Conference Transcript - RBLX 2026-09-11

Operator

And now, please put your hands together for the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, David Bazzucchi.

David Baszucki, CEO

Okay, welcome everyone. Thank you so much for being here. We all get a little excited when RDC comes on, as we just saw. I've met a lot of you. A lot of you want to shake my hand. So thank you for coming up here. But we'll do that later in the developer session. So every year, we get excited here when I walk into this room, and we all feel it. Like, this is arguably the 3,000 most creative people in the world, and the most passionate people in the world, as we just saw. And what brings us here all together, and what we're all about, is play. play as humanity's oldest technology for connection before civilization before commerce before agriculture we played together around fires across villages between strangers who became friends because a game gave them a reason and this instinct has never gone away It just found new spaces. The campfire became the stadium. The stadium became the internet. And every time we built a new place together, play was at the center. Now today, we live in a world that is arguably more fragmented than ever. And the things that bring us together, the shared spaces, the common experiences, the moments where strangers became friends, these are harder to find and the platforms that were supposed to connect us too often do the opposite. But play is one of the few things that still connects us. It's a fundamental need and the world needs more play. together you're the ones making this possible every game you've created every player you've brought together that world you've built that's more than a hobby or a business that's a contribution to something the world needs right now and the numbers show it last quarter players spent more than 29 billion hours on Roblox across more than 180 countries, connecting, creating, competing, belonging, and the games you build have become part of our culture, just like books, records, and TV. That's what today is all about. The more play, opening up new ways for people to connect, communicate, and experience your games. More building, giving you the tools, the technology, and the AI-powered creation layer to build things you think were possible before. And more growth, making sure the world finds what you've built and that you all flourish. Play, build, grow. Let's begin with play. We all intuitively know that it's never been just the game. When we all think about playing in the physical world, something much bigger than a game pops into our heads. We're watching, we're talking, we're arguing, we're expressing ourselves and somewhere along the way, maybe making up the rules as we go. Playing the physical world has always been about all of these things all at once, and the digital world is catching up. We're building a platform that reflects this. We're playing, watching, chatting, discovering, and creating the game all happen together. Now, I want to take a moment to highlight that bringing play to millions and ultimately billions of people around the world comes with tremendous responsibility. This past year, we continued to innovate on safety systems and features that set us apart in the industry. And we recognize that this work in the near term has created some friction for you all and for all of us. But we make decisions like this based on our belief that the long-term value they bring to our entire platform is more than worth it. We're kicking off today with a dive into our continued quest to welcome more play to Roblox. And we built Roblox on a foundation of essentially the most difficult thing, multiplayer, 3D, immersive worlds, and that's really kind of a Roblox tradition. But what we're going to share today is our intent to start there and ultimately go all the way to Roblox reality, to take this all the way to the future. But take a look at our map here of play in the U.S. gaming space. A couple things are really apparent. First, where we're growing very quickly in 18 and up is an enormous part of the market. All of these bars are proportional to U.S. gaming revenue. The other thing that's really interesting is how much play is spread between 2D and 3D and single player and multiplayer. That's a little bit of a hint for what you're going to see today. Now, some of the most played games on the planet are 2D. Puzzle games, fast casual, simple to pick up, easy to return to. And for a long time, not the easiest to build an experience on Roblox. We want to make it easier to build an experience, a wide variety of play on Roblox. So to kick it off, please welcome Nick to the stage to tell us more about welcoming more play. Come on out, Nick. Thank you.

Operator

Please welcome Roblox Senior Vice President of Engineering, Nick Tarnow.

Nick Tarnow, Other

Thank you, David. Hi, everyone. I'm Nick Torno, and I lead engineering for our engine and creator teams. The Roblox gaming world is rich and diverse. Behind this logo lies a universe of play. And while we already support a broad range of content on Roblox, we want to go even further. And so, as part of our work to make play more universal, I have some news to share. Today, I want to show you three ways we're expanding how people play. First, getting into a game should be simple. Historically, the way people get into Roblox game is through the Roblox app. On an Android device, this means clicking on the tilt icon, then finding the game inside. We focused a lot of energy on fast launch and fast join, but it's still multiple taps. Imagine you're running around in the real world and you're trying to get a quick session to play in. That extra step could make the difference. So we're making steps to make it even easier. Let's jump over to my phone to see how. So here you can see, in addition to the standard Roblox tilt icon, players will be able to create game-specific shortcuts directly on their home screen. One tap, and you're into the game. Direct Launch will be launching on Android shortly after RDC with iOS, Mac, and Windows to follow. So that's the first thing. For the second thing, let's take a closer look at this game that I'm playing. While it may look kind of familiar, it's probably not the type of game that first comes to mind when you think about gaming on Roblox. But it's an example of the type of game we're about to make much easier to build. So I'm excited today to share we're enhancing engine and studio support for building 2 and 2.5D games on Roblox. Let's hop over to the slides to see how. First of all, we're adding support for the orthographic camera mode into the engine so some of you guys know what that means for those who do not know what that means orthographic cameras are a type of camera where objects are the same size regardless of their distance from the camera so whereas in a normal perspective transform objects that are closer appear larger than those that are further away orthographic cameras flatten 3d worlds so objects the same size regardless of how far away they are from the camera for that crisp 2.5D look. Second, we're adding support for animated image containers and direct sprite sheet import. So these capabilities make it much easier to craft games like the one you see here, where animated sprites populate a 2D side-scroller with parallax and 3D objects in the background. And third, we're building new capabilities into our UI system, with long-awaited features like blur, shadows, including text and inner shadows, and 2D particles, all with exceptional performance across all of the devices we support. These capabilities will be in Studio Beta soon and will be fully shipped before the end of the year. And to be clear, this is not a new 2D engine. These primitives are being built into the existing engines so they'll benefit all Roblox games. Stronger primitives like this help you focus on what you want to build, not how to build it. So that's the second thing. For the third, I'm going to hop right back on my phone. All right. So I want to get back at this game. When you're playing games like this, you're often playing largely alone. And while there may be things like asynchronous challenges or leaderboards, it's primarily something you do by yourself. And as you're running around in the real world getting these little play sessions in, there may be times where you lose network connectivity. Let's simulate that here by switching this phone into airplane mode. Now normally what happens when you do this on a Roblox game, as everyone knows, you get the dreaded disconnected dialogue. But that's not what's happening here. I can play this game indefinitely while offline. It will synchronize when I'm back online. So this is the first in a new class of games you're building into roblox that work even without a network connection in fact this goes even further so let me let me do something um here i'm going to just force kill this game and i'm going to relaunch it remember i'm still in airplane mode i'm still in airplane mode so imagine you're you know in an airplane literally and you didn't launch roblox before you got on the plane but you're you want to get some gaming in right into the game so that's a cold launch of a roblox game while offline. All right, let's jump back to the slides. Experiences can mix and match online and offline mode into a single game. So you don't have to really choose one or the other. You can have some game modes that work when you're online, and some game modes that work when you're offline. Direct home screen launch, engine enhancements for 2 and 2.5D, and offline play. These new capabilities can be mixed and matched, complementing each other to provide new ways to play on Roblox. So that's how we're expanding the types of play. As Dave shared, play is about more than just the game. It's also about playing with others. So next, I'd like to welcome Raj Shrapati to the stage to talk about how we're making it easier than ever to chat.

Operator

Please welcome to the stage Roblox Senior Director of Engineering, Raj Shrapati.

Raj Shrapati, Other

Hey, hey, everyone. How's everyone doing today? Great. Awesome. I'm Raj, super excited to be with you all here at RDC today. So I lead engineering for social features on Roblox. Social helps users connect, chat, and play together. So today, let's talk about chat. Chat on Roblox is massive. Our users send more than 1.4 billion messages in your games every single day. Thank you for building those amazing games that make this happen. Chat is play. It starts with, hey, are you on? It sounds like, let's go. And it ends with, dude, that was fun. Same time tomorrow? So earlier this year, we added some guardrails around who can chat with whom in order to better protect our youngest users. I know it's been frustrating for you all, but it was important work. And it made something clear. Chat is central to how the Roblox community comes together and plays. We have made significant progress. Now, we are focused on making chat livelier than ever before. So, here is our vision. First, we'll become the social default. Players should be able to bring their friend group with them, make plans, jump into a game, hang out, all on Roblox. No app switching required, simply to just chat with your friends. Second, intelligent coordination. Players of all ages should be able to coordinate safely in order to keep the game going. And third, a multimodal future. We hope players want to talk to their friends while they play, so whether they use text or voice, it's just going to work. So here is how we are bringing this vision to life. We recently launched Global Chat that allows players to talk across servers in the same game. Our players love to chat, and Global Chat allows them to do just that, but with more users their age. Just within a few months after launch, we are already seeing more than 30 million global chat messages being sent every day. We have actually loved seeing how lively global chat gets when you bring your community together for an event. And with real-time rephrasing, we can keep it civil while also keeping the conversation going. Okay, let's check out global chat in a game right now. And I'm going to join this game, like Dragon Adventures, which I've been playing for a while. And I'm going to switch to the global chat tab. Ooh, lots of people playing at 10 a.m. on a Friday. I love seeing that. Hi, everyone. But the people that you want to play with are not always in the same server or even in the same game, right? Usually bringing your friend into a game means leaving Roblox, switching to another app, sending them a message, hoping they see it. That's just too many steps to just say, hey, come play Roblox with me. So starting this week, you'll be able to chat with your friends from directly inside the game through the new friends tab in the chat window. So I'm going to switch over. I'm going to message my friend Seb and ask him to join us on stage and play this game with me.

