Our ninth yearly Roblox Developers Conference (RDC) kicked off today at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Every year, this event brings the most innovative creators from wideness our global polity together to connect with one flipside and learn well-nigh our newest features and products. This year, we shared how we plan to unzip our vision of reimagining how people come together.
As of the quarter ending June 2023, 65.5 million users spend an stereotype of 2.3 hours every day on Roblox. As the platform has grown, the polity is increasingly excited than overly well-nigh connecting, building, and communicating. The innovations we shared at RDC fall under the four principles we’ve established to help us realize our vision. We’ll talk through each of these principles below:
1: Evolving our Platform for 3D Immersive Liaison and Connection
Roblox is a global immersive platform for connection and communication. We are making it easier to create personalized and expressive avatars as we evolve and introduce new ways to communicate on Roblox. These unique avatars help people fully connect with others in our immersive 3D experiences. Avatars represent a user’s identity, so an avatar’s squint can transpiration as often as the user likes—more than 10 million of our daily zippy users updated their avatars every day in 2022.
At RDC we unveiled new tools we’ll be rolling out throughout the year to make it as seamless as possible to create and publish avatars from anywhere:
- New mesh and texture APIs will requite creators tenancy over waffly items inside an experience, so they can morph the shape and dimensions, or transpiration textures. Within the next few months, developers will have the option to enable these APIs to indulge people to customize avatars—without leaving the experience. This will start with the customization of avatars themselves—adding freckles or waffly the shape of the jaw—then expand into in-experience megacosm of avatar items, clothing, and emotes.
- Our avatar megacosm tool now supports importing standard gLTF files in wing to OBJ and FBX files. We’ve moreover released a preview function that enables creators to see how their avatar will work with variegated facial expressions, emotes, accessories, and layered clothing. And coming later this year, we’ll release ML-powered tools that will automate the process of rigging, skinning, caging, and segmenting the model for the creator.
- We plan to enable a way to hands create an avatar from an image and a text prompt, then customize it and add it to the user inventory to start using it. Today, avatar megacosm takes an experienced creator days, or up to a week. But in his keynote, Dave showed how easy it will be to create an avatar in just minutes with these new tools.
We’ll moreover protract expanding on the worthiness to express emotion through avatars, going vastitude facial expressions to hand gestures and upper soul movements, and new machine learning (ML) techniques that enable increasingly realistic avatar movement. In the near future, a person’s avatar will mirror their word-for-word facial expressions, right lanugo to the same twinkle rate. All of this is important to enable people to have emotional connections in these immersive experiences in the same way we do outside of them. We’re so excited to see what our creators build with these new capabilities.
Sharing New Ways to Communicate
People once use Roblox to connect and communicate with friends via text yack and, for those over the age of 13 in the U.S., via yack with voice. Last month, we moreover shared the worthiness for those over age 13 to animate their avatar with facial animation, using the camera on their device. At RDC, we spoken Roblox Connect, a new way for friends to undeniability each other as their avatars—together in a shared experience.
Launching later this year, Connect will enable people to undeniability a friend from their Roblox friends list using their real name and facial expressions—conveying nuance with their own soul language—and be transported to a shared immersive space on Roblox for their conversation, sitting together by a campfire or standing abreast a waterfall. Behind the scenes, we’re substantially packaging a Hollywood-style motion capture studio into something that runs on a mobile phone or laptop—without the need for equipment or motion-tracking dots. The device’s camera is all that’s needed to capture motion and translate it in real time.
We will unshut source Roblox Connect and have built it only using public platform APIs. By providing Roblox Connect directly to our millions of creators, we unleash their joint genius to develop new communications experiences. While we cannot possibly imagine all the ways our creators will use this technology, here are two examples of the potential power of this new functionality:
- Today, someone who lives in San Francisco could meet up with a friend who lives in London at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to trammels out the latest walkout via The Met wits on Roblox. But with Connect, these friends could make a undeniability on Roblox and teleport there together, hear their friend’s commentary well-nigh the art, and see their friend’s reactions, all in real time.
- A father and his grown son, who’s moved wideness the country, could be together on a dock by a lake and reminisce well-nigh their last fishing trip. The son could see the expression on his dad’s avatar and hear his real laugh as they joke with each other.
2: Coming Together in Exceptional Experiences From Anywhere Wideness Increasingly Devices
Roblox is one of the largest immersive platforms misogynist anywhere. As devices evolve and new versions wilt available, we want to provide everyone on Roblox with the weightier wits possible for their device. Creators can publish experiences once and immediately get them into the hands of a global regulars wideness all of the platforms we support.
We’ve opened up wangle for developers to start creating experiences for Roblox on Meta Quest and have seen a tremendous response. In the first five days, we saw increasingly than 1 million downloads of the unshut beta. At RDC, we shared that Roblox will be widely misogynist to people on Meta Quest later this month. We moreover spoken that we will be upgrading the Roblox Xbox app, enabling a new look, frequent updates (with wangle to the latest features), improved content recommendations, and an improved user experience.
And, at long last, we spoken that next month, millions of Playstation panel owners will be worldly-wise to wangle the full itemize of Roblox experiences. Getting our developers’ experiences onto these two wondrous platforms is a significant step toward making Roblox misogynist on all of the most popular devices. And we’re not stopping there!
3: Growing a Vibrant Virtual Economy With Increasingly Ways to Earn
In wing to the suite of tools and services we once offer to support our creators, we’re sharing new ways for creators to earn on Roblox. As we shared in our vision for the Roblox economy, we support one of the world’s largest virtual economies. In the 12 months ended June 2023, Roblox developers have earned $680 million. In the span of a couple of years, we have moreover diversified and introduced new ways to indulge increasingly creators to earn.
