Roblox is investing heavily in AI to assist users with game development, while also increasing the amount of money they can earn.
The news comes as part of the Roblox Developers Conference, where the platform also unveiled its new TikTok-style Moments feed of short-form videos taken directly from Roblox games.
Roblox now boasts an average of over 111.8 million daily active users and 390 billion visits to its games. Last month Roblox had a record-breaking 45 million concurrent users – higher than Steam – and over the past year, creators have earned over $1bn.
Roblox is now rewarding its creators with an increase to its DevEx rate – essentially the exchange rate from Robux to real cash. This has now risen by 8.5 percent, meaning 100,000 Robux equals $380.
AI is also a major way Roblox is enabling smaller teams to develop games on the platform. “To achieve our mission of connecting a billion people, we need creators around the world building at massive scale,” the company said. It believes the majority of the top 1000 in-platform games were built by teams of, on average, fewer than 10 people.
In total, Roblox has 400 AI models in production. Its star product is 4D Objects, which it believes will overhaul UGC. Users will be able to create fully interactive scripted assets by a simple text prompt – for instance, generating a fully drivable and customised car.
Other AI products include text-to-speech and speech-to-text APIs, allowing creators to add dialogue to characters or command NPCs, and real-time voice chat translation (starting with English, Spanish, French, and German).
Roblox’s other major development is its Moments feed. This will allow users to capture and edit short clips from games and share to a scrollable feed. Roblox hopes this will aid discovery on the platform, with users able to jump straight into a game from these videos. It will soon be available in specific countries in beta form (but not the UK or Australia).
“For years, our users have been doing this off-platform, creating a massive presence with Roblox-related content garnering over 1 trillion video views on YouTube,” the company said. It’s understandable it would want to keep this engagement on the platform. It also follows the likes of Twitch, which similarly updated its mobile app with a Discovery Feed of clips – it’s clear the dominance of TikTok on social media is impacting many gaming platforms.
These developer updates from Roblox follow continued efforts from the company to improve safety, with Roblox expanding its age estimation requirement to all users of the platform who access its communication features by the end of the year.
These safety efforts follow years of concern, with multiple reports accusing Roblox of being unsafe for children.
Last month, Roblox responded to a lawsuit accusing the company of failing to protect children. “Any assertion that Roblox would intentionally put our users at risk of exploitation is simply untrue,” it wrote. “No system is perfect and bad actors adapt to evade detection, including efforts to take users to other platforms, where safety standards and moderation practices may differ. We continuously work to block those efforts and to enhance our moderation approaches to promote a safe and enjoyable environment for all users.”