Benham

Hey, Seb, come on over.

Raj Shrapati, Other

Seb should be on his way. Thanks, boss. Seb is actually not just my friend, but also my boss. I hope I don't screw this up. Wish me luck.

Seb Barrios, Other

We're going to have fun. Hello, everyone. I'm Seb. I'm SVP of, thank you, SVP of Engineering here at Roblox. Thank you, thank you. It's great to be here. Is everyone having a good time? All right. All right, and we're just getting started. Friends Chat helps you connect with your friends wherever they are, so you don't have to switch around apps. You can just invite them, start playing together, like Raj just did with me. And this is important. When we ask players why they come to Roblox, the number one thing they mention is playing with friends.

Raj Shrapati, Other

So we know that players love to talk while they play. So next year, we're going to make this co-play experience better by launching voice calling on Roblox and this time we'll get it right. Trusted friends will be able to talk continuously as they pick a game, play together and move from game to game.

Seb Barrios, Other

Raj, you talked about making gameplay coordination easier, effortless. One feature I really like is voice typing and it turns out it's really useful when you're flying on a dragon. Why don't we showing what they looks like.

Raj Shrapati, Other

Let's back to my laptop. And let's see voice typing in action. OK, I'm going to switch over back to here. And what's going to happen when I turn on voice typing is my voice is going to get transcribed in real time by Roblox AI with all the safety guardrails and sent as chat messages. So keep your eyes on the chat window. So I'm going to switch this on. Okay, here be dragons. Okay. Give me one second. I'm going to turn this on. I prefer, like, continuous mode so that I don't have to keep sending every message, so... I'm going to try and fly. Hey, look, I can actually fly. Ooh, I crashed into something. This is actually a visually stunning game. So thank you, Dragon Adventures. Okay. Saab, how are you liking? Oh, you got your name wrong, Seb. We are trying. OK, you're not, Sam. You're Seb. But I want to see how you react to this.

Seb Barrios, Other

Let me join you. All right. Let me fly here. We'll trigger to...

Raj Shrapati, Other

I don't think you can find me. I'm so far away. No, no, I'll find you very quickly.

Seb Barrios, Other

And in the meantime... Oh, we're just crossed. Is that you? Yeah. Hold on. All right. I can see you. But check this out. But while I find you, I'm going to send you something cool.

Raj Shrapati, Other

Ooh, emojis. Emojis are coming to your chat experience soon. And I'm going to respond with a powerful emoji of my own. All right. And not just emojis.

Seb Barrios, Other

Check this out.

Raj Shrapati, Other

Oh, are these quick words? Quick words, that's right. So these are a curated list of words that allow gameplay coordination to happen safely across all ages. So I'm going to respond back with a quick word of my own. Some of you might know this as super safe chat. But, Seb, are these 30 words really enough for all games? That's a great question, Raj.

Seb Barrios, Other

So let's hop back to the slides because we have an interesting and fun announcement to make. You will be able to customize these words. They will be reviewed to make sure they're age-appropriate, but they'll pop up right next to the words we have already so players will be able to interact with what's specific and relevant to your game. They're safe, people are happy, you can see the avatars as excited as we are, and we think it's just the next step to make chat livelier than ever.

Raj Shrapati, Other

Thanks, everyone. Have a great RDC.

Operator

Please welcome Jeren Ateş, Director of Creator Ecosystem.

Jeren Ateş, Other

Happy RDC, everyone. I'm Jeren, Director of Creator Ecosystem. This year, we've been hard at work, side by side with creators, helping them turn bold ideas into real, playable games that redefine what's possible on Roblox. One of the ways we work with creators is through our incubator program. a six-month intensive sprint that provides hands-on support, direct access to Roblox experts, marketing resources to help turn their novel game ideas into successful launches. Since announcing the new incubator earlier this year, we've supported two dozen creator teams across design, engineering, discovery, and just about everything else that they need to bring ambitious visions to life. What's especially exciting about this cohort is the mix. Some teams are seasoned Roblox developers while others are bringing fresh perspectives from other platforms. That combination has created a vibrant, collaborative community where creators are learning from each other and advancing each other forward. And the impact goes beyond just the games themselves. Incubator hasn't just brought together an amazing group of talented developers. It's also helped our engineering teams sharpen and evolve the tools and engine capabilities that power creation on Roblox. One of my favorite things at RDC is to see how these creators are using the latest tech. Starforged from Making Fun Aetherfall from Pixelbase Studio Fossilforce from Nibblebyte and Scrapbook Saga from B-Bucks and ZayCrow Across Incubator and Jumpstart are rolling entry programs for developers launching their first novel game on Roblox Each of these teams have been working closely with us to test, refine, and push forward features. They're helping us make the platform even better for the next generation of creators. Let's take a look at what they've been building. This is a really cool video, and these are really cool games. But they're also very different games. But they do share the same basic challenge, putting more detail, scale, and expression on screen while making it perform well across all sorts of devices, including the low-end ones. Slim and R-streaming systems help solve that problem for the world. They let creators build detailed environments and bring the right mesh and texture representations into view as the player moves through the experience. And a lot of the work happens automatically. Systems like texture streaming and occlusion culling help the engine performance and stability in the background. We're applying the same idea to characters. Slim now supports our 15 platform avatars, and we're continuing to expand that support. New avatar joints and movement systems also give creators control over how players and characters move and respond. Scrapbook Saga is a good reminder that fidelity doesn't have to mean realistic 3D. The team is leveraging technologies from input action system for cross-platform input to mesh and texture streaming for scalability, so that the beautiful 2.5D world of the game runs smoothly across all devices. The important point is how these systems work together. We want creators to spend their effort on the world, the game and the characters, while the engine continuously manages how much content, geometry, texture detail, and rendering work each device needs at any moment in time. All of these four games are shipping on that foundation today, and we're committed to making it easier and easier as we evolve our engine and tooling. And before I leave, I do want to share that we will be opening up after applications for our 2027 incubator class this winter stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks and apply with your most ambitious pitches have a great RDC thank you Jaren all right thank

David Baszucki, CEO

you so we've talked about more play now we are going to talk about more building we're undergoing as we all know, a complete revolution in all forms of creation. Just as we've moved from analog to digital creation tools over the past several decades, we're now going through something arguably bigger, which is the transition to AI-accelerated creation. The opportunity in front of all of us is enormous. Our goal is for the world's best content to be built on Roblox. And right now, two things are coming together that more and more are making this possible. First, when we think of our technology stack, our engine, our cloud, the services that form really what is essentially a Roblox operating system for gaming, this creates a really strong foundation for the second, which is AI creation. And that is in build, that is in build in studio, that is in Roblox cloud access, that's plugins, that's MCP, all places where AI can sit on top of our OS and accelerate creation speed and quality. So we're going to start with the tech and I'm going to use the history of TV and video as a little bit of an example to kind of relate where we are with gaming right now. Now we're pretty deep into the spec for TV. It's a pretty mature technology. We started with black and white film. We hit movies with sound a short time later. TV's been around longer than I thought, since the 30s. I remember on my small little Mac screen, a postage stamp size of video, the initial quick time in the early 90s. Fast forward and 14 years later, we were streaming on YouTube. We've had social short-form streaming, and now we're pretty mature. 4K, 120 hertz, you can buy that pretty cheaply for a few hundred dollars, and the hardware's caught up, essentially, with the vision. Now, in gaming, it's very different. The spec really has not been implemented yet. I remember when Pong came out, I had a home unit with some Pong on it, online, asynchronous, text-based, multiplayer MUDs. We had 2D multiplayer on the network. We had 3D multiplayer on the network. We got into 3D multiplayer on the internet, UGC 3D multiplayer. And now more and more higher resolution 3D showing up in gaming. But I do want to highlight that none of us have ever played what we would consider a full photorealistic multiplayer gaming experience. It does not exist right now. and on one side we just talked about 2D 3D photorealistic multiplayer is all the way on the other side and it's a spec we would like to define real time, any device, anywhere in the world with NPCs it's essentially the holodeck and we like to build it so we started with the Roblox reality architecture and we shared why we believe this is the architecture that's going to be the first photorealistic multiplayer gaming architecture. It's a cloud game engine, our 3D engine, that handles synchronized, persistent world state, physics, logic, object positions. But in our vision, this is coupled with a video world model sitting on top that generates the lighting, the fine detail, things that it's going to become very hard to imagine a traditional 3D gaming engine handling. We'll share more of that as we talk later about Build. Now, the second opportunity for Build is AI acceleration. And in software development, things are happening very, very quickly, but in a way, it's also becoming a bit mature. We've seen in the software coding space a movement from autocomplete to tools that are now writing entire apps, websites, middleware, services. And the pattern is pretty well understood. The models are getting better. Orchestration is starting to run many agents at the same time. We're seeing agentic loops that are testing and coding and testing and coding. And what it sits on top of is relatively stable and mature. compilers, operating systems, cloud services, all of that. Now, gaming, as we all know, is much more complex than just code. Software is a single medium. In gaming, we have models for code, for audio, for 3D objects, for entire systems, and we'll ultimately, as we start to think about testing, need NPCs that both interact in the game and could be used for testing. As we shared with Roblox Reality, we believe to get photorealism. We're going to need video world models that can upscale. And on top of that, orchestrating all of this, knowing how to put these models together and in what order and how to route them. And so what we see ourselves doing is really building an AI operating system combination with AI creation layer for gaming. And if we take a look, we can see a little bit of side-by-side how you can think about this relative to the coding space. We have OS-level components at the bottom. We have professional development environments like Roblox Studio. But more and more, both in the coding space and now in the gaming space, we're seeing mobile consumer creation apps, either for coding, for apps, for websites, and now for games, which we're going to talk about more today. Now, underneath it, our engine, our infrastructure, all of that lets this run at scale. But together, we believe our AI creation tools are going to change what it means to build a game and who can be a creator. now 20 years ago we made a promise and it was actually pretty it's fun to think back that we came up with a slogan that was very ambitious but in a way foretold the future we all remember it you make the game and with build our new mobile first creation tool inside of our app build in Studio, which I think more and more you're going to see brings these same capabilities to Studio. We've never been closer to making this true for everyone. Ultimately, we'll all build games just as we share video with friends, and the games we all build will get better and better. So here's Nishche. He's going to start us off with more background on where we're going with Build.

