Unveiling the Future of Creation With Native 3D Generation, Collaborative Studio Tools, and Economy Expansion

  • Last year at the Roblox Developers Conference (RDC), we shared our overarching goal of having 10% of the gaming market’s content revenue flow through our platform.

  • At this week’s Game Developers Conference (GDC), we’re showing how creators can easily build, grow an audience, and monetize on Roblox.

  • We’re launching enhancements to Roblox Studio and AI innovations with Roblox Cube, our core generative AI system for 3D and 4D. And we’re showcasing how we’re making discovery transparent and actionable.

At this week’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, we’re unveiling new technology including Roblox Cube, our Cube 3D foundational model, updates to Roblox Studio’s performance and reliability, UI, and Asset Manager, several new APIs, and an even more personalized homepage. As always, developer teams of any size can produce some of the biggest games on our platform because we provide the tools to publish once to almost any device, anywhere in the world.

At last year’s Roblox Developers Conference (RDC), we announced our overarching goal: to have 10% of all gaming market content revenue flow through Roblox and be distributed within our creator community. To achieve that, we’re committed to giving developers creation, discovery, and monetization tools that make it easy for them to start and build businesses on our platform.

Last year, creators on Roblox earned $923 million, up 25% from $741 million in 2023. The number of daily active users on Roblox grew 21% in 2024, while the gaming industry grew at a single-digit pace in the same time frame. During the fourth quarter of 2024, 85.3 million daily active users spent an average of 2.4 hours a day immersed in games, shared experiences, and more. There’s a clear trend of players coming to Roblox over any other platform, and this is an enormous opportunity for creators to build quickly and find new audiences of active and engaged players.

Streamlining Roblox Studio for Creators

For creators big and small, Roblox Studio is our 3D immersive content creation ecosystem and engine. And at GDC, we’re rolling out several innovations:

  • We’re dramatically improving Roblox Studio’s performance and reliability. This includes improvements to Explorer, which we’ve rebuilt in Luau with a more performant architecture. Developers can now manage thousands of Explorer instances without slowdowns.

  • We’re making Studio even easier to use with an updated UI and the ability to customize toolbars.

  • We’re upgrading Studio’s Asset Manager with unified asset management, improved search and filtering, and increased performance and stability.

  • To enable quick and efficient communication between developers, we’re making it possible for developers to collaborate in real time by leaving comments and annotations for one another.

AI powers many of the tools we provide to Roblox creators to build their games and quickly explore new creative directions. At GDC, we’re announcing several new tools that showcase how AI can make things even easier for them:

  • This week, we’re rolling out Roblox Cube, our core generative AI system for 3D and 4D, and releasing the Cube 3D foundational model, including the beta launch of our Cube Mesh Generation API.

  • We’re unveiling our text generation API, which lets creators offer interactive possibilities in their experiences.

  • We’re announcing our real-time translation API, which automatically translates in-experience text.

Finally, we will be updating our open-source voice safety classifier in the coming weeks to detect policy violations in several additional languages.

During one of our GDC sessions, Principal Engineer Peter McNeill will demonstrate Studio’s new look and collaboration tools as he builds and publishes a new game. Attendees will see how quickly creators can advance from a concept to a published multiplayer game on every major platform.

Connecting Millions of Users With Great Experiences

Our goal for discovery was to surface, in a fair way, more diverse content on our homepage, making it easier for people to find their next favorite experience. At RDC, we shared our commitment to open and transparent insight into our algorithm. That includes what we value, how we reward attributes that drive distribution, and how developers’ experiences are performing against those attributes. Thanks to these changes, we’ve seen more experiences breaking into the top 100. We plan to continue evolving these discovery systems to feature more games in our homepage sorts, search results, and recommendations.

More than 90% of Roblox traffic originates from the homepage. To help players find the experiences and connections most relevant to their interests, we are making the homepage even more dynamic and personalized. Earlier this year, we introduced dynamic ranking, which means the “People You May Know” and “Continue” sorts will be dynamically positioned on the page based on how the user engages with them. We also rolled out the “Recently Visited” sort in search results so players can quickly return to experiences they enjoy.

In the coming weeks, we’ll roll out the full release of the Friend Referral Program, which enables developers to create a program within their experience that rewards existing players for inviting new players to their experience, using referral links. They can also create in-experience rewards, such as a custom badge or in-game currency. We’ve seen that those who play with their friends are more likely to spend additional time in creators’ games. In fact, we’ve found that co-play sessions are typically 1.9 times longer than solo sessions***.

“Making a hit game doesn't require expensive marketing or tech licenses or lengthy development lifecycles. It takes focusing on creating experiences that are simple and fun to play with your friends,” said Janzen Madsen, CEO of Splitting Point Studios, who’s speaking Thursday at GDC. “When we launched a dusty trip, the automatic thumbnail personalization function, part of homepage discovery, really helped us find our audience, and we’re now at over a billion plays with no signs of slowing down.”

Our Ads Manager gives creators another way to drive growth and reach more players through sponsored experiences, search ads, and more. In the coming weeks, we’re introducing significant, long-requested upgrades to the product, including engaging ad units, improved performance, and simplified setup and ROI-focused reporting.

Earn How You Want To

With the powerful creation and discovery tools we provide, developers have the opportunity to transform their ideas into growing businesses. And it’s not just the highest level of earners who have success on Roblox. In 2024, the top 1,000 developers on Roblox made an average of $820,000, up 570% since 2019**. The top 10 developers made an average of $33.9 million, and the top 100 earned an average of $6 million—up 450% and 500%, respectively, since 2019**.

The Roblox economy allows creators to increase their earnings by minimizing costs and providing monetization tools for studios of every size. From server architecture to distribution to moderation, we have creators covered. Instead of spending hours figuring out complicated systems, they can invest more of their time building great games. And they can monetize them in ways that make the most sense for their game and player base.

“Late last year, we worked with Paramount on SpongeBob Tower Defense, based on one of their most iconic IPs, SpongeBob SquarePants. Developed in just 90 days, it became a top-15 game 35 days after release****. With nearly 125 million visits and an average session time of 40 minutes, the game shows what happens when you create a compelling game on Roblox: Your audience finds you,” said Zach Letter, CEO of Wonder Works Studio, who is speaking today on “Design That Goes Viral” at PocketGamer Connects.

We’re also providing creators with more ways to earn. Roblox Rewarded Video Ads are currently live in beta within select experiences, and we’ll be rolling them out to more creators in the second quarter of this year. This will enable creators to offer their users more value at critical points within their game while also creating high-performance ads for brands. We expect this combination to drive higher earnings while making the experiences themselves more likely to power engagement.

We’re also launching a way for experience creators to sell in-game currency, boosts, items, and other developer products on their experience details pages. This makes it easier for creators to offer their items outside of their experiences, in other areas of the Roblox platform. These new tools augment many others we’ve recently announced that help creators build businesses on Roblox.

We look forward to seeing everyone at GDC this week and demonstrating our latest innovations. And we can’t wait to see what our creators build with them. To learn more about the many ways the Roblox platform is helping creators build and accelerate their businesses, please check out our Creator Hub page.

* NewZoo Q1 2025 Update

** Our creator ecosystem includes many hobbyists. Of the millions of creators monetizing on Roblox, more than 24,500 are part of our DevEx program, with the median creator participating in the DevEx program receiving $1,575 USD during the 12 months ended December 31, 2024.

*** As of Q2 2024

**** In Robux spent