV in Korean. Thank you, thank you, thank you. People are gonna love watching this. Now, speaking of influencers, for a while, we tried to convince our influencer community and our creator community to bring back platform events. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. It was the other way around. You all told us you wanted events back on the platform. It took us some time, but we listened. In 2024, we did four, so far, four platform events, each of them bringing new games, new innovation, and new mechanics: The Haunt, The Classic, the RIAs, and the Games. Yes. I wanna thank all the creators, all the influencers, who made this event successful and possible, and all the participants, and I wanna thank Twin Atlas for the phenomenal job creating unique, true-to-Roblox event hubs.
With that, I wanna share something with you. I have a little surprise coming, something I'm very, very excited about. All right, you may have guessed it. Our next event is going to be a spooky one. It's a Halloween event. Keep your eyes open, it's coming soon. I want to thank you all for an amazing year, for all the work you've done. I'm excited about the future that we're going to bring together in 2025, and I want to bring back David Baszucki to stage to close it out. Thank you.
Please welcome back David Baszucki.
All right, what a morning! Wow, that was really fun. I secretly know the name of that event. It is going to be awesome, and we're going to show off some new tech. Okay, the tradition, right? Every year, we check in on the predictions. Last year, we finished the first set of five-year predictions. We hit 70%, seven out of ten. We're going to give you a heads-up of where we're tracking this year. It is year one, so let's start bringing them up. These are going to close in 2028. If you see a green thumbs up, I'm estimating we're still on track. If you see yellow triangle, we're a little bit in the edgy zone. If you see red, we're not there. On good note, there's no reds, okay? And they're pretty ambitious predictions.
Okay, so number one, oh, great, I can read them right here. Roblox is a Fortune 500 company uses Roblox for recruiting. Full green here 'cause Roblox uses Roblox for recruiting, and given our current growth trajectory, both revenue, DAUs, bookings, enterprise value, we will be a Fortune 500 company. Cha-ching, green. Okay, school curriculum, already coming, and we have this vision of language as well. You saw some hints of the vision to give you real-time translation APIs. This may come either school systems or consumer, but we're still green on this. The next one, this is the edgy one, right? Gets picked up in the press. The policy and safety team told me this isn't within our current policy right now.
That said, we do believe with ID validation and all of this, I, I'm still very optimistic. I'm just going to have to work with the policy team and safety, so we can do dating on Roblox. I'm still optimistic, but I want to be a little conservative here. Okay. Roblox employees use Roblox more than video. Still optimistic on this. You're seeing in the background on perf and quality, really finishing and driving all that we started. Video, high-quality animation, motion capture. Stay tuned for that. We're still optimistic on this one. Okay, universal civility metric that shows for most players, civility is increasing over time.
This is really huge for us, and everywhere on the platform, whether it's text or video, we're getting a lot smarter at nudging, at kind of helping people learn what to do better. We are optimistic that someday we will publish a civility metric on Roblox. Physical merch, you just saw it today, okay? We just announced the Shopify integration. We're going to integrate with others. Feeling very green on this one. The next one's a little more difficult. My family has been playing Roblox for 18 years, so I'm going to make this one yellow just 'cause this one's a little tricky. We are driving to a vision where a billion people use Roblox literally every day to communicate as well as play. We're keeping this green, not yellow.
A top fashion designer discovered on Roblox without any experience. There's a couple already that are moving in this direction. We have some great designers integrating with Walmart. I got a great backpack yesterday. You'll hear more about that. Very optimistic about this, and we could actually imagine that discovery possibly happening within a fashion experience on the platform. A musician will perform live to a million people. Absolutely. You just heard our commitment to music, and when we couple that with real-time tracking, which won't just be face, it'll be body and, ultimately, whole body, this will be very possible. Finally, we've all seen some of the valuations that have been put on your studios, and if we together capture 10% of global gaming content on Roblox, this one just naturally follows.
Feeling really good about that. Okay, it's been really exciting to hear what you've all been working on. We are going to take a little break for lunch. After lunch, you're going to hear from Nick and Tian on how our tech can help you build great experiences. We are going to have a full one-hour open mic Builderm an QA. Whatever you've got, goofy, spicy, edgy, things we haven't heard about, line up. We want to hear it. Enjoy lunch, and we will be back in a while. Thank you all so much.
Please welcome Roblox Vice President of Engineering, Nick Tornow, and Vice President of Product, Tian Lim.