Operator

Thank Please welcome Senior Director of Engineering Nishcheh Khanam.

Nishcheh Khanam, Other

Nishcheh Khanam, I'm Nishcheh. Let's talk about Build. Earlier this summer, we introduced Build. Build gave all users the ability to build and publish games using prompts. We launched in three countries, Singapore, Serbia, and New Zealand. And the results of our early alpha are phenomenal. We have more than 100,000 users who've tried to create a game. I am very impressed with the kind of games coming out. There are people who are creating games for their siblings to learn math. We have 2D puzzles coming out, we have the obbies, and we have a few fun horror games coming out. But today, we're here to talk about how Build is more than just a creation surface. It is a surface for all of you experienced creators to manage and operate your games. So let's look at a demo. All right, so this is the build tab. Perfect. So this is the build tab. It contains my list of games. As of last week, it not only contains the list of my build games, but also all user-owned games that all of you have been iterating on in studio for years. That's right. All right, let's look at one. This is Tokyo. As you can see, the prompt history is empty. This is a game that I was iterating on in January, trying to play with Cube and MCP. We let it load. Perfect. So I'm in the game. I can move around. You can see all the pretty buildings. You can see the beautiful car that I built. I can drive it. So yeah, you can playtest all your games, the games that are not only public. So that's the universal list. But now, let's try and create something. So I go here. I love theme parks. Let's build one. Build me a theme park with a moving Ferris wheel and a go-kart track. All right, I submitted it. And as soon as I submitted this, the agent starts cooking. It's using a multitude of our models that Dave just showed, our coding model, our 3D foundation model, an image generation model, our audio catalog, all working in unison, trying to create a 3D immersive game. We'll let this cook, and we'll come back to this. All right, so we talked about the list. We created a game. Once I create a game, I want feedback. I want users. Typically, I would go to Creator Hub, go to Ads Manager, set up a campaign, But this is a build demo, so I will go into a game that I've created, I can go to my games menu, and I go to get users. And right here you can manage and create your ad campaigns all on the go. That's right. Okay, so let's go back to our list. Oh, it's someone sent me Robux, thank you. So let's go over to my list. I created a game, we have ads, we have users, I do want to see how my game is doing. Thank you. So I go to my game, I go here, and instead of going to creator hub, you can actually go here and go to stats. And right here, on the go, I have all my stats. You have your daily active users, your playtime, my retention, which is actually terrible, but there's more. You can actually go into a stat here, you can press analyze, and you can go back and forth with the analytics agent and go deeper on a stat, all on the go. That's cool. All right, so thank you everyone, I will use this well. All right, so I created a game, we have stats, we have ads, what next? I think managing a game's economy is also something that requires a lot of work and iteration. What if you could do it on the go? What if you could go here and spend the money that I'm getting right now. And I go to earn Robux. And right here, I have access to all my dev products, and I can create some more. So let's try and edit one. This is speed. This is a dev product. Let's edit it, make it 5x. I should make it more expensive based on the number of Robux I'm getting, but I'll make it cheaper. And I press Save. As soon as I press Save, this is live. All on the go. That's right. So these were three things that we looked at that made managing games easier. You could create ads, you could look at your stats, you could edit your products, but we don't want to end here. We'll keep going, we'll add richer initial features here. So, where are we? We live in New Zealand, Serbia, and Singapore, three countries. We announce this bunch of stuff where people can manage and operate their games, but we can't end here, there's one more thing. Every single creator in the audience has access to build as of 9 a.m. today. I can't wait to see what you create with it, and we would love your feedback.

Operator

Please welcome Roblox Senior Director of Engineering, George Elcora.

George Elcora, Other

Hi, I'm George, and I'm on the Engine team. It's my honor and privilege to be with you here at RDC. I'm very excited to be sharing what we've been working on. But before we talk about what's ahead, let's look back for just a moment at what we've launched this year to support all the amazing games that you've all been building on Roblox. Our focus on Engine has always been to build the technology that unlocks your creativity. Last year at RDC, we introduced several of these technologies. On-demand cloud transcoders that can generate optimized representations for each asset for each device. Mesh and texture streaming at various levels of detail while adhering to a strict memory budget for every frame. And Slim, a new way to composite multiple assets into single, lightweight representations. Together, these technologies allow you to build bigger, higher-fidelity worlds like the ones Jaren shared with you earlier. They automatically scale across all the devices that we support. And of course, these technologies are not only for new games. When texture streaming shipped last year, for example, creators didn't have to do anything special to adopt it. It was automatic. In fact, when we flipped on texture streaming, we were able to reduce out-of-memory crashes across the entire platform by 11%, and it increased overall playtime by 1.9%. That's the equivalent of more than 6 million of last quarter's platform hours of additional engagement each day on average. On platforms running lower-powered devices, like Android, we saw even better results. All behind the scenes, all automatically, all the existing content simply ran better. While these technologies move the platform forward considerably for meshes and textures, there was one area that we wanted to give a little more love to. That's terrain. Thank you. We are going all in on terrain and world building. We've heard you, and we want to make the terrain system on Roblox the very best in the world. Terrain sets the backdrop for all the worlds that you build, and it's time to take it to the next level. I'd love to share with you what we've got up our sleeves. We're coming at it from two perspectives. First, quality, so you can create the worlds that you've always dreamed of without compromise. And second, of course, performance, so that the worlds you create with terrain of any size run smoothly on any device. We've already taken the first steps through the launch of the Terrain Early Access program that was made available in June this year. So improvements to hierarchical levels of detail and removing the heavy terrain data from your place files make the terrain load faster, require less CPU overhead, and take far less storage than before, allowing you to build bigger and bigger places and setting us up for everything that I'm about to show you. This has enabled some significant savings to place file size, memory, and overall performance of terrain. Together, these optimizations allow us to represent up to 16 kilometers by 16 kilometers of terrain. That's up from 4x4 and the area of more than two San Francisco's. So that's pretty cool. And this was just a start. Now, I'd like to share with you a very early sneak peek at some of what's ahead. Let's have a look. So here's what we're able to achieve with the tech that you already have. For those of you who've used our terrain features, the limits are quickly clear. From the jagged voxels to the lack of material customization, even though grass height holds a very special place in my heart, The representation that we used and the tooling impose limits that hinder you from achieving the exact look you want. Let's do more. Let's walk out into bigger, richer worlds with tools that let you create everything from the more stylized to the more photoreal. So the future of Terrain is about letting you fully express your vision and capturing your intent. We're removing the technological barriers that get your way, that limit the resolution of your terrain, the fidelity of the final rendering, and your ability to express it. Here you see the final result put together with all the elements that allow us to render higher fidelity worlds. Now let's walk through this world bit by bit and show you how we built it. Let's start with this road here. So this road was shaped with one of the tools we're working on, the terrain spline tool. This is a very early look at that capability. A technique for non-destructively editing 3D voxels with splines.

Shao

Thank you. It's very cool.