Leveraging Generative AI
At RDC, we spoken Assistant, a conversational AI that makes megacosm on Roblox increasingly wieldy and empowers wide creators to build richer, increasingly engaging experiences faster. Assistant will be misogynist in Roblox Studio and Creator Hub later this year, and within experiences sometime next year to help creators learn, code, and build increasingly effectively. Working with Assistant will be collaborative and iterative, so creators can provide feedback and Assistant will work to provide the weightier solution. This new generation of AI-powered tools will overdraw the worthiness of all creators to bring their ideas to life.
Assistant builds on the existing use of generative AI on Roblox, which simultaneously lowers the windbreak to entry for new or less experienced creators, and enables increasingly established creators to automate tedious, repetitive tasks and quickly scale their work. In both cases, this unlocks new creative opportunities so we all goody from a increasingly diverse set of ideas, and bigger, increasingly would-be projects stuff shared on the platform. Earlier this year, we released Code Assist and Material Generator into beta and we’ve once seen unconfined success with both tools. Since releasing Lawmaking Assist, we’ve seen the value of lawmaking generated double compared to our previous autocomplete solution. Creators using the beta for Material Generator, which enables them to generate material variants with text prompts, increased their use of physics-based rendering (PBR) material variations by increasingly than 50 percent compared to creators not using the beta.
Economic Opportunities for Creators
At RDC, we shared with creators key enhancements that will modernize their worthiness to earn on Roblox. First, we shared that we’ll soon launch a way for creators to offer subscriptions within their experiences and the self-rule to segregate which features or offerings they make misogynist as a subscription model. For instance, a creator could offer a subscription for a digital “trunk club” where subscribers regularly receive curated outfits, or a members-only fan club.
As a step toward making it possible for anyone on Roblox to participate in our economy, later this month, we are inviting anyone that is ID-verified and has Premium to create 3D items for our Marketplace. We superintendency well-nigh creating a Marketplace with content people love and where creativity is protected. That’s why, as we unshut up our Marketplace this year, we are implementing safeguards in wing to ID verification that bring increasingly peccancy to creators. We are moreover developing easier ways for creators to snift duplicates of their items and increasingly hands report, manage, and track IP claims. These tools are in minutiae now and we’ll share details as they wilt available.
We are moreover evolving our Marketplace so that by next year, there will be two predominant types of items: those that are stock-still in quantity (Limiteds) and those that have a flexible quantity, both with financing per unit to publish. Grounded in real-world economics, these systems are intended to help creators sustainably earn income. We launched Limiteds in April and through June 2023, we’ve seen strong traction, with 77 percent of Limiteds selling out and 80 percent of items reselling for increasingly than the original price.
At last year’s RDC, we spoken our plan to launch Immersive Ads, which we did this year. And while this was a year of learning, we are once seeing early signs of creators—especially our mid- to long-tail creators—earning up to 20 percent from Immersive Ads. Brands are moreover seeing the impact of these ads as a way to reach their communities increasingly effectively. For example, H&M’s portal ads crush an 11 percent increase in the number of people joining its experience, with 97 percent of those people joining the wits for the first time. Increasingly than 11,000 people organically joined a friend who had teleported into the H&M wits through an Immersive Ad.
And we have heard loud and well-spoken the feedback from our polity well-nigh Creator Marketplace fees. Next year, we plan to update our Creator Marketplace fees to enable windfall and tool creators to keep 100 percent of the net proceeds from the sale of their items in Studio or Creator Hub—excluding tax and payment processing fees. Moreover coming next year is the worthiness for developers to sell models in wing to plugins, and a transpiration to buy and sell resources in U.S. dollars instead of Robux, thus eliminating any Roblox platform fees. We’re starting small, but our hope is to build a vibrant economy of creator-to-creator exchanges. We want to help creators of all sizes diversify the ways they can earn, and pass on forfeit efficiencies in the form of savings or higher payouts where we can.
4: Working Together to Foster Civility, Built on a Foundation of Safety
Safety has unchangingly been in our DNA. It is the foundation upon which civility is built. We invest in technology and workflows to maintain a safe, civil, and welcoming platform for everyone in order to empower people to build communities that are fair, respectful, and helpful. As we introduce new liaison mediums and invite increasingly people to create, scaling our moderation tools is critical.
At RDC, we shared new tools that will help maintain a unscratched environment as we roll out new features. We’ve built an ML tracery that detects policy-violating voice communication. This model is the first of its kind deployed at scale, where the AI is directly evaluating voice content and expression, rather than first translating voice to text and then classifying that text. The English-language moderation model will be released shortly, with four spare languages to follow.
Fostering civility is a joint effort between Roblox and our creator community. We empower creators of experiences by providing the policies, tools, and insights to pinpoint what civility ways for their community. By empowering creators, we enable them to incorporate context, such as what’s towardly for their audience. Today, developers can use the IsVerified API to largest manage wangle to features within their experiences based on a person’s worth verification level. This can be used to grant wangle to specific parts of the wits or help them largest manage in-experience moderation. Later this year, developer-configured text filters will provide developers with tools to decide what type of text is towardly for their polity and experience. This work is just part of our ongoing investment in the technology and workflows that create safe, civil, and thriving communities for everyone.
But this is not the end…
All of the innovations we shared at RDC will enable people to connect and communicate in a increasingly immersive way than overly before, on an overly expanding range of devices. For creators, these tools will enable easy, intuitive megacosm from anywhere—and help creators build a business—built on a foundation of safety and civility. These are the principles that will help us unzip our vision: Reimagining how people come together. We are grateful and excited to protract this journey with our creator polity and cannot wait to see the wondrous things they’ll build with this new technology.
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