Hello, RDC. I'm Nick, and I lead engineering for the Creator and Engine groups at Roblox.
I'm Tian. I lead product and engineering—product for the Creator and Engine groups at Roblox, and we are super stoked to be here at RDC 2024 in sunny San Jose.
Same Roblox, new RoLocation. Get hyped. How's everyone loving San Jose?
I appreciate that it's flatter and warmer.
There's more space for booths and networking, so hopefully you get to meet some new people and get to ask and get answers to more of your questions. Since last RDC, we've also both taken on the Engine group, and we're still ramping up.
It's been a lot of fun, I gotta tell you, learning about the deep, dark inner workings of Roblox, but it's also been super inspiring to think about the sheer amount of innovation and deep architectural thinking that had to go into building an engine that works so well across so many platforms and provides so many core primitives for this amazing ecosystem.
That's right. Making a platform that scales all the way from low-end Android to high-end PC, that's social co-experience out of the box, instant deploy, practically infinite server scaling, that's still easy and fun to build on, well, it's harder than it looks.
That's exactly why things like occlusion culling, that Josh talked about earlier, took us a while. We did not take the easy way out, because if we did, that would've been more work on you. Last year, we introduced the concept of the creator hierarchy of needs. It starts with a rock-solid platform with stability, performance, and quality at the base. Then we need to fit your workflows and ensure that we're building in a way that scales with your team size, complexity, and external tools.
All of that's sort of table stakes. On top of this, we focus on accelerating creation, removing friction at every step of the process, so you can focus on what only you can do, which is creating fun and inspiring experiences for our users all over the world.
Throughout this process, we want to make sure that we're all working together, communicating with mutual empathy, transparency, and accountability, so that we can be good stewards of the platform together.
This framework continues to map to our areas of focus, where we're spending most of our energy hardening and solidifying the platform, and we hope you're seeing that in the product. We're gonna go through each part of the pyramid step by step, progress to date, and what you can expect, but we're gonna start with the how. Let's start with transparency and accountability.
That's on the left side of the pyramid, not the bottom. Earlier in the day, you heard about our focus on performance and quality, like improving memory management with Harmony to reduce crashes and improve low-end Android performance.
This reprioritization has meant we've had to delay some of the features we announced via the Creator Roadmap or at last year's RDC. Features like new voxel lighting, accessory adjustments, R16--R6 to R15 conversion tools, terrain improvements, and avatar movement improvements all had to be delayed so that we could put performance and quality front and center.
It's so important. We're gonna keep reiterating. We saw how engagement and monetization were negatively affected by crashes. As David said earlier, our fixes this year have added 300 million hours of playtime per user to your experiences. Moving forward, perf and stability are guardrail metrics for us. We want to launch features only if they don't cause regressions.
As we've adapted, we've tried to stay really transparent with you all with our quarterly creator roadmap updates, especially when things get delayed. We also held three creator AMAs focusing on areas that we know are of great importance to you, like discovery and our economy, and we have one more planned in a couple of weeks. Thank you all for your participation in these AMAs and the hard-hitting questions. Please keep them coming.
That's right. Keep it spicy, please. With all these changes, accountability time. Let's review what we added to the roadmap last REC versus what we did. You sure you're ready for this, man?
We just talked about accountability, so yeah, I think I'm ready. Hit me.
Okay. We delivered 59% of what we said on time. Another 11% delayed slightly. About 1/4 are still delayed, but the remaining 5% are still on track to be delivered on time.
It just shows how hard it is to predict the work of more than 2,000 people precisely. We won't always get everything right, but we promise to keep you in the loop when things get delayed, and sometimes we might have to pivot, especially when we learn something from working with you all.
Speaking of which, I think last year we announced Luau file syncing on stage, and I recall shining a bright light on you, playing angelic, heavenly music for the moment. I have photographic proof of it right here.
Oh, no. I don't remember that. I think I was going like this because I wasn't really sure.
Uh-huh.
Okay, it's time for a mea culpa. We haven't yet shipped files.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. I've got a new sound effect for the moment.
Oh, God. As we were building it, the feedback we were getting from the community was that we hadn't gotten it quite right, so we've returned to the drawing board, and we're focused on making it feel really great. We plan to release a prototype to get your feedback very soon.
Now, let's take a moment to talk about stewardship. I mentioned that we are all stewards of this platform together, and in the spirit of transparency, I want to address an unspoken elephant in the room. We all see that we're an evolving platform, and we recognize that sometimes it feels like there's a tension between the rich past and traditions of Roblox and its future.