George Elcora, Other

So you can edit the road, narrow it, widen it. You can move it, reshape it on the fly, and the world responds intelligently as we go. Automatically raising. Thank you. And all the foliage around it adjusts. So we think this tool will let you build roads, paths, and streams, just as you want them, and the freedom to edit them and refine them. Next, I'd love to show you terrain decals. So we're projecting decals directly onto voxel terrain. So adding these detail everywhere that you need it, we're working on a whole new virtual texturing system to make this possible on extremely large terrain. You can scale them, rotate them, or place them anywhere on the terrain, and they'll follow the curvature and elevation. So let's look around a little more. Thank you. So looking around here, you can see all of the flowers and bushes that we've placed in this scene. Doing this by hand is, of course, way too time-consuming and inefficient, both from an artist's perspective and also computationally. So next, I'd like to show you our new scattering system. So these decorators were placed here with the rule-based procedural tools that let you paint the foliage in at different layers within the scene. Let's hide all the decorators and bring the layers of vegetation in one by one, so you can see what I mean. You can use all kinds of decorators to fill the world around you, building them up in layers, one on top of the other, to create a rich tapestry full of detail. Now I'd like to draw your attention to the mountains in the distance. So what you see here is impossible to achieve with the existing technology, specifically how the ridge line and the materials in the distance stay clear and sharp despite being far away. This is possible thanks to the introduction of sign distance fields and virtual texturing, letting you create these vistas for your players without the terrain popping in and out, breaking the immersion. So this is the fidelity we want to bring you, from the smallest projected detail underfoot to a ridgeline on the horizon. We're building towards a future of terrain technology that's truly worthy of the worlds that you imagine. And to populate this terrain, I'd love to ask Oren and Xiao to come up here and talk to you about how we're going to make these worlds come to life. Thank you very much.

Operator

Please welcome Senior Director of Engineering, Oren Jacob, and Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Xiao Yu.

Oren Jacob, Other

Yeah. Thanks, George. And hi, folks. I'm Oren Jacob, senior director of Avatar here at Roblox. And this is Xiao Yu, a principal machine learning engineer on our team. Up until today, when building NPCs for your game, they did just what you told them to do. You authored everything they said and did in advance, often through complex behavior trees. So the second a player did something you didn't plan for, the world stopped feeling alive. That changes today with NPC dynamic behavior. NPC Dynamic Behavior allows you to quickly create a game populated with NPCs through prompts in-studio. It's simple. You describe who a character is and what they want, and your NPC works out the rest in the moment. We're going to show you how NPC Dynamic Behavior works in-studio today on the stage. Xiao, let's get to the demo. This is the farmer Victoria. Instead of writing her lines one by one, Xiao has written the prompt describing who she is, a farmer whose produce has been stolen by the bandits in the town and who will tell anybody who will listen all about it. Xiao has pasted the description and generated her behavior. That's it. Simple. Behind the scenes, by the way, we've already done this for the bandit boss in the background and the crowd of Henshin. Remember, none of these NPCs here has a dialogue tree, and none of them know what we're about to do in this demo. So Shao, let's give it a try and see what Victoria has to say for herself.

Shao

Hi, how's it going?

Victoria (NPC)

Oh, it's been a rough day. That bandit boss and her mob stole all my produce. Could you grab some tomatoes and hit her with them to get it back?

Shao

Happy to help. Do I get anything in return?

Victoria (NPC)

Once you defeat that bandit boss, I'll whip up a golden smoothie for you as a reward. Just bring those tomatoes back to me after she's gone.

Oren Jacob, Other

So Shao's not picking from a menu, he's just talking to her And Shao, let's grab some tomatoes And then hear what the bandit boss has to say at her side of the story Hi, I heard you stole some tomatoes I stole nothing Victoria's the thief, stealing this whole town from me You want tomatoes?

Xiao

Victoria told me you are the villain, though Victoria lies She's the one causing all this misfortune Sounds like the bandit boss is trying to recruit Xiao to her side.

Oren Jacob, Other

She can see the tomato in Xiao's hand, and she's arguing maybe where we should send it. I think we should be in the shopkeeper's side, Xiao. Let the bandit boss have it. Come on.

Xiao

Oh no, that hurt.

Oren Jacob, Other

Good work. And now look at all the other bandits flee now that the boss is out of commission. Let's head back to the shopkeeper and see what she has to say.

Victoria (NPC)

Thank you for your help. Here's your golden smoothie.

Oren Jacob, Other

Ashao takes the golden smoothie, watch the health bar on the top right corner. There we go. Yeah. And all of that, what you just saw, came out of the behaviors generated from a prompt in Roadblock Studio and a few audience members. Not a cut scene, not a separate tool, the same place you already build everything else. And because it's a prompt, you can edit it, version it, tune it, constrain and reuse it across as many other NPCs as you want. Change it, and every downstream conversation and behavior can change with it, too. So dynamic behavior in-game NPCs are one thing. We can also use the same NPC technology to generate 100 playtest agents and test complex behavior in a multiplayer game. So back to the slides for a second. Today, we're also introducing a brand-new technology. These are headless Roblox clients running in Roblox's cloud. that you can use to do automated client testing that you can use to do automated client testing of your game. You would be able to script these clients via APIs, or as I mentioned, you can use the same behavior technology we just saw to make automated playtesting even easier. Let's go back to the demo, shall? All right. Let's say we're building a game with a complicated four-team food fight in it. 25 players on each side. Shao, let's give it a go and get in there. Four, three, two, one. Food fight! Every one of these NPCs are making their own decisions. Nothing here is choreographed. But as this plays out, Shao and I have been suspicious that our gameplay might be a little bit out of balance. In this particular case, we're using cloud clients to control some of the NPCs in the food fight going on right now. And by doing that, we can capture game state data from the client's perspective and use that to figure out if the game is in balance or not. Previously, I would need to have coordinated with 99 of my closest friends on Roblox here to test at this scale. Now, we can see how this plays out. It looks like yellow's pulling ahead, which is often the case. Blue's currently suffering. Oh, the last blue guy just lost it. Greens are left with red. Let's see how this plays out. Who's up for team green? Team yellow? There it is. Yeah, I want team yellow too because they often win in our unbalanced game. Let's see how this goes. Two green guys left. Hang in there, buddy. Oh, not looking good. That's it. All right, we got a winner. Yellow, once again. So here's a summary of the data from one of the client's perspectives. Whether you look at the data directly or point a coding assistant at it, it's pretty obvious to see a team yellow is overpowered, and now I can go and fix that, test again, and get my game balanced. And that's the loop. Describe the behavior, watch it play, read what's broken, and fix it. Dynamic behavior is the first in a series of improvements coming to NPCs and roadblocks, built so that everyday encounters in your experience play out differently every time and coming soon. We're also not stopping there. We're already building the next evolution, NPCs that can play, think, and react with the same agency and complexity as a human player. Thank you, yeah. If you want a first look, Come by our breakout session, The Fast Path to Smarter NPCs, tomorrow. Thank you.

Operator

Please welcome Roblox Senior Vice President of Engineering Anupam Singh and Senior Director of Product Karun Chana.

Anupam Singh, Other

Good morning, folks. I'm Anupam Singh. I'm responsible for Foundation AI and infrastructure at Roblox. With me is Karun. He's going to help us drive many demos today. You've already seen three very interesting things. You have seen build. You have seen terrain. You have seen NPCs. In this section, we are going to combine all three live with multiple devices. So, wish us luck. Okay? Let's start with Nishai. He initiated a theme park. He did make a few Robux, by the way. He's very excited backstage. But let's see what results we got from his prompt.

Karun Chana, Other

Yeah, we can pop up his screen. 4,000 Robux, and he doesn't have a passcode on his mind. This is great. So, all right, let's see what we came up with. Theme Park Cartway is the one that we started. Took about 12 minutes. That's his prompt right there. Let's launch in and see what it came. This was done live as soon as we join over here. I think you asked for a Ferris wheel and a go-kart track. I did something. All right. Not bad. The Ferris wheel is moving, and it has a go-kart track. I don't see go-karts, but it's a start.

Anupam Singh, Other

Awesome. So now we have this from a single prompt, but Karun wants to build a much richer theme park. And so we are going to switch over to a much, much richer theme park because this Ferris wheel and the go-kart is just a good starter place.

Karun Chana, Other

That's right. Colonel, what can we do? So the story here is a couple of weeks ago, me and my kids went out to Great America, actually, and my daughter asked me if we could build a theme park. And that's kind of what started this mini project of ours. Of course, I'm a little biased. I want to use our own tools. And what we did is we started entering prompts, if I scroll all the way to the top. We went a little elaborate. We said we want a go-kart track. We want a carousel, a Ferris wheel, all of that. We did go crazy with it while we were out that whole day. We prompted it about 15 to 20 times, spent about on and off two hours on it. And I think we ended the day with something that we truly did like. If you pop in over here. So thank you so much. Keep it coming. Keep it coming. But if you look over here, we have a hedge maze in the back, the go-kart track on the left. The carousel is actually spinning. That took a little bit of tries for us to get there. And then if I make my way all the way to the back, you can also start seeing some of the benches are not perfectly set up, but it's enough for me to get started to start building this theme park.

Anupam Singh, Other

So behind the scenes, though, there's a lot of AI working to satisfy Karun's prompts. We have a scene generation model that laid out the initial scene, and then we have a procedural generation model that made the Ferris wheel functional. In some ways, prompting is the new way to program today, and we are all getting accustomed to it, right? But again, we can make this theme park much more richer.

Karun Chana, Other

But where do we do that? I'll admit, after about 15 to 20 tries, I know my kids had a great time. I missed the Studio Tools. I missed opening up Studio, just adjusting the bench a little bit, making a fence, doing all sorts of things. So what we ended up doing is if I flip over to my laptop on Studio right now, exact same place, no changes. Well, largely no changes. I've been working on it. But now I have the full suite of Studio Tools available. I used Team Create, got in some college to help me out, and I had the build in studio available here to start building our things.

