Our ninth annual 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 across our global community together to connect with one another and learn about our newest features and products. This year, we shared how we plan to achieve our vision of reimagining how people come together.

As of the quarter ending June 2023, 65.5 million users spend an average of 2.3 hours every day on Roblox. As the platform has grown, the community is more excited than ever about connecting, building, and communicating. 为了实现我们的愿景，我们制定了四项原则；我们在 RDC 分享的创新内容都隶属于这些原则。 We’ll talk through each of these principles below:  

1: Evolving our Platform for 3D Immersive Communication 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 look can change as often as the user likes—more than 10 million of our daily active 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 give creators control over changing items inside an experience, so they can morph the shape and dimensions, or change textures. 接下来的几个月，开发者将可以选择启用这些 API，允许人们自定义虚拟形象，而无需离开体验。 This will start with the customization of avatars themselves—adding freckles or changing the shape of the jaw—then expand into in-experience creation of avatar items, clothing, and emotes. 
• Our avatar creation tool now supports importing standard gLTF files in addition to OBJ and FBX files. 我们还发布了预览功能，使创作者能够看到他们的虚拟形象如何与不同的面部表情、表情、配饰和层叠服饰配合使用。 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 easily 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 creation 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 also continue expanding on the ability to express emotion through avatars, going beyond facial expressions to hand gestures and upper body movements, and new machine learning (ML) techniques that enable more realistic avatar movement. 在不久的将来，一个人的虚拟形象将准确反映他们的面部表情，甚至到相同的眨眼频率。 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

人们已经使用 Roblox 和朋友通过文字聊天联系和交流。针对美国 13 岁以上的用户，他们还可以使用语音聊天功能。 Last month, we also shared the ability for those over age 13 to animate their avatar with facial animation, using the camera on their device. At RDC, we announced Roblox Connect, a new way for friends to call each other as their avatars—together in a shared experience. 

Launching later this year, Connect will enable people to call a friend from their Roblox friends list using their real name and facial expressions—conveying nuance with their own body language—and be transported to a shared immersive space on Roblox for their conversation, sitting together by a campfire or standing beside a waterfall. 在幕后，我们在本质上将好莱坞风格的动作捕捉工作室打包成可以在手机或笔记本电脑上运行的程序，无需设备或动作跟踪点。 The device’s camera is all that’s needed to capture motion and translate it in real time.

We will open 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 collective 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:

1. 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 check out the latest exhibit via The Met experience on Roblox. But with Connect, these friends could make a call on Roblox and teleport there together, hear their friend’s commentary about the art, and see their friend’s reactions, all in real time.
2. A father and his grown son, who’s moved across the country, could be together on a dock by a lake and reminisce about 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 Across More Devices

Roblox is one of the largest immersive platforms available anywhere. As devices evolve and new versions become available, we want to provide everyone on Roblox with the best experience possible for their device. Creators can publish experiences once and immediately get them into the hands of a global audience across all of the platforms we support. 

We’ve opened up access for developers to start creating experiences for Roblox on Meta Quest and have seen a tremendous response. In the first five days, we saw more than 1 million downloads of the open beta. At RDC, we shared that Roblox will be widely available to people on Meta Quest later this month. 我们还宣布将升级 Roblox Xbox 应用程序，为大家带来全新的外观、频繁的更新（可以访问最新功能）、更完善的内容推荐和用户体验。

And, at long last, we announced that next month, millions of Playstation console owners will be able to access the full catalog of Roblox experiences. Getting our developers' experiences onto these two amazing platforms is a significant step toward making Roblox available on all of the most popular devices. And we’re not stopping there! 

3: Growing a Vibrant Virtual Economy With More Ways to Earn 

除了我们已经提供一系列支持创作者的工具和服务之外，我们希望与创作者分享在 Roblox 上赚取收入的新方法。 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 also diversified and introduced new ways to allow more creators to earn. 

Leveraging Generative AI

At RDC, we announced Assistant, a conversational AI that makes creation on Roblox more accessible and empowers advanced creators to build richer, more engaging experiences faster. Assistant will be available in Roblox Studio and Creator Hub later this year, and within experiences sometime next year to help creators learn, code, and build more effectively. Working with Assistant will be collaborative and iterative, so creators can provide feedback and Assistant will work to provide the best solution. This new generation of AI-powered tools will amplify the ability of all creators to bring their ideas to life. 