The reality is, we all want something slightly different from Roblox, but we think that's great. We want to build a more diverse and broader ecosystem that appeals to more users and has more experiences and avatar styles.
You'll notice that many of our announcements this morning are geared towards enabling and rewarding this increased diversity. We hope that talking about genre evolution, unmet demands, new music, launching more ways to earn through the affiliate program, more rev share from paid access, we hope these things inspire you to try out some new things and maybe bring in some new users to the platform.
After all, the more we can grow our user base through more diversity, the more success we can bring to more creators.
You have all seen how Roblox is growing. Last quarter, daily actives up 21% year- on- year. Experiences with more than 1 million daily actives up 25% year on year. You are all doing incredible work and reaping amazing success, and we are so proud of all of you and of us, of the small part that we play in it.
With that success comes increased responsibility and scrutiny. Remember, we're building this platform together, so we should all be aware of how our actions represent the community and Roblox as a whole. We have to be stewards together.
Right. We're becoming a more global platform, with more experiences becoming hits in more countries. We have users from over 190 countries and regions visit us every single day. Sixty-one countries represented right here in this room, with more joining virtually. Now, this is just an amazing opportunity, but it can bring additional complexities, which I'm sure many of you have seen the headlines about.
To help, we're committing to improve our communication around global developments affecting the platform, and we're going to build tools to help you navigate an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape.
For example, some countries have different standards for depictions of violence and crime, and so one path we might take would be to create dynamic content ratings. In the future, an experience may have different ratings in one country versus another. This can help maintain your ability to reach a global audience with the least amount of effort while still respecting local laws and regulations.
Stewardship is about working together to foster a safe and civil environment for everyone. You all have amazing communities around your creations, and having healthy communities requires rules and active management.
Historically, we haven't really given you much help to manage your communities, but that's changing. We're building tools you can use to control unwanted behaviors in your experiences. A few months ago, we launched the Ban API to let you remove users from your experience with real-time alt detection, so we could all identify and prevent alts from rejoining your experience.
Any guesses to how many people you've all banned since we launched at the end of June?
Anything?
Ten.
Very close. We've seen you ban over 2 million accounts in your experiences, including alts, since this rolled out.
Clearly, you have the power to enforce your rules. I hope you use that power well, but we also hope that your users become more civil in your experiences as a result of it. Now, last month, we also launched a ban management dashboard in Creator Hub, so that you would have a UI to manage your bans.
We're continuing to work on eliminating bad actors across the platform, with efforts underway to prevent review bombing and extensive ongoing work around anti-cheat.
Okay, I wanna take a beat to remind everyone: if you're using content in your experience that you did not create, please make sure you have permission to use it before publishing. Now, to help you with this, we're actually working on a program to help you connect with rights holders more easily, as well as brand partners. In the meantime, there are a growing number of companies out there that can help. One example of those is GeekOut, who are here today. For those of you who don't know—wow, you guys got some fans. GeekOut helps facilitate Roblox development projects with top Japanese intellectual property, like one of my favorite anime of all time, Attack on Titan. GeekOut were the ones that helped facilitate this contest, but they've also helped bring other IP to Roblox.
If you want great music, you can try out any of the thousands of new tracks we got as part of our DistroKid integration, which Greg walked us through earlier today. If you have a branded experience, you can work with a company like STYNGR to help you get top artists onto your experience.
Now, if you've been dealing with IP issues, you've probably been having a rough time staying on top of all those legal notices or DMCA claims. We've heard your concerns, and we're working on making things better.
Our work here is centered on the Rights Manager, and soon you'll be able to see all the claims you filed and all the claims filed against you, and work through them before they become legal issues and before there's any strikes on your account.
We also know there's a lot of marketplace content out there, some of which you probably wish you could take down or maybe didn't know you should take down. We recently announced, just this past week, a proactive archival process that will archive some of these avatar items for you without any consequences.
Now, we know there's a lot more work we can do here, and we're working super hard on it, so please stay tuned. All right. All right, let's get to the actual pyramid. The base is the foundation we all need to succeed. The foundation needs to be rock solid. If you're creating on a shaky foundation, you're probably tearing your hair out or using language only appropriate for seventeen-plus experiences. There's nothing that erodes a foundation more than bugs.