Anupam Singh, Other

So we've gone from a single prompt on mobile to multiple prompts, maybe 15 or so, on another mobile, and then we are now in studio, which is where we really build the complex experiences. But we can continue prompting, right?

Karun Chana, Other

So I can continue prompting. I'm going to use the favorite tool, my favorite tool over here that we launched earlier this year, procedural models. So you can generate a procedural model. I'll pick a fence, because I think I want to solve two things immediately. I want to fence around this whole world. It's going to generate some parts. It's got a post and a rail. I'll hit Submit. It's now generating images. So what are those four images? There's going to be four images that show up that I can pick the style off, and then I can go in and generate the object.

Anupam Singh, Other

So you can pick your own style. you're still in control. As a creator, just because we're prompting doesn't mean the model can go off and do whatever it wants to do. We're actually giving you control while being able to do a lot more.

Karun Chana, Other

That's right. Not only that, actually, the cool thing about procedural models is, and if you don't mind, I'll pick my fence and give it a second. There you have it. So I picked my fence. The cool thing about procedural models is it actually is generated with a script. So you can specify what properties you want to expose as part of that script, and then as you resize and reshape those objects, those properties change along with it. I'd show you that with a stack of tires. I wanted to create tires as guardrails around the track. And if I scale this wide, you can see it's adding more columns instead of changing the width of the tire. And if I go high, it, again, kind of stacks the tires.

Anupam Singh, Other

So the scripts are attached to these tires so that it knows to generate more tires. And I know your favorite is the tractor tire, right?

Karun Chana, Other

It's a tractor tire there, so... Awesome. And it's got a fence in the back as well, so that's... There you go.

Anupam Singh, Other

So that's our fence. And again, it does take time and iterations to generate something nice. And therefore, we have a time-lapse video...

Karun Chana, Other

Yeah, now, if you flip back to the slides, I think we had to, again, with the help of the team, about 20 minutes. This is about 20 minutes of work, maybe 25 minutes of work, and we time-lapsed it. Minor adjustments. I personally found this hard to do in prompting, but the tools made it super easy for me. I made a better-looking gate, adjusted the benches, finished the tire tracks, the tire stack around the go-kart race, and then I think I end on... Well, I replaced trees, of course. You have to replace trees. And then add the fence around the world as well.

Anupam Singh, Other

So that's what it takes to go from a single prompt all the way to a pretty good theme park. But when I look at this theme park, I'm sure what you're thinking, it's just floating in space. It's just sitting there, there's no terrain behind it. Oh, wait. Ground is a good idea, I think. Ground doesn't exist, so, you know, George is short as terrain. Could we add that kind of terrain here?

Karun Chana, Other

Yeah, so that's what we ended up doing next in preparation for this. That's our combined world, right? Now, thank you. It took a little bit of effort. We got the place from George, we had to write a plug-in, it was a little bit of work. I honestly cannot wait for the new terrain system to come out, but admittedly, I was happy with how this ended up.

Anupam Singh, Other

So yeah, 15 turns, 15 minutes, you know, getting the terrain together, but now we have another kind of style mismatch. The theme park looks a little blocky, while the terrain looks very beautiful. this is where I would want to upgrade this or oppress this to a medieval theme park, more, you know, more granulated, more woody. How do we do that?

Karun Chana, Other

Yeah, so thank you for setting me up, Anupam. But if we flip back to our laptop, this has been a top of mind for us throughout this year, and we are excited to ship some tools out later this year, through this year, to make this easy. Let me show you what we did with the tools we have, and then where we want to go with this. So, we already have the cube models out. It supports generating meshes, it supports generating textures. The inspiration for the medieval team that Anupam just asked for was this, if you pick this gate, is this image on the far left over here. And these two generations are done with the existing cube models out there.

Anupam Singh, Other

So, the image with the white background is our inspiration. And the grayscale is the basic...

Karun Chana, Other

It's a mesh. It's just a mesh without the texture. And that's the result.

Anupam Singh, Other

The texturing result is the third one. I mean, it's still missing a lot of details compared to the inspiration image, right?

Karun Chana, Other

Yeah, it's not perfect. I mean, I like it personally, I like it, but I think we can get more detail. But to solve that problem, I think what we're doing is we're going to have new cube models that end up launching later this year, which do indeed capture a lot more finer details you can see in the geometry. And the texture model as well will support both PBR and 4K textures.

Anupam Singh, Other

So PBR, 4K, and the ability to do normal maps, right?

Karun Chana, Other

Yeah, so I have to talk about normal maps if I plop over to this horse over here. I think everyone's thinking it's a heavy mesh, like, what about performance? This is not going to be great. If you look at the detail of the horse, again, I personally like it. If I remove the normal map from this, it goes back to the older mesh, if you will, and then you can add that detail back to the normal And that way, you can maintain the performance of your game while still getting the fine details and the aesthetic.

Anupam Singh, Other

And we know that all of you are generally concerned about, you know, when a mesh is heavyweight, the performance of the game is not that great. But we have worked very hard to build a texture model that does not make the mesh heavy, keeps it lightweight. Now, this is the entire world. We have gone from a blocky world, from a single prompt, all the way to a medieval world. I know you love the Ferris wheel because the Ferris wheel has this texture, it's wooden, and it still maintains its functionality.

Karun Chana, Other

That's right. So I think let's kind of go in. I think the Ferris wheel and the carousel is where we ended up spending a lot more time on this. If it pops up, hopefully I get more Robux. There you go. And I think what we ended up doing is we did build the Ferris wheel with the procedural model, and I made it in. Oops, that seems dangerous. And I can go in, and it's fully functional, a lot better than the one I had before, I feel. and I can kind of zoom out and take a look at the whole park.

Anupam Singh, Other

Yeah, so the entire world has become medieval. But we want to be candid with you. You know, you have to do this object by object right now. So we have a time-lapse video of what it took to make the entire theme park medieval. Can we cue the time-lapse video?

Karun Chana, Other

Okay. Can you cue the video? There you go.

Anupam Singh, Other

That's the video where each horse and each pillar and each roof had to be changed. Now, we know that this is a lot of effort. Our next version of this technology will let you select the entire theme park, multi-object, and be able to oppress it with a single prompt. Right now, you get the high quality texture, but you have to do it object by object. That's right. Okay, now, we have the theme park and Oren talked about NPCs. Our park is very empty. Can we invite Oren's NPCs?

Karun Chana, Other

Yeah, I think the bandit, if you slip back to my laptop, the bandit kind of scared them away and they showed up at the theme park. It looks like even bandits need play. And what we've done over here is we've taken the same bandits from Oren's demo and we've generated a more dynamic behavior which just says, troll around the park, explore it, and that's it. None of this is scripted, all of it is generated.

Anupam Singh, Other

Yeah, none of these NPCs are scripted. Therefore, we could take it from that experience, the fruit fight, all the way here, and they learn how to navigate the theme park, they learn how to get across, and it's a great way to test, and a great way to populate your game. Now, over the last few months, we've heard a lot about video models. Video models that generate photorealistic output, right? And that is also part of our AI strategy. So just to recap, we have coding we showed you today, we have 3D, we have MPC, and finally, we have video. Our video model work has been so exciting after we announced Roblox Reality that I would like to invite Dave back up to stage so that we can share some massive progress in the project that we call Roblox Reality. Welcome back, Dave. Good to be here. Awesome. All right. So let me set Roblox Reality up as Karun brings up his screen. It is for many, many years and decades, we've been trying to do things like rain, sunny weather, snow. And it takes a lot of effort for you to take that theme park and make it rain. I'm from San Francisco. I love fog. I would love some rain.

David Baszucki, CEO

I mean, the whole idea behind Roblox Reality, we're going to give you a glimpse of what we believe will be the architecture that brings multiplayer photorealism. That is not it yet, so stay tuned. Some things are better done in a 3D, multiplayer, cloud-based game engine, but some things are better done in a video world model upsampler. In fact, we get to all of the fine detail at 4K, 120 Hz, beads of sweat, individual hair, little insects flying, drops of water, snow, weather, these are going to be much more appropriately done in a video model than a 3D model and we want to have the magic mix.

Anupam Singh, Other

So let's just show it. Imagine you wanted rain and a little bit of fog and puddles. That's the reference image you were working with.

Karun Chana, Other

Are you ready, Karun? I think we're ready. I'm going to hit the switch right about now. Oh, there you have it.

David Baszucki, CEO

Awesome. Okay, so what you are seeing is the exact same 3D world that can run multiplayer anywhere with the viewpoint on this single screen being upsampled with our World Model Super Upsampler. Look at the drops of rains. Imagine trying to do that in 3D geometry or a shader. Very difficult. So let's keep going.

Anupam Singh, Other

And how fast does Roblox reality work? You know, while they were talking about water, we meant a sunny weather, right? We can bring back water very, very quickly because I'm very curious how the water works with the ferris wheel.