Assistant 以 Roblox 上生成式人工智能的现有使用为基础，同时降低了新手或经验不足的创作者的使用门槛，并使更成熟的创作者能够自动执行繁琐、重复的任务并快速扩展他们的工作。 In both cases, this unlocks new creative opportunities so we all benefit from a more diverse set of ideas, and bigger, more ambitious projects being shared on the platform. Earlier this year, we released Code Assist and Material Generator into beta and we’ve already seen great success with both tools. 自从发布 Code Assist 以来，我们发现生成的代码量是之前的自动完成解决方案的两倍。 与从未使用 Beta 版的创作者相比，使用 Material Generator 测试版（可以通过文本提示生成材质变体）的创作者将基于物理的渲染 (PBR) 材质变体的使用量增加了 50% 以上。

Economic Opportunities for Creators

At RDC, we shared with creators key enhancements that will improve their ability to earn on Roblox. 首先，我们宣布即将推出全新功能，让创作者在他们的体验中提供订阅，并可以自由选择他们以订阅模式提供的功能或产品。 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. 我们致力于打造一个充满用户喜爱内容的市场，在这里，大家的创造力也能得到保障。 这就是为什么，当我们今年开放商城时，除了身份验证之外，我们还实施了保障措施，让创作者更有责任意识。 We are also developing easier ways for creators to detect duplicates of their items and more easily report, manage, and track IP claims. These tools are in development now and we’ll share details as they become available.

We are also evolving our Marketplace so that by next year, there will be two predominant types of items: those that are fixed in quantity (Limiteds) and those that have a flexible quantity, both with costs 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 more than the original price.

At last year’s RDC, we announced our plan to launch Immersive Ads, which we did this year. 虽然这是学习的一年，但我们已经看到了创作者（尤其是中长尾创作者）的早期迹象，他们从沉浸式广告中获得了高达 20% 的收入。 Brands are also seeing the impact of these ads as a way to reach their communities more effectively. 例如，H&M 的门户广告使加入体验的人数增加了 11%，其中 97% 的用户都是首次加入体验。 More than 11,000 people organically joined a friend who had teleported into the H&M experience through an Immersive Ad. 

我们已经听到了社区关于创作者商城费用的响亮而清晰的反馈。 Next year, we plan to update our Creator Marketplace fees to enable asset and tool creators to keep 100 percentof the net proceeds from the sale of their items in Studio or Creator Hub—excluding tax and payment processing fees. Also coming next year is the ability for developers to sell models in addition to plugins, and a change to buy and sell assets in U.S. dollars instead of Robux, thus eliminating any Roblox platform fees. 我们从点滴实现，但我们希望建立一个充满活力的创作者间互动经济。 我们希望帮助各种规模的创作者实现收入方式多样化，并尽可能以节省或更高收入的形式传递成本效率。

4: Working Together to Foster Civility, Built on a Foundation of Safety 

安全一直是我们的基因。 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. 当我们引入新的沟通媒介并邀请更多人加入平台进行创作时，扩展我们的审核工具尤为重要。

At RDC, we shared new tools that will help maintain a safe environment as we roll out new features. 我们打造了一个机器学习架构，可以检测违反策略的语音通信。 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 additional languages to follow.

构建文明的环境离不开 Roblox 与我们创作者社区的共同努力。 We empower creators of experiences by providing the policies, tools, and insights to define what civility means for their community. 通过赋予创作者权力，我们使他们能够结合背景，创作出适合其受众的内容。 Today, developers can use the IsVerified API to better manage access to features within their experiences based on a person’s account verification level. This can be used to grant access to specific parts of the experience or help them better manage in-experience moderation. Later this year, developer-configured text filters will provide developers with tools to decide what type of text is appropriate for their community and experience. 这项工作只是我们对技术和工作流程持续投资的一部分，旨在为每个人打造安全、文明和繁荣的社区。

But this is not the end…

All of the innovations we shared at RDC will enable people to connect and communicate in a more immersive way than ever before, on an ever expanding range of devices. 对于创作者来说，这些工具将使他们能够在任何地方轻松、直观地进行创作，并帮助创作者在安全和文明的基础上发掘商机。 These are the principles that will help us achieve our vision: Reimagining how people come together. We are grateful and excited to continue this journey with our creator community and cannot wait to see the amazing things they’ll build with this new technology.