I don't know. Have you ever forgotten to anchor all your parts in a model?
Me? That seems very unlikely.
I don't know. I think I have a clip of your cabin here. I'm sure this has never happened to anyone here before, right?
Okay, maybe that one time. We're improving our testing procedures so bugs don't get out, but when they do, we wanna work quickly to triage, prioritize, and resolve anything that does.
In the past year, we've closed more than 3,300 creator-submitted bugs. This includes closing four times the number of Studio bugs versus the same period a year ago.
Get the bugs. We're not done by any stretch, but we hope you feel like we're being more responsive and doing a better job of resolving the bugs that you care about. Please keep the reports coming. We're on an extermination mission.
Shoot. Oh, I think the slides hung.
Oh, damn.
Don't you just hate it when you try to do something in Studio and your machine just hang? We do, too. I'm pleased to say that we've reduced Studio hangs since the beginning of the year by 60%. This effectively doubles the amount of time you can use Studio before encountering a hang.
Another type of interruption we've addressed is when the script autocompletion tool times out while type checking. We've implemented a fix that has reduced these timeouts by more than 90%.
We've also improved the P99 speed of Creator Store and inventory search by over 50%, so that should speed up everyone's workflows.
As we improve performance, you all can build bigger and richer worlds, supporting more and more players. This brings new problems, but these are the types of problems that we really like. You've shown us how slow Studio can be when you try to open large place files, and since last RDC, we're excited to share that we've made place open times 33% faster at the P90.
If you can't tell, we're trying to make every touch point in Studio more responsive so you can iterate faster, because we know that iteration is so-- is the amazing superpower of Studio. You can playtest your experiences so quickly, no compilation or deployments necessary. We're excited to say that we've made the P50 or median playtest time 62% faster and the P90 48% faster since the beginning of the year. If we keep this pace up, we'll save you all over a million hours of time per year on just waiting for playtest.
A million hours. That's what? Like, a hundred years?
That's a hundred years. I think that's barely enough person-hours for someone here to go build a better Elden Ring on Roblox.
Hint, hint. We're investing a lot to harden the platform. We hope you'll see and feel that. Things are getting more solid. When we say rock solid, we're talking about hard rocks, like granite. There are still many, many places that need work, and we want to hear from you about what's most important. In order to help with that, we're opening up bug reporting on the DevF orum to hundreds of additional people every month.
Now, everything we've talked about thus far has actually been the result of an internal company-wide program to address your top pain points, which we literally and unimaginatively call the Creator Top Pain Points Program. It's led to some of your favorite improvements, though, things like group revenue sharing, the Ban API, or the improved transparency on discovery.
We hope you feel the difference. We'll continue to push on every top pain point we can.
Moving up the pyramid, we want to build tools that solve your use cases and scale with you as you grow in ambition, vision, team size. These tools need to integrate with your third-party tools as well. Now, part of that was the Luau file sync, which we've already harassed Nick about, but we're also thinking about how we can help you manage, collaborate, and iterate even faster on your experiences.
Let's start with assets. You all create a ton of assets. If we look at the top 2,000 creators by time spent, the top 50% of those have more than 1,600 assets, and the top 5% have more than 14,000 assets each. That's a lot to manage.
What do you do with it all?
Show of hands, who thinks the current Asset Manager is amazing?
You can tell us how you feel, like, really. Okay, okay, okay.
They just did. They just—
Who, who thinks it could be a whole lot better? Sure, okay. Look, you need to be able to organize your assets, to find them easily, filter, and search. We're working on a completely redesigned asset manager built to handle your scale. It's slated for beta later this year, with a full release in 2025.
You'll be able to easily organize your assets into folders and with labels, and we're going to even layer in semantic search. Instead of having to search for assets based upon their exact file names, you can search for something like chess pieces to find all the chess pieces in a list and drag them in. Or say you want to add some plants to your experience, you could search for shrubbery, see a bunch of different plants, drag in a shrubbery, drag in another shrubbery. As part of this, we'll be deprecating the existing Asset Manager and migrating user inventory out of Toolbox and into the Asset Manager.
We have a lot of shrubberies in your assets.
I'm a fan of, fan of the shrubbery. Yeah.
Now, as you expand to more collaborators, having a clear line of sight about who did what becomes a lot more important. Who moved my cheese? Who unanchored all my cabin parts? Last week, we started rolling out the ability to see a history of your collaborators' activities and configuration changes in your experiences. Judging by your reaction on the DevF orum, this was something that you've all been really looking forward to, especially those working on bigger teams. Now, we're just getting started here. This capability will become a lot more powerful as we add more activities to it.