Karun Chana, Other

Yeah, I keep strolling towards the ferris wheel. I'm sorry for wasting our time, but I love this scene. There you go.

David Baszucki, CEO

Okay, so here we are back. This is reality turned on. Making the drops of water fall off of these individual ferris wheel cars is happening purely in the video model. There's enough information in that video model to paint these in on top of 3D. We don't have to synchronize these multiplayer. These will run on a video server.

Karun Chana, Other

That's right. That's exactly right. And then I think one last switch as we wrap this up. I think we also can change the sky over here. This is also my favorite.

Anupam Singh, Other

Painting the sky is another pretty big problem, technical problem, but there you go. That's northern lights, that's snow. That's the level of control that we can give you with Roblox reality, we are working on latency, we are working on frames per second, and we are working on giving you as much control as you want.

David Baszucki, CEO

Anupam, is that snow 3D geometry?

Anupam Singh, Other

No, that's the big thing, that we've all struggled with 3D geometry getting more and more realistic, but here, the model is intelligent enough to actually add snow, and when our avatar walks around, you can see the foot marks, and you can keep changing it. I think Karun would be playing with this all day long, but we have that much time for you. Thank you very much and have a great RDC. Okay, on aplomb, Karun, thank you.

David Baszucki, CEO

All right, so remember today, you saw it here today. So we've talked about more play and we've talked a lot about building. Now we want to talk about growth. And the games created by all of you in this room are arguably some of the best ever made, some of the most innovative that have ever been made and, of course, some of the highest concurrent player counts of any games that have ever been made in the world. And this innovation and this ambition, we want to optimize the way the world finds your creation. Now, everyone I talk to for the last 10 years, what's the first thing we talk about? Of course, discovery and the recommendation system. And we're making enormous progress on this. We have just recently moved out to analyzing the first 28 days and beyond. We have found that younger players generally tend to retain and monetize better with shorter-form games, experiences they discover, play for a while, move on. We have also found, as we've cohorted the system and started to make it more aligned using our age check, are drawn to longer-term experiences and deeper games. So we're now optimizing for both. And thank you for all of your feedback from all of you I've talked with about this. Now, we've also started incorporating projected retention and monetization into our paid tiles on the homepage. So creators, we are rewarding creators who are building retentive and monetizing games in a good balance. And we're also always looking for new ways for you to reach players with our ad formats and our placements, so stay tuned on this. Now, one of the things that's really interesting is the size of the audience for all of your games off of our platform. Today, more than 35% of all gaming video on YouTube is Roblox-based, which is amazing. And we have a lot of influencers here. We're working with the influencer community right now at this RDC, and we are going to bring back StarCode 2.0. So stay tuned. It's going to be awesome. In addition, Moments is expanding, really, to a place where influencers can share Roblox games. And it's very interesting that the mix of this, our algorithm, our homepage, ad formats, influencer it does come together in moments where a video can lead to an immediate play with those technical underpinnings and where ultimately we may see more than video in moments and so stay tuned Seb is going to be coming on stage with that once players find your experience we want to give you all the tools to balance how you monetize and constantly improve these systems. That's freemium, paid access, the marketplace, inexperienced subscription, advertising. We want to do it carefully, and we want to give you a lot of tools. I want to share something we're going to be testing in the next few months, and this is something we tried over 10 years ago and backed off of, but we think today it's very different, and that's pre-roll. We've always believed that ads on Roblox should be additive. short, skippable while a game loads, and Roblox can then optimize this delivery and rev share with zero integration. So there's something really interesting we're going to be testing here. Creators are going to get paid directly, so stay tuned on that. And then there's one more thing I'm going to share today about having more play. We're going to save that a bit for later, because we do want your games to reach into places they've never reached before. But before then, here's John to talk more about advances we've been making in Discovery. Welcome, John.

Operator

Please welcome Chief Growth Officer John Chunkudy.

John Chunkudy, Other

Hello, RDC26. It's so exciting to be here. Thank you so much for coming. My name is John Chunkudy. I wish I was showing you one of my games today because Nishay's back there counting all his Robux. that y'all sent him. But what I do is I lead growth here. And so that means I obsess over one question. How do we connect players with your games? We have millions of games, and right now in Roblox, there's a player looking for their next favorite. The game that they'll be playing for hours tonight with their friends, a game that they'll be playing years from now with their kids. And finding it shouldn't come down to luck. That's the problem that I came here to work on, not about a ranking system, but a platform where every player on any given day can be connected with a game that feels like it was made just for that, and where you find a growing audience for the games that you build. Now, earlier this spring, we realized that this wasn't working as well as it could be. We were optimizing for short-term outcomes for players and finding that they didn't always correlate with long-term outcomes. In fact, sometimes the opposite. So, in June, we made a change. We shifted to prioritizing long-term outcomes for players representing lasting value for them. And there was a trade-off. We saw improved engagement and improved retention with some harm to short-term bookings. And we believed that that trade-off was worth it. And indeed, after we rolled this change out, we were able to confirm what we saw in our testing, which is that the increases in retention and engagement should lead to net bookings growth. Home looks different now, too. Different games are breaking through. And they're not breaking through because they're winning the thumbnail war. They're breaking through because they are high-quality games that keep players coming back. And hey, we're really glad that some of you have noticed this work. I want to make these changes more concrete with an example from our creator community. Evan Bear One leads Turning Tables Games. He's built more than 70 games across a range of genres. He's got some great games. And about a week after we rolled out our algorithm changes, Evan posted publicly that his revenue was actually down. and for some of his top games by as much as 70%. I don't know, is Evan here today? Evan, I'm really sorry about that. But I'm happy to say that three weeks later, Evan posted again. His portfolio was performing better than ever. More daily active players and more revenue than he had before the change. And I want to cite two examples of how Evan was able to do this. The first is a game that he had been building for a long time. It features deep gameplay and a robust progression system, and he supported the game with regular content updates. The new system noticed, and three weeks later, it was his top-earning game ever. And the players who were coming there from our recommendation system were playing an hour or more every single week, above the median for the genre. That is a great outcome for his players, and that is a great outcome for him. The other example is a game that he actually released in May, before we rolled our algorithm change out. And although it saw some initial traction, it was down to about 2,500 players when the new algorithm came out. But the players who were finding it kept coming back, and they were bringing friends with them. The new algorithm saw that. And so a week later, the game was up to 10,000 daily active players. A month later, over 125,000 daily active players. Now, we love to hear creator stories because there's always lessons in them for us. And obviously, Evan's story is his own, but the pattern that it represents is not. When players come back to your game, the system will keep sending you more. Since June, we've continued testing. And what we've discovered is we don't see the same tension between long-term retention and long-term bookings that we saw with short-term bookings. Both long-term engagement and long-term bookings are expressions of player value. We've rolled out further improvements to both retention and engagement since June, and we are confident that that will further accelerate long-term bookings growth. We wrote a post in August about these updated changes along with tips on how you can improve the metrics for your games and in doing so, further increase the impression that the recommendation system delivers for you. In the interest of ongoing transparency, I want to talk about a test that we're working on right now. We believe the best way to be introduced to Roblox is by a friend inviting you to play. And when you enable that, we want to reward you with more distribution. So we're working on a system that credits your games for player engagement, not just from the player who got it recommended to them, but the players that they bring to play with them. We believe we can build a model that will detect viral games very early in their life cycle and accelerate their growth. This one's still in the lab, so stay tuned. Thank you. Now everything I'm talking about so far is about bringing gamers to your games. And indeed, that is central to how we seek to serve you. But the other side of the equation is growing the number of players on the platform. And you'll hear a consistent theme from speakers today about particular focus on accelerating our growth with 18 plus gamers. And so I want to tell you about some of the testing that we've been doing recently. Over the summer, we tested more than 200 new campaigns here in the U.S. focused on bringing in 18 plus gamers with deep play creative in genres that adult gamers like myself love to play. And I want to tell you about some of our learnings. The first is that these campaigns perform very well. In fact, the majority already meet or exceed our conservative ROI guardrails for this type of spend. And that's important because it means they don't need to be one-off tests. They can now be part of the regular way that we accelerate growth for the platform. And the second is that these players come and stay. On mobile, for example, these campaigns are bringing in players who onboard and retain at higher rates than the existing optimized campaigns that we had on mobile before. These are not tourists. These are gamers coming to play, finding great games for themselves, and they're staying. What this means for you is a bigger audience for what you're already building and more room for the kinds of games that need an older audience to work in the first place. This is early work. We're going to continue to optimize and explore, but this is a machine that works and we're going to keep going. Here's the bottom line. Games that engage players with the platform deeply, that monetize effectively, and ideally bring new players onto the platform, will get more exposure from our recommendation systems than ever before. We will keep an open dialogue with you. We will keep telling you what we're working on and partnering with you. We want you to succeed on Roblox, and growth is central to how we believe we can serve you best. Every player who shows up is looking for their next favorite game, a game one of you is building right now. It's our job to make sure that they find it. Thank you for building here with us. It is a privilege to do this work on your behalf. Thank you.

Operator

Please welcome back Roblox Senior Vice President of Engineering, Seb Barrios.

