Games creation and hosting platform Roblox unveiled some big plans during its Roblox Developers Conference this past Friday, with the promise of more tools, more access, more revenue sharing, and more performance improvements for the “experiences” that creators put together for the company – in spite of ongoing complaints about Roblox’s alleged child labor exploitation and sketchy monetization.
Roblox Corp confirmed its aspiration to increase game scale for creators, with the aim of letting a developer “host a high-performance, 100-player open world, sports, or battle royale–type game on Roblox” all while still having it run on devices that have 2GB of RAM. This is primarily being driven with the company’s Harmony novel technology, which brings client-side balancing and optimizations of CPU, GPU, RAM, and bandwidth.
The company is also leveraging generative AI tools in order for games to be made at scale and more accessible thanks to a new internal project, which hopes to let users enter in some text and visual prompts in order to create 3-D models of things like landscapes, textures, and terrain.
Finally, multiple revenue sharing initiatives (and by extension revenue streams for Roblox Corp itself, natch) will let creators sell physical merch, provide between 50 to 70 percent of revenue share when in-game purchases in real currency are made on desktop, and start a creator affiliate program in late September that grants up to 50 percent revenue on qualified Robux purchases via an affiliate link.
Other planned functions for Roblox include an expansion of Roblox Groups alongside a rebranding to Roblox Communities, a party feature that lets users seamlessly group up and play games together, and spaces for musicians to showcase their music on bespoke platform tabs.
The apparent final goal is to see Roblox balloon to one billion daily active users. “We believe 10% of all gaming content revenue will flow through the Roblox ecosystem and be distributed within our community of creators,” the company states. “On our way to 10% of gaming content revenue, we believe we will reach approximately 300 million daily active users. We believe that about 80% of those people will come to Roblox to play together, with the rest coming to shop, consume entertainment, learn, or simply communicate with one another.”