Activity history is great, but soon you'll also be able to leave notes, annotations, and comments in Studio for your collaborators, so they can better understand your work or what they need to pick up next.
Or you can apologize about that egregious hat you just dropped into the experience.
Yeah.
If you forget to comment or are just plain lazy like me, we've got you covered. This past summer, we launched the ability to generate an AI-powered summary of package changes right there in the package diff window. We're also working on adding AI-powered change summaries for scripts as well, so Nick doesn't have to read my code anymore.
Now, shifting gears from Studio to OpenCloud. Last year, we showcased a new OpenCloud API that let you change scripts, and we showed it, where you could edit, update a Google sheet, and it would update your store and your experience. Today, we're really excited to share what we think is an even much more powerful new OpenCloud engine API, which will let you run arbitrary Luau script in the cloud on a running server. Among other things, we think this will allow you to run automated tests headlessly as part of a CI/CD process, and we're really excited to see what you do with this capability.
Now, another power tool for great experiences is Creator Analytics. Who here likes the Creator Analytics stuff going on? Yeah, let's hear it for the analytics team. We continue to push super hard here. We want to give you more and more insights into how your creations are doing and what you can do to iterate to success. Let's talk about some of the updates. As you've probably all noticed, we've upgraded the Experience Overview page to give you a bird's-eye view of all your KPIs, so you can quickly identify which KPIs you need to focus on. We've also rolled out new economy and funnel analytics to help you optimize the inputs to your KPIs. You can see sources and sinks for different currencies or where people are falling off in onboarding or becoming a, a buyer.
Now, since we've rolled this out, we've seen over 700 creators take advantage of these new APIs. Experiences like Adopt Me!, Blade Ball, and Jailbreak use these analytics to optimize everything from their onboarding funnels to their in-game economies. For example, the team behind Fabled Legacy, a popular dungeon crawler, improved their onboarding funnel by 50%, improving their retention and revenue.
Today, we're excited to announce that we plan to ship the ability to track custom events, so you can track things like UI interactions or quest progression in just a few weeks. To learn more about our new analytics features and to hear some real-world tactics from top creators like Voldex, Twin Atlas, or SoulScar, come to the analytics session tomorrow.
Go, analytics. It's not just experience analytics that are getting better. We're also expanding our analytics for avatar items to include item-level insights, such as buyer demographics, how much of the publishing advance you've recouped on those items, item sales locations, and more.
Now, we also want your experiences to perform better as well, so we've been improving the MicroProfiler. To help you better identify performance bottlenecks, we've added memory X-ray mode and summary flame graphs. X-ray mode highlights memory allocation hotspots as they're located, and the summary flame graph helps highlight tasks that maybe by themselves may not be expensive, but if they're called frequently enough, can become a real drag on performance.
Earlier this week, we launched more breakdowns of server performance data. You can break down memory and CPU usage on the server by engine categories. We mentioned earlier that we used to have this fixed amount of RAM that RCC could use, and it's now scaling based upon the number of players. This will allow you to have worlds with more and more players, richer and richer worlds.
You've heard all day about our focus on low-end Android, and to help you know if you have a crashing problem on these devices, we'll show an insight on your Experience Overview.
Phew! That was a lot. We wanna hear what else we could do to help you understand and improve performance in your experiences. Later today, after the Builderman Q&A, or anytime tomorrow, please come visit our debug performance booth downstairs to speak with our engine engineers and talk performance. We also recommend checking out the session tomorrow, Using Roblox Tools to Improve Performance, hosted by Mr. Chicken Rocket himself.
Yeah, Chicken Rocket.
Chicken Rocket.
Okay, continuing our trek up the pyramid, we want to help you go faster by making things more intuitive, eliminating or helping to automate those really boring, mundane tasks. We wanna free you to work on what matters for your experience.
Earlier this year, we rolled out a beta of the new next-gen Studio UI. Our goal is to make it easier for y'all to use and customizable for your workflows, and your feedback has really been helping us continue to iterate and improve Studio.
