Hi, It’s Nick and Tian reporting to you live from the Roblox Developers Conference (RDC)! We’re bringing you an update on all of the announcements today and also want to celebrate… you!
Since last year’s RDC, you posted more than 50K times in the Help and Feedback section of DevForum to help each other work through creation challenges and questions. You also assisted with Roblox Inspire, and more than 25K creators joined to learn from each other. You all continue to inspire and motivate us every day!
Now, let’s dive into the updates.
Building A Rock-Solid Platform
This year, we’ve been laser-focused on hardening the platform – making it rock solid. This starts with bugs, and we’ve closed more than 3,300 in the twelve months ended June 30, 2024, and squashed 4X the number of Studio bugs compared to the prior year.
Some of the notable improvements to Studio performance and stability are:
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Reduced Studio hangs by 60% since the beginning of the year 1
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Decreased place open times for 90% of Studio users by 33% on average 2
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Made play-testing faster for 90% of Studio users by 48% on average 3
We want to enable you to host a high-performance, 100-player battle royale or sports game and have them run on low-end 2GB Android devices anywhere in the world at the highest frame rates possible. Here are some of the performance wins we showed at RDC24:
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Announced our Harmony architecture
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Harmony is our next-gen scaling tech that predictively orchestrates resources and coordinates across the entire engine to make choices to anticipate occurrences like crashes and stop them from happening.
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We’ve been rolling out Harmony behind the scenes, and we’re seeing a 21% decrease in out-of-memory crashes on low-end Android phones.
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Started testing automatic occlusion culling with select experiences
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Occlusion culling automatically increases frame rate by not drawing most things that another object would hide.
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Based on initial testing, we see a 35% reduction in rendering time on our slowest devices from automatic occlusion culling. Occlusion culling allows you to build richer worlds while maintaining high performance and a great user experience.
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RCC memory change
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Historically, whether you built an experience with one person or 100, we gave you 6.4GB of memory on the server.
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We want to give you more server resources to build with, so this week, we’ve moved to a new dynamic memory allocation that starts at 6.4GB and adds 50MB per player who joins your experience.
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At the end of the day, performance, stability, and quality are foundational to everything we do at Roblox. We see this work, from reducing crash rate to improving framerate, resulting in increased playtime. Better performance means better user experience and more engagement for your experiences.
Fitting Your Workflows
We want to build tools that solve your use cases and scale with you as you grow in ambition, vision, and team size.
Better tools for management, collaboration, visibility, and testing
We announced a completely revamped Asset Manager (Late 2024) with the ability to organize your assets with folders and labels, and enhanced search across all your accounts and groups. We’re improving collaboration and visibility with the Experience Activity, which launched last week, and are planning to launch Comments and Annotations (Late 2024).
We also announced that you can soon run Luau in the cloud using our upcoming Open Cloud Engine API for executing Luau (Late 2024). For instance, you can integrate with GitHub Actions to run automated tests.
Example of how to run automated tests using upcoming Open Cloud Engine API for Executing Luau
Insights to optimize your experience engagement, avatar, and performance
Earlier this week, we launched breakdowns for your server performance dashboards in Analytics and more analytics to help you optimize low-end Android performance. You can break down your server memory and CPU usage by engine categories. Later this year, we’ll ship custom analytics events and detailed analytics for avatar items.
We also recently shipped new visualizations for new X-ray mode and summary 
flame graphs:fire: for Microprofiler. X-ray mode gets brighter in intensity when a memory allocation hotspot is located, and the summary flame graph helps highlight tasks that by themselves may not be expensive but called frequently enough may be a real drag on performance.
Accelerated Creation
Taking Studio to the Next Level
We want to help you go faster by making things more intuitive, eliminating or helping automate mundane tasks, and freeing you to work on what matters for your experience. That’s why we have already rolled out the beta of the next gen Studio UI, brand new templates, and are working on ways to allow for community-generated templates in Studio (Late 2024) to help you get started faster.
Improved Data Stores
One of the things we’ve heard time and time again is that data stores need an upgrade. Having to prevent concurrent writes, handle failures, and ensure consistency is a lot of work and hard to learn.
So we’re working on updating Data Stores (Late 2024) to handle some of the challenges you’ve been managing, defining standardized schemas and high-level APIs for common use cases like player inventories, stats, live ops, and more. We will also plan to handle session locking and retry logic for you automatically. Lastly, we’re planning a Data Store explorer so you can easily find and edit keys for debugging or customer support.
More Control over Avatars in Your Experience
We are working on giving you more control over the avatars in your experiences (Early 2025). You’ll be able to control the scaling and hitboxes, preventing you from needing to maintain custom allow/deny lists for unique avatar items.
Fun and Inspiring
Over the past year, you’ve created so many fun and inspiring experiences. Your creativity, ingenuity, and unique sense of humor amaze us. We want to give you more tools to make the platform fun for everyone by connecting global audiences, allowing for novel forms of expression, and helping you match players in competitive experiences.
Translation
We’ve been working hard the past year shipping translation products like chat translations, translations for non-English experiences, and translation feedback. In June 2024 alone, we estimate we translated more than 17.5B chat messages. We heard that you need even more flexibility for translation, especially if you have experience relying on dynamic or user-generated content. We’re working on a real-time translation API (Late 2024) that will allow you to send content to us, and we’ll send it back to you translated in real time. We also plan to help you translate your thumbnails and icons (Late 2024).
