At Roblox, our vision is to redefine the way we connect. Millions of developers and creators around the world come together to inspire, create and share. Our platform is built by users and our community is at the heart of everything we do.
Everything you see on Roblox – from high-quality experiences to avatar expressions – is created by our community. Developers want to create and share their creative visions with the world, but in the current game development environment outside of Roblox, that’s harder than it should be. Roblox studio is the most affordable 3D design tool in the world, and we’re about to take it to a whole new level. We make it possible to create anything, anywhere, by anyone, and we’re constantly investing in new tools and services to empower our community of creators to do things we never imagined possible.
Roblox is uniquely positioned to offer developers:
- Powerful authoring tools that publish in seconds
- A platform that facilitates the discovery and rapid growth of viruses
- Rapid iteration and scaling with no upfront costs
- Deeper connections and richer worlds as our engine and platform evolve
I shared our product and vision with creators today at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the premier forum for gathering creative energy and discussing solutions to the obstacles and challenges creators face. Here’s a summary of what we’re doing to speed up building on Roblox.
Powerful authoring tools that publish in seconds
We give Roblox developers everything they need to create and publish to iOS, Android, Mac, PC and XBox in seconds, with more platforms on the way.
Creators can focus on bringing their ideas to Roblox with our tools like Roblox studio and contact our large community of creators for support Center of creators.
In Creator Hub, the developer forum allows creators to share information; our Talent Hub allows creators to find each other to create incredible experiences; and our Creator Marketplace allows creators to share tools, technologies and assets with each other.
A platform that facilitates the discovery and rapid growth of viruses
Once a creator creates and publishes a world, it becomes available to our large audience. With over 67 million daily active users (DAUs¹) can now be seen and joined in this experience in seconds with no additional downloads, the potential for rapid growth is high. Combine that with the rich social graph that connects our users and their ability to see what their friends are doing and join them with one tap, and you have a very dynamic ecosystem ready to launch new experiences to the top of the charts in days.
Roblox’s audience is not only large, but it’s getting wider. More than half of Roblox users are over 13 years old, and our the fastest growing age cohort is 17-24 year olds, who now account for nearly a quarter of DAUs on the platform.
A good example of a game and team that has recently exploded onto the scene is Maximillian Studios, a 6 person team that has been creating and releasing The front line is a first-person action game on Roblox.
Using new technologies, cinematic aspects from the movies, and unique audio techniques and design methods in Roblox, Maximilian’s creativity and obsession with detail have created an incredible and flawless user experience. Less than a month after its launch, Frontlines has already received 12 million visits worldwide, with users logging in from San Francisco to Paris and Tokyo.
Rapid iteration and scaling with no upfront costs
By making your content accessible to many users, Roblox provides a fast and rich feedback loop about how people interact with your work. This feedback is facilitated by both our integrated Analytics system and our monetization mechanisms.
Additionally, on the cost side, we cover infrastructure hosting, storage, customer support, localization, payment processing, moderation and platform costs.
For example, at the beginning of August last year DOOR reached almost 1 billion visits. The creator, Lightning Splash, is a two-person team that created the game in less than a year. Roblox influence KreekCraft named it the best game of the year.” Thanks to Roblox’s free hosting and cross-platform distribution, Lightning Splash was able to handle massive overnight growth without crashes or scaling crises. When I checked recently, they’ve balanced 160,000 concurrent players with 2.6 billion total cross-platform games, and are now a team of four.
For Janzen Madsen and Splitting Point Studios, iteration is a core part of their strategy. Nearly 2.8 billion visits to the best places, including Rolling Thunder and Silly wizards, the ability to send updates in seconds is something their community has come to expect and has been a major monetization tactic for the studio. When something breaks, they fix it instantly with a seamless update for all users without requiring users to update the app. When they have a new item to roll out or a limited time event, they put it out there instantly to increase interest. If the community doesn’t like an update, they can always rewrite it. This user obsession has led to high ratings in the community.
Today, a number of ours developers are building significant businesses on Roblox, and this is just the beginning. During the 2-year period 2021-2022, Roblox provided our global developer community with over $1.1 billion in DevEx payments, a 164% increase over the previous two years. What’s more, if you look at the growth rates of the top 10, 100 and 1000 authors over the last three years, you’ll see growth in each segment with a 33% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the top 10, and a 47% CAGR for the top 100, we seeing an impressive 91% CAGR for the top 1,000 creators. Our platform has an ever-wider set of creators, an ever-wider set of content, and appeals to an ever-wider range of users. By constantly expanding the creation and monetization options available to creators, we intend to continue to democratize creation and open up opportunities for success in our community of creators.
Deeper connections and richer worlds as our engine and platform evolve
As you create, engage, and improve, Roblox works to make your world more realistic and more immersive with engaging social systems and more realistic worlds.
An example of this work can be seen in our avatar systems. Each Roblox user has a personalized avatar, and we’re rolling out the ability for each avatar to display natural facial expressions—emotions and speech-related movements captured by their device’s camera. In addition, we are supplementing our current text chat with voice chat. Together, these features will allow your users to interact with each other naturally and intuitively.
We are also investing in more realistic worlds. The Roblox engine simulates the real world, and we work to ensure that the materials and systems in Roblox behave the same as they do in our physical world. During creation, the creator can describe a house or tree as wooden. In the meantime, we’re working on better modeling of wood, how it behaves when hit by an ax, how it floats on water, and how it catches fire when heated. The result is that without code, your experience can become richer and full of emergent behavior.
Another example is aerodynamics. Just like in the real world, an airplane flies due to its shape and speed. When you throw a feather or throw a paper airplane, they float and slide to the ground. You don’t need to program this behavior: you can focus on building your world, and our ability to richly simulate that world can improve your gameplay over time.
Our engine is designed to adapt to the user’s device. A single world can include users on a large number of devices. The engine elegantly loads and models what’s right for each device, maintaining a fair and just experience and framerate with minimal work for the creator.
As a result, experiences created on Roblox can stand the test of time. Escape from prison is a great example of an experience that continues to succeed in new and innovative ways. This experience gives players the opportunity to role-play a prison break, receiving over 6 billion visits since it was first developed in early 2017. As Roblox rolls out new technologies like physical materials, Jailbreak creator Badimo continues to evolve his world to engage his users. Jailbreak’s popularity led to unique partnerships with NASCAR and McLaren. For example, McLaren released their new MCL36 F1 car in Jailbreak on the same day they unveiled the real version, allowing Jailbreak players to test drive the car before it even hits the F1 tracks.
Join us on Roblox
In summary, creators have everything they need to start creating for free. They can publish to different platforms in seconds, reaching a huge global audience. Audiences can join the experience in seconds, with no downloads, subscriptions, or playing with friends. Roblox then makes it easy for creators to replicate, engage, monetize and retain. Roblox is an elegant solution to many of today’s game development challenges, and it’s constantly improving. There’s never been a better time to build Roblox.
Join us at GDC
If you’re at GDC tomorrow and want to learn more, we hope you’ll join us. We’re excited for you to hear directly from 14 Roblox developer studios about their personal journeys and successes on the platform. Roblox Engine: Development on a platform that powers 32 million immersive experiences session at 10 a.m. and Pushing the boundaries of exciting worlds meeting at 4:00 p.m. Also, if you missed any of our sessions earlier in the week, you can view them in the GDC Repository.
We are excited to be on this journey with you.
¹ February 2023