To help kickstart those first few steps of creating a new experience, we've been creating new templates, like racing, laser tag, and a first-person shooter system, and more recently, a new platformer template. We hope that these can inspire and teach everyone some new tricks. We have many more templates on the roadmap, but we're actually more excited that soon we'll make it easier to discover community-created templates right there in Studio. A few weeks ago, we also added visualization modes to Studio. It's that little menu in the upper right of the viewport. You can quickly toggle various debug modes and visualizations to augment your workflows. For example, you can quickly visualize collision fidelity, highlight those anchored parts, or adjust your camera speed to travel long distances more quickly.
We also noticed that many of you are rolling your own 2D spline solutions, so we decided to add native capabilities to create, edit, and visualize 2D splines in the Studio. Some exciting examples of what you've already created include an audio visualizer, a polygon generator, and we can only imagine what other creative uses you'll find. All right, let's talk about data stores. One of the things we've heard time and time again is that data stores need an upgrade. Having to prevent things like concurrent writes, handle all the different failure modes, and ensure consistency is a lot of work, and it's hard to learn.
We're working on updating data stores to handle some of the challenges that you've had to manage. We'll be defining standardized schemas and higher-level APIs for common use cases, like managing player inventories, stats, LiveOps, and more. We're also gonna handle session locking and retry logic. Lastly, we're also gonna build a Data Store Explorer, so you can quickly find and edit keys for debugging or maybe customer support. For data store users.
Okay, shifting gears to avatars. Earlier this year, we beta launched Avatar Auto Setup to help save you hours or maybe even days of time rigging, caging, skinning, segmenting your avatars. This is-
What you're seeing in this video is the workflow. Arbitrary meshes can be imported, automatically rigged, and then QA'd in Studio with animation or clothing previews. Now, we've actually seen a good number of the bodies published to the Marketplace rigged in this way, and we plan to continue to improve auto setup. We'll be enhancing integration with external digital creation tools, we'll support partial setups, and we'll provide editing tools in the Studio so that you can fine-tune the results.
Speaking of avatars, we did finally open up creation to everyone, and very quickly, y'all created so many unique and expressive avatar items. I especially liked this frog.
However, after being live for a bit, we heard your feedback that maybe our Modesty Layer policy was a little too stringent, yeah? You evidently thought it was silly that the frog had to wear underwear. You know what? We agree.
We're happy to share that as of last month, we removed the requirement for Modesty Layers on certain avatar types, such as inanimate and animal avatars.
Yeah!
Yeah. We have updated our docs with clear examples of dos and don'ts. Now your frog avatars can be in their cutest and most natural state. Fully liberated, no Modesty Layer required.
Free the frog! Okay, that's enough of that.
Hallelujah.
Now, more seriously, we do know that there's still some problems with 2D clothing anD Modesty Layers. We're aware, and we're working on it. We've also made huge improvements to selling avatar items inside your experience. With the Bulk Purchase API, you can curate full outfits or bundles of accessories inside your experience, and users can then purchase them all in one single transaction.
We're working on ways to make it easier for avatar creators to build their own experiences. We have a shopping experience template in the works for later this year.
Now, all this creativity in avatars did create some interesting challenges. We've heard from some of you that it's getting really hard to deal with the variance in player avatars, which can now be dramatically different, different in size. Makes it hard to build fair, competitive experiences. We're working on giving you more control over these avatars coming into your experience.
You'll be able to control the scaling and the hitboxes, so no need to maintain custom allow and deny lists for unique avatar items. You'll be able to preserve people's self-expression and identity while still achieving your creative vision.
I really was hoping I could stay a tiny stick bug in Gunfight Arena.
Sorry to break it to you. We're working on rolling this out by early 2025.
Okay, so we're at the top of the pyramid. Over the years, you've created so many fun and inspiring experiences. Your creativity, ingenuity, and unique sense of humor continue to amaze us. We wanna give you even more tools to make the platform more fun for everyone by connecting global audiences, allowing for new and novel forms of expression, and bringing your ideas to life much faster.
Speaking of something fun, how about being on a server with thousands of people or hundreds of people all over the world speaking different languages, but being able to easily understand it all? We've been busy shipping translation solutions to help connect everyone and make it easier for you to reach a global audience. We shipped automatic chat translations earlier this year, and we estimate that within every month, and we'll take, just June as an example, we're translating about 17.5 billion messages. We see that when people are able to communicate, they're more likely to stay engaged, to help each other, and even spend Robux.
That's right. We've also had experience translations for a bit, but it was only if you had created your experience in English. This year, we shipped omnidirectional experience translations, so it's the ability to translate your experience from any of Roblox's 16 languages to any of the other. Since launch, more than 20,000 non-English experiences have been translated.