Seb Barrios, Other

Thank you. Very happy to be here again. Everyone's still having a good time? Anyone want to send me some Roblox? At least you know the demos are live, right? Perfect. I want to highlight something you just heard. The algorithm matters, but the most powerful discovery engine in Roblox are the people who play your games. Think about it for a second. The last game you played, the last game you truly loved, how did you find out about it? It probably came from a friend or a streamer or someone you follow, someone who said, hey, check this out, it's great, you have to try this. That word of mouth, that enthusiasm, it's the most powerful discovery engine in the world. And that's what Moments is. Moments is our short video feed system. Players capture what's going on, fun games, fun plays, creators make videos about it. the things you have to see and share. And every moment is a doorway into a game. You tap, you're in, the distance between being interested in something and playing is gone. We recently moved moments into the main tab of the app. But here's what else we've been working on. And get ready, our live demo's coming. Let's look back to the phone. All right, perfect. Let's pop up Roblox here. and jump very quickly into the feed. You'll see things that you're used to, fun videos, a creator coming up with something fun that they are recommending us to play. But you know, Roblox is about a lot more than just watching. And avatars are a big part of Roblox. So we're bringing them natively into moments. You'll see here, it looks like a video, but it's actually the 3d rendering of the avatar so if i click here on shop we'll see i can buy the whole thing or i can look at individual things the sword is pretty cool i like the shoes i can also just pop back right here into moments and keep scrolling and we're not stopping there roblox is about play we've been hearing about play all morning so wouldn't it be cool to play on Moments, right on the feed. I click here and I'm playing. This is a real game that we made using Build. I'm clearly not very good at it, but let's keep trying. You also notice I like Easter eggs. Some of you might have discovered a couple of Easter eggs we were playing with on our app recently. So Nishe actually talked about this specific game and he had a screenshot on it because it was made with Build. But we think this format is actually going to work for all sorts of different games and it'll just be a new form factor that you can use to reach even more players. I can go back, I can keep scrolling, just back in my feed. And I'm happy to announce then that avatars will be coming in October and that playable moments are going to be coming in the next few months. If we go back to slides. Perfect. Thank you. It'll be fun. And there is more coming to Moments. In the next few weeks, gameplay video previews are going to start showing up in Moments, so make sure you have a good one for your game. They'll bring even more players into your experiences. We're also making Moments easier to make and better to watch with better tools like better editing, better text-to-speech, more expressive overlays, and analytics so you understand how your different videos are performing. Since going live, Moments has been spreading throughout the world in different countries. In the US, it's not available for everyone. But wouldn't it be nice if it was? So I'm going to jump back into my phone, and we're going to use chat again. You remember Raj. He was here on stage with me before. So we're going to pop into the chat. and here's our conversation from before tell rush rush can we please release moments for everyone in the u.s let's see what he says okay he's typing hopefully oh okay uh are you Oh, just kidding. OK, I was, are you sure? That means we are now live. So if we go back to our slides, you should be able to, thank you. You should be able to refresh your apps or in the coming minutes or hours, and you'll see Moments in there on the tab. And that's Moments. Thank you. That's Moments. It's discovery powered by the players who play your games. Thank you.

Operator

Please welcome to the stage Senior Director of Product, Sophia Ranjava.

Sophia Ranjava, Other

Hello, everyone. I'm Sophia, and today I'm here to talk to you about how Roblox can help you earn more, earn faster, and reinvest in growing your games and growing your business. So let's get right into it, starting with earning more. Earlier this year in June, Roblox announced the largest devX rate increase in Roblox history. Eligible games can now earn 42% higher devX rate on spend from eight checked US users 18 and older. These users comprise of about a third of our daily active users, and they spend more than twice the other users. This higher spend is not a surprise, because when you look at the U.S. gaming industry spend, 80% of that comes from users 18 and older. Investing in creating content for this cohort of users is the largest earning opportunity on Roblox. We are excited to share that more than 2,000 games are already seeing a greater than 10% increase in their earnings thanks to this incentive. I'm also going to share how Plus is resulting in creators earning more. Plus is a new platform subscription. We launched it about four months ago. Plus comes with savings, social, and identity benefits. We are soon going to launch early access. And of course, you need Plus to send Robux. Our vision is that any deeply engaged user on the platform, it's a no-brainer for them to be a subscriber. Early signals from Plus are compelling. Plus users have twice as much playtime in your experience as Nonplus, and when they're there, they spend up to seven times more than Nonplus. You obviously benefit from that spend. In addition, Plus comes with what we call Plus incentives. So creators earn when they originate Plus subscribers and from the Plus use of private servers. In the first four months since launch, Plus Roblox incentives alone have generated 300 million Robux in earnings for creators. Now let's move on to creating player value through earning faster. Who doesn't want to earn faster? But before we do that, let's go back to 2013. In 2013, Roblox launched Developer Exchange. It allowed developers to exchange Robux for cash and transformed what was possible for creators of every size. Now we are going to transform it once again. Introducing Roblox Wallet. Roblox Wallet is the future of earning on Roblox. You will earn directly in US dollars. You will get paid automatically every day. You can move funds from your account to another account or to your external account in local currency. You'll have access to analytics. You can see where your money is coming from and what your outgoing expenses are. And you'll have richer transaction-level details and deep dives. You will see in the agenda we are hosting two wallet workshops tomorrow. Please be sure to attend those to answer any questions you might have, which this is a big change. Almost forgot to mention, creators can also buy Robux from their wallet funds at a discounted rate. Wallets start rolling out later this year. Starting in December, eligible creators will start receiving their invitations in CreatorHub. Over the following year, we will launch wallets for groups, businesses, and also launch for under-18 creators and additional countries. I want to make sure I mention that wallets is not just faster payments. For us, the vision for wallets is to help independent creators grow into owners of big, thriving businesses on Roblox. When you earn more and you earn faster, you get to reinvest more. We are already seeing this reinvestment take hold on the platform. 71 of our top 100 games run sponsored ads, underscoring the importance of advertising on the platform as an important part of growth strategy for games of all sizes. 27% of games made more than 10% of their revenue from rewarded video. This is 27% of games that integrated rewarded video. So this is a huge contributor from just one integration. I shared a lot today. I have another tiny bit of exciting news to share before I go. You saw how wallet can help you earn faster. What if your wallet could go with you everywhere? Announcing Roblox CAD. Just as you'll be able to use your wallet funds to spend on the platform, you'll be able to use the card to spend off platform. Anywhere a major card network is accepted, you can add it to your preferred wallet. The card arrives in 2027. I cannot wait to see what it unlocks for you. Thank you.

David Baszucki, CEO

Thank you, Sophia. Centurion card or Roblox card? I want to put down my Roblox card. So today we talked about more play, more ways for people to connect, communicate, and experience your games, more building and the tools to bring really your creations to life, and more growth, making sure the world finds what you've built and you grow your business. But we're not quite done yet. I want to share a few more things we're looking at to bring more play to the world, and I'd like to welcome Benham to stage to walk us through it. Come on up, Benham. Benham, so how are we going to welcome more play to Roblox?

Benham

So let's start with links. Links are already a great way to share Roblox games. But when someone clicks on it, you need to download the app, you need to open it, you need to wait for it to load, and then join the game. When the goal is to get users to play the game, every extra step matters. That's why we have for the first time, by the end of this year, all of the games are accessible and playable in the browser. Okay, so this is big.

David Baszucki, CEO

This is not downloading an executable. This is not cheesy technology. No. This is, you want to share what we're doing? We're literally retargeting the build of our C++ engine too.

Benham

That's correct. We're actually compiling the engine in the WebAssembly. Up and down the stack, we had to do innovations. We had to redo the networking because it is browser. You're dealing with DDoS. For concurrency, we had to implement the concurrency from scratch on the new browser API.

David Baszucki, CEO

So the question I always ask the engine team now is if we make an improvement in our C++ code for somewhere deep in the engine, do we get it for free in WebAssembly?

Benham

Yes, it is not a port. And it's going to be one of the most advanced applications on WebAssembly thanks to Fata and the WebAssembly team at Roblox. Okay, can we take a look? Is it true? Is it real? Yes. Does it take a live demo? So, let's switch to this laptop. Okay. One of the best ways to find new games is sharing. So, let's pretend somebody shared this game with me. I click on it. Watch what does not happen. There's no app, as Dave said. Boom. It actually loads in the browser.

David Baszucki, CEO

That is pure WebAssembly retargeted C++ code. I've got to ask a bunch of questions right now. So if we have the native app installed, we would launch a native instead.

Benham

Exactly. We go to WebAssembly. Exactly. We automatically detect it. We go to the native app. But now when they don't have it, they can actually play it right here in the browser.

David Baszucki, CEO

So in a way, any Roblox link becomes a universal link with or without the app.

Benham

Exactly, exactly. Basically, that's why it is so important, because now the link that you share with your community, the posts that you have on the social, they're not just a way to get users to find the game, you get new players playing into the game in the browser.

David Baszucki, CEO

So the perf looks pretty good. I'm assuming WebAssembly can tackle and use the GPU as part of the process. Yes, same as our engine.