New Tools For Storytelling and Voice Commands
We showcased two exciting new ways to express your creativity in experience. The first is Text to Speech (Early 2025), which lets you unlock new types of content and narrative styles. You can easily add narration, speaking NPCs, or speaking captions in experiences. Here’s an inspirational video we created working with the ClipIt team that shows off this upcoming feature.
The next is Speech to Text (Early 2025), which allows you to create voice commands. Here’s a cool demo by GregTame envisioning what voice commands could look and feel like.
Custom Matchmaking
For creators of competitive games, it can be challenging to build an experience that works well for noobs and veterans. It’s no fun for your newer players if they get fragged as soon as they join your experience. So we will launch Custom Matchmaking (Early 2025), allowing you to define matchmaking rules to group users by skill level or preferred experience mode (e.g., team play vs. individual) or any attribute you decide.
Scaling Creation
Earlier today, we shared some early demonstrations from an incubation project we launched a few months ago with a team of researchers and engineers at Roblox. Their task is to develop a 3D Foundational Model that will efficiently power generative 3D creation on our platform.
The model will be open source, multimodal and capable of powering 3D scene creation through text, video, and 3D assets prompts. When we integrate the model into our systems, we plan to make it available within your experiences and via Studio. We imagine a powerful future where Roblox creators have extensive generative AI to power real-time creation and more complex and innovative gameplay.
Helping You Build Your Business
We want to help you benefit from a larger audience and more opportunities to earn. Today, we announced Price Optimization, a recommendation tool to help you determine the optimal pricing for the products and passes you sell in your experiences. We also announced that in the first quarter of 2025, we’ll enable eligible creators to sell their physical merchandise directly within their experience.
New Revenue Share for Paid Access $9.99+
We’re adding the ability to price paid access experiences in real currency on desktop. We plan to support a higher revenue share for these paid access experiences. For instance:
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A $9.994 USD-priced experience can receive a 50% revenue share.
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A $29.994 USD-priced experience can receive a 60% revenue share.
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A $49.994 USD-priced experience can receive a 70% revenue share.
We’ll roll this out on desktop for users to purchase in their local currency at first, with plans to expand to other supported devices. This update is an addition to how paid access experiences exist today. Which means we will still support paid access experiences paid and earned in Robux.
Commerce
Early next year, we’ll enable eligible creators to sell physical merchandise within their experiences. We plan to integrate with various e-commerce platforms, and are excited to announce our first partnership with Shopify. This means that creators who sell physical goods with Shopify will be able to sell those same products in a Roblox experience. We’ll pilot this solution later this year with a handful of creators, brands, and e-commerce partners.
Creator Affiliate Program
We’re launching an affiliate program that rewards you for new users they bring to Roblox. You can earn a share of the Robux purchased on our platform. This is a pilot program: We will begin accepting applications for the first version starting today, with the aim of expanding this to all creators by mid-2025. We’ll be sharing more details on DevForum next week.
Partner Program
Alongside the growing number of collaborations between you and brands, we’ve consistently heard about the growing opportunity for us to help you connect with one another. For brands, this means finding creator studios to partner with on integrations, ads, custom builds, and creating avatar items based on specific qualifications and expertise. In January, we will be expanding the Roblox Partner Program to new members. Here we shared clear criteria on how to be part of the program and earn official badges…
Bringing People Together
Party
Later this year, we’re rolling out Party, which will enable friends aged 9 and older to seamlessly group up, discover, and join their favorite experiences together. Party will also let friend groups communicate via text and voice within and outside Roblox experiences. Early next year, we’ll release an API to let you see when people are in a Party in your experience, which will open up new ways to make experiences more social and engaging. You can place Party members onto the same team with a visual treatment (i.e., red vs. blue team) or teleport them all to the same starting location.
Groups Becoming Communities
We’re pleased to announce that Roblox Groups, which allows creators and users to form communities with people who share similar interests on the platform, is becoming Communities to reflect the expanding toolset we’re building for creators to connect with their audiences — like Announcements and Events - and reinforce our commitment to enabling our all-ages communities to connect directly on the platform. Expected later in 2024 in Communities, we’re releasing Forums — a dedicated space where users can share feedback, discuss gameplay, and report issues found.
Music
Starting today, we’re adding a vast library of new music to the Creator Store with our DistroKid integration, with more coming later this year. For creators that own the rights to their music, next month, we’ll add the ability to upload your music via Distrokid. By the end of this year, we expect to see the catalog of music on Roblox that grows to span across genres like electronic, pop, dance, rock, country, and rap/hip hop. In the upcoming months, we’re adding new platform-level features like What’s Playing and Music Charts, where people can find popular and trending experiences or songs from breakout artists across the Roblox community.
Check out the video below showcasing some of the new music coming today featuring The Strange Ones and The Holy Knives with contributions by the TTD3 and ClipIt teams.
We’re excited to share these updates with you and can’t wait to hear your feedback. We will update the Creator Roadmap shortly so you can keep track of when some of these products will launch.
Footnotes
1. Decrease YTD as of August 31, 2024
2. Based on a comparison between the last RDC and June 30, 2024
3. YTD improvement through June 30, 2024
4. Purchased on desktop, in real currency
Hope that changes next year.