Lastly, we shipped translation feedback. This allows anyone to provide feedback on translations, and we've seen more than 12 million pieces of feedback submitted already. We've also heard that you need even more flexibility for translations. If you have an experience that relies on dynamic content or user-generated content, this is particularly acute. We are working on a real-time translation API that will allow you to send content to us, and we'll send you back a translated version of it in real time. This is coming by the end of the year.
Now, as Greg mentioned earlier, we're experimenting with translating your experience thumbnails and icons, and in the long term, we actually want to help you translate any in-experience image that contains text. The goal of this, of course, is to make your experiences more accessible to the global audiences. When this launches, as Greg said, it'll be completely optional. You'll have full control over whether you wanna use our image translation or not.
Okay, we announced these next two announcements on our creator roadmap just last month, and we saw a lot of excitement on the DevF orum. First, let's talk about text-to-speech. With text-to-speech, you can unlock new types of content and narrative styles. You can easily add narration or speaking NPCs. Here's an inspirational video we created working with the Clip It team that shows off some of this upcoming feature. All the voices were synthesized by us.
I will grant you one wish. I wish to be rich! Wish for it.
All right. That's pretty cool. This is gonna launch early next year.
Next is speech-to-text. Imagine the ability to do voice commands with an API that's transcribing the voice stream. This next clip, which Greg Tame helped us put together, envisioned what it might feel like using speech-to-text for voice commands. Let's see what he was thinking.
Open doors to sector G6. Close the door, close the door, close the door, close the door.
It, it's just a vision video, but we think it's super possible. Frankly, I would have shot first, closed the door after.
Yeah. Yeah.
Now, switching gears a bit, you know what else is fun? Instant gratification. With tools like Assistant, Texture Generator, and Material Generator, which just went to full release this past week, you're able to prototype and test new ideas much faster. Now, let's be honest, when we launched Assistant late last year, it was pretty limited in what it could do. If you asked it to open the pod bay doors, Hal, it would probably say, "I can't do that."
Just last month, we added this ability to Assistant to run Command Bar scripts, and it unlocks a whole bunch of new capabilities. Now if you ask the Assistant to open the doors, it'll open it on the spot.
Let's add some doors. Let's open the doors. Now let's close the doors. Done.
It's good that the AI is following instructions. It's getting to where Assistant could really come in handy. Everything from quickly duplicating an asset and arranging it into a pattern, to organizing content into folders or bulk editing properties, even helping you clean up your Explorer structure.
That would be super helpful. My Explorer structure could use some cleanup.
Yeah, if it's the place file I'm thinking of, I think it may be beyond repair, but good luck! Anupam demonstrated one capability earlier today. When you changed the streetlights, they turned on and off depending on the time of day. There's a ton more you can do with this capability, and we're just gonna give you three more quick examples to just get you thinking. First off, let's say I want to set up a team system for my experience, where I want players, as they join, to be assigned to one of four teams. We'll call them red, blue, green, and yellow. What you're gonna see on the screen here is user Slim Fandango joining over and over, and every time he joins, he gets assigned a different team.
And all the code was generated with the prompt: Add a script to make a system of teams, red, blue, green, yellow, and assign each player randomly to a team. That is what this is. He's red. Now he's yellow. Now he's green. Easy team system with no code.
Another example, let's say I'm building a 2D puzzle game, and I want to have, like, a top-down view. I can ask Assistant: Add a script that locks the camera in a top-down view of the player and follows the player, keeping the player in the center of the screen. Assistant will generate that script right for you, and you have this capability added to your experience. Assistant can even generate UI elements, so you can ask it to create a dropdown of five elements, and Assistant will pop it into your scene. Now, one of the really cool things about Assistant is that it helps you and it complements you. You can go back and forth between direct manipulation of your code and data model and the conversational AI of Assistant.
It's not one or the other, and you can use the right tool for the job to get to your creative vision.
Now, last year, we showed an example of using Assistant scene creation and theming. At the time, it was just a mock and illustrative, and it was just filling out the scene without adding any kind of behaviors. Today, we're gonna show you the currently live Assistant, not a mock, a real demo, can help-- how we can help you fill out your scene and bring it to life and add some mechanics. Because just like last year, it's close to Halloween, we'll be building another spooky scene.