Benham

Okay, cool, but does every Roblox game do this? Every Roblox game, you talked about 2D, 3D, 3D photorealistic. And yesterday, you suddenly asked us, how about Chromebook? Yeah, does it work? So we went and bought one. Okay, let's run it on a Chromebook. I'm out laptop-ing everyone up here. How about we try it on this Chromebook? A game that Nick showed earlier. Awesome. It just loads. and just imagine you had a train, you scan QR code of a game, and again, same thing, you're in here playing the game.

David Baszucki, CEO

So this means, first off, if I'm a creator, I can share links, people can play my game. If I send my dad, who might not have our client installed, something cool, he can play it. And if I make something in build, for example, and publish it, can I literally send him a link of something I made in Build.

Benham

This is a perfect match for Build. And same as you, this has actually happened. This last week, my family built a game on Build. For context, my son wants to be a pirate. My daughter likes dressed in press. My wife scared of snakes. That sounds like a really natural matchup. This is what they built. Let's see. I think they need to fix the pool. This is a tough crowd. And let's try the wardrobe. I don't think this game is going to win the RDC award. But as you mentioned, I'm probably going to share this with the grandparents. This is really the fastest way from building a game to sharing it with someone and they checking it out. They really go well together. Wow. Others join us. That's great. Maybe we can flip back to the slides. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's WebAssembly. Thank you, technical team. Thank you.

David Baszucki, CEO

But wait, stay out here. Okay. We have one more. We have more. Hover. So I do want to say there's one last thing I want to talk about, and that is over the last almost 13 years, many of you have come up to me and asked me about a technical thing and an idea. Some of you have asked me in the last three days. And it's really another idea to expand the Roblox universe and the content on the platform. Earlier today, I talked about kind of the cloud layer below, which I said is essentially a gaming OS. But I also want to talk about our app. And our app is very, very powerful. we just retargeted it to WebAssembly, it runs any experience, it runs 2D, 3D, and as you see we're moving to both single and multiplayer online or offline for single player. And I want to take a look at one last thing, so can you show us a little of what you've been working on and what our teams have been working on in the lab? I think if we pop up a screen on the laptop. Let's go to the last laptop. This is a PC. Whoa, interesting. I see a Roblox app and I see a TTK executable. Yes. Is this what I'm thinking?

Benham

It is, Dave. It is. We're starting with a PC build. It is basically Roblox executable, custom build to run as a standalone single game. but because it is a Roblox app, it is the same small package. We put both of them here so you folks see, this is really the same app. Okay, so let's give it a try.

David Baszucki, CEO

We are going to run essentially a TTK build rather than a Roblox app build.

Benham

Let's check it out. Let's say I'm a new user. I've never been on Roblox. I downloaded the TTK app. I click on it, and let's hope that Wi-Fi here is good. This is a live demo. You can also join.

David Baszucki, CEO

And so, the thought is this is either standalone or through an app store?

Benham

That's correct. So, I click, and boom, I'm playing here. So, this is a standalone user experience, under the hood, 100% Roblox. So this is the first demo, live demo, of a Roblox game played as a standalone game. This is the moment.

David Baszucki, CEO

So I literally could probably look around and point out the 12 to 15 people that have asked me about this over the last 15 years. And so I want to share why we're looking at this. And it does stem from the notion, first, the world needs more play. Second, we have been on a mission with our vertical stack. One build runs any device, runs any language. This is the natural extension of that, which is one build runs any device, any language, and either in our app or in any app store. I also want to note that we want to remove literally any limit for any creator to build on the Roblox platform to get the world's best content on our platform. So can we take a look at that? Let's flip back to the slides, please. So cloud and services identical?

Benham

It's the same cloud and services integrated into your standalone app. As we discussed, it's basically the same custom configured app. So the same multiplayer engine, the same services that power accounts, analytics, safety, everything. It's the same thing. So build once and same creation tools. Exactly. Build once, run everywhere, CTK just found out that they have a standalone app. You all just found out that you can have a standalone app, and you can use all sets of our creation tools to build games, and all of them are available as a standalone app.

David Baszucki, CEO

Okay, what if I want, instead of what we've been looking at, I want co-play and I want mobile.

Benham

Co-play is always on by default. It is one community, one social graph. So the players and all of these standalone apps can play with the players on Roblox. And the accounts travel with the game. How about we check it out on mobile? Check out some mobile. So this is a video. So what are we seeing? Same thing. It's basically Roblox executable, this time on mobile. But TTK standalone app. We click, we actually join the game quickly. Okay, and so mobile comes through an App Store? It is, absolutely. It is App Store. As a result, you can actually participate in the discovery and marketing of your game. Okay, co-play on mobile. Same thing, we just talked about it. So, co-play is enabled by default. You can find your friends on Roblox app, play with them, and if you want to play more great Roblox games, you can also download Roblox app. Okay, I saw in the architectural diagram, common safety cloud stack. Safety travels with the game, Dave. So the same high standard of safety that we provide to you and your users. On the Roblox app, we plan to provide the same thing on all of these standalone applications. Parallel Economics, Parallel DevX, our app and standalone? It's the same. You make same earning from the Roblox app and this standalone app. And included in there is the higher devX rate for age-verified 18 and over U.S. users. With all the announcements that we made today, especially with this announcement, it's going to be very exciting to build for mature audiences and reach them everywhere. Okay, wow. Okay. And finally, can I turn it on or off?

David Baszucki, CEO

Can I decide? Yes, thank you. okay so we're always in control um so uh awesome benham thank you awesome okay it's been an uh exciting morning and we have a lot more to come but before we wrap up i do want to mark our 20th anniversary we turned 20 that's two decades of builders creators and players thank you all. And to recognize this milestone, I'm really to honor the original four of us that were in that office for a few years. I want to first honor our late co-founder and my friend Eric Castle. We're going to bring out his wife, Rebecca. Come on out, Rebecca. And we're going to bring out Telemon, John Shadletsky. Come on out. Now, Matt Dussek would have been here. He is literally racing his Porsche right now, or he'd be here too. So first off, John, do you remember the four of us in that office? It was, you know, people today talk about fast iteration speed. We were literally iterating by the hour, if I believe. New build every day, playing every afternoon. That was great. Yeah, it was crazy, actually. And Rebecca, I want to honor Eric, because so many of the foundational elements, integration with Luau, the multiplayer replication system, like in a way we had the optimal group of four people. Each of us played a role and Eric's role was just so substantial.

Rebecca Castle

Thank you, Dave. My whole family really appreciates how you honor Eric. And I'll just quickly say that your building keeps his legacy alive. So thank you all for the work that you do.

David Baszucki, CEO

And John, you're, once again, it's almost like the four of us were the optimal Dungeon and Dragons four-person crew. You know, we spiked all over the place. Can I be the wizard?

John Shadletsky

You are the wizard. Yeah, I'm always the wizard.

David Baszucki, CEO

Yeah, and so John, you kind of complimented me and Eric and Matt. Matt did the social graph. I was doing Engine. Eric was doing Luau and Studio and all of that. You're doing a lot of live ops innovation, really. And so as I thank you all for being on the stage, John, Is there one thing you can say that just kind of highlights what those early years of LiveOps thinking was?

John Shadletsky

Well, you know, there's a lot of great things about Roblox and a lot of reasons why people might want to play it. But I think early on we hit on the idea that, like, maybe the most exciting part about Roblox was, it's free!

David Baszucki, CEO

Yeah! Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, guys. All right. If you want to find it's free, it was in an experimental ad we actually tried running on TV a long time ago. And you can find that anywhere. So, okay, so 20 years, a simple idea, look at what we've built. In the last 12 months, creators earned $1.7 billion on our platform. And since 2020, the top creators, the top 10 creators, saw their earnings grow up by 3.6 times. But here's something that's really exciting to us, and that is the top thousandth creator grew even faster at 4.3 times. And the further we go into that long tail, the faster the growth has been, which highlights really the opportunity on Roblox and how it keeps growing. And by the way, the average for creators between number 1,000 and 10,000, that's a lot of creators, is more than $30,000 a year. In the United States, Roblox accounts for about 20% of under-18 gaming revenue now. And our 18 through 34 audience grew 42% year over year, with ours up 37%. In India, daily active users grew 64% year-over-year last quarter, and in Japan, 67%. And according to industry analyst Matthew Ball in 2025, Roblox accounted for more than half of gaming industry growth worldwide. None of that happened because of us. It happened because of all of you, both you in the room and all of our creator community worldwide. Now, over the next several years, we're going to be, and our industry is going to be, completely transformed. We believe it's going to be a positive transformation. Historically, whenever creative fields have been touched by new tools, the result has been more creators, not fewer. And we believe the same is happening in the gaming ecosystem. system, we're on the verge of a moment when building an interactive world is as common as making a video or writing a story, and where creators around the world find audiences, produce their greatest work, and build studios, and where play in all its forms becomes more human, more universal, and more essential than ever, and not just for Roblox. For the whole industry we're a part of, gaming, toys, sports, all of us together benefit when play thrives. Play is a unique form and a special form of human connection. It's something we do together, and we believe the world needs more of it. Together in this room, we are the architects of that future. Thank you. I can't wait to see what you all build next. Thank you. And we're gonna do my predictions at the start of Builderman Q&A. Thanks a lot, everyone.