Let's just start off with a basic nature scene. We've got a little campfire and some mossy pillars. It doesn't look very Halloweeny, though. It's way too green and bright, so let's change that. I'm gonna ask Assistant to change the grass color in terrain to brown.
Now, let's place some skulls. We're going to use this prompt: Place a pile of two to four skulls around the base of each mesh that has prop pillar in its name.
Cool. It's Halloween, so maybe we could add some pumpkins. Place a pile of three to five pumpkins around the base of each mesh that has prop pillar in its name.
Some green smoke would be cool. Add green smoke around each mesh that contains prop pillar in the workspace.
Spooky. How about some fog? Select 2/3 of the trees and add some fog in that space.
Still a bit bright.
You're right. Let's change that. Change the time to 8:00 P.M.
Let's add some zombies. The prompt will be: Randomly select 1/3 of the trees and insert a zombie underneath it. Attach a script to the zombie that makes it chase the player when it's within three studs.
Okay, this is getting good. Let's play test it.
There are the zombies.
Not looking good for that guy.
Well, I think it's because we forgot to spawn some weapons.
Oh, man!
There he goes.
The zombies got him.
We really should spawn weapons.
All right, so we zoomed-- we sped this up, a bit for presentation, but the raw cut was less than three minutes to go to add that style and all that interactivity to the scene.
This stuff is real, and it's really useful. If you want to learn even more about how to get the most out of Assistant, come to the Create and Ship Faster with AI and Collaboration session tomorrow morning. They're gonna be breaking it down even more. That was a lot of stuff, man. Are we done yet?
We've got one more thing, and we're really excited to share it with you. We're gonna talk about matchmaking. The matchmaking system instantly connects players to servers, and it does a great job at that. One thing the matchmaking system hasn't done historically is account for more competitive experiences.
It's just no fun as a new user to a competitive experience to join and just constantly get fragged as soon as I join because I haven't gotten good.
It depends if you're the fragger or the fraggee.
Sadly, I'm always the fraggee these days.
Yeah.
However, we're excited to give you more control over the matchmaking process with custom matchmaking rules. You'll be able to group players based on skill level, preferred experience mode, for example, if you prefer team play versus free-for-all, or anything else you can dream up.
What you can see here is a creator defining attributes on their users and servers, building rules with those attributes so they can group people, for instance, here, by their ELO score. You could also group by other things like languages or interests, pretty much anything you can imagine, and you'll have analytics to help you understand how your rules improve engagement or other KPIs. We're working on rolling this out by early next year.
I want to bring this back all together and go back to the audacious thing that David said at the beginning of the day. We think that we can help you, your work, your creativity, become 10% of the global gaming market.
Roblox is so special. There's lots of magical ingredients that give us confidence that we'll get there. We're social out of the box. We have an avatar that transcends experiences and games. We have an amazing set of community-created avatars that are uniquely you. We have crazy distribution. You can deploy to practically every device around the world with a one-click publish, and you have speed. You can iterate daily with nearly 80 million daily active users, faster than any other app or game devs in the world.
The most special piece is you. You're the magical ingredient. Your passion, your willingness to give back and support each other. Last month, more than 25,000 creators worldwide got together for Roblox Inspire. This is our renamed Roblox Connect virtual event. You all held over 21 workshops in 11 different languages, designed especially with newer creators in mind. You were all very curious. You asked more than 2,000 questions, and the content's been viewed more than 28,000 times on YouTube so far.
The following week, over 700 creators participated in the Roblox Inspire 2024 Game Jam Challenge, submitting more than 300 games. Congratulations to the winner, Rock Croc Fan Club, who won with their rhythm experience with cool 2D characters, Party Crash. We're continuing to host more creator events. Check out what's coming at events.roblox.com.
Your contributions go beyond events. You help each other all year round. Since RDC last year, you shared more than 50,000 posts in the Help and Feedback section of the DevF orum, working together to find answers for all those common questions.
Can you believe this number? You've created more than 270,000 models and 600 plugins on the Creator Store. It's crazy! Truly, we can't thank you enough for your dedication to this community.
We want you to exercise your creativity and get out there and show the world what great Roblox content can look like.
Creators, in conclusion, our job is to help you succeed. Next up, we have the Builderman Q&A. After that, and all day tomorrow, please stop by the booths downstairs to visit some of our product and engineering teams. Test out some of the new features and give us feedback on what you need to do your job better. Thank you.
Thank you. Post 28.