RDC26: What We Announced

Updates Announcements
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Hi Creators,

At RDC, we shared some exciting updates to both Roblox as a platform and our creator tools, avatars, and engine. Before jumping in, I want to acknowledge how transformative the past year has been. We know that some changes have been difficult to navigate, and I want to personally thank every one of you for your dedication and creativity. Our community is like no other.

Because of your hard work, on average, last quarter, 123 million users (up 10% year-over-year)1 came to play on Roblox every single day. Game visits are also up 55% from last year2, and creators have earned approximately $1.7 billion through DevEx, up about 50% since last year3. And it’s not just the established hits carrying the platform: in August, 28% of games in the top 100 by hours, and 33% of games in the top 1000 were launched in the preceding 90 days.4.

I’m incredibly grateful of where we stand now as a platform and proud of all of your incredible achievements as we navigate a new age of game creation together.

Building Your Business

From publishing your first game to getting your third hit discovered, we’re here to help you grow your businesses by improving how you iterate, grow, and learn from your players.

Publish Your Games More Easily

To make publishing on Roblox easier without compromising on safety, we’re lowering the Highly Engaged Player threshold from 250 to 100 this November, along with several other changes announced today:

  • Introducing a way for creators to build and change their game without unnecessary or disruptive moderation while it is still taking shape.

  • Adjusting our approach to content violations, changes we expect to reduce bans by nearly 40% for well-intentioned creators.

  • Answer a single question, rather than the full questionnaire, to reach players ages 16 and older in most regions. Games with restricted content will still need to complete the full questionnaire. See our Restricted Content Policy for details.

  • And more!

Test, Observe, and Ship Fixes Faster

Test early, understand your players, and ship fixes faster with new tools built for the full development cycle:

  • Early testing (Late 2026): Invite up to 10 age-checked friends of similar ages to test your game early, before you publish.

  • Player Support (Late 2026): View and manage support requests submitted by your players. Sign up for early access here.

  • Observability Platform (Late 2026): Trace client sessions and logs, get instant troubleshooting insights from Studio Build, and ship fixes directly inside Studio and Creator Hub.

Earn Faster and Get Paid

There will be more ways to earn faster, get paid, and spend so you can better run your business:

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  • Pre-roll video ad formats (Coming soon): Pre-roll gives creators a simple new way to earn: short, skippable, mobile-first video ads that run while your game loads, with Roblox optimizing delivery and sharing the revenue; no code or integration required. Roblox Plus subscribers won’t see pre-roll ads.

  • Roblox Wallet (Late 2026): With Wallet, your earnings will be paid out automatically every business day in USD5. Transfer to your bank account on your schedule, track every transaction down to individual purchase records, and see your cash flow in real time from Creator Hub.

  • Roblox Card (2027): With Roblox Card, you’ll be able to spend your Wallet balance anywhere major cards are accepted6.

Engage Players Where They Already Are

Grow your audience and keep players engaged outside your game with new distribution and communication tools:

  • Play on the Web (Late 2026): Distribute your game on the web. Share your game’s Details Page URL in a YouTube description, on X, or in a Discord, and anyone who clicks can start playing immediately in Chrome, with no app or install required.

  • Play offline (Mid 2027): Enable offline solo play alongside a live, multiplayer mode.

  • Pre-Set Quick Words (Late 2026): Add pre-set Quick Words, which are proactively reviewed for policy compliance so players of all ages can coordinate gameplay safely.

  • Developer Push Notification Support (Late 2026): Turn on push notifications for opted-in players to alert when it’s their turn, enabling new cases like async turn-based play.

Creator Tools: Build Faster in Studio

Build faster with new Studio tools for terrain, generation, moderation, and collaboration:

  • Asset Moderation (Late 2026): Get instant, detailed moderation feedback on assets during development so you can fix issues before publishing.

  • Scene Generation (Late 2026): Prototype faster by generating a layout of a scene.

  • Branch and Merge (Early 2027): Spin up isolated Place branches so anyone can build simultaneously without stepping on each other. Combine work through a guided merge that resolves conflicts at the property and script-line level.

  • Test Teleports (Early 2027): Teleport between places in Studio.

  • Terrain Improvements (Mid 2027): Significant advancements to Terrain, including scattering, splines, and projected decals.

Populate Worlds With Advanced Avatars

Add dynamic NPCs, smoother animation, and clothing that fits every avatar correctly:

  • Emissives for UGC avatars and items (Late 2026): Use textures to control emissive glowing effects on avatars, clothing, and accessories. You can now sell emissive items on Marketplace.

  • NPC Dynamic Behavior (Late 2026): Populate games with dynamic NPCs through prompts in Studio. You can edit, version, tune, constrain, and reuse it across as many other NPCs as you want.

  • Silhouette-preserving Layered Clothing (Early 2027): Define how clothing and accessories resize and deform in a way that maintains the integrity of the garment when fitted onto a range of avatars.

  • New Default Movement (Early 2027): Use new default avatar movement that includes motion matching and root motion.

  • Animation Graph Improvements (Mid 2027): Adding support for State Machine Nodes and Luau Expressions.

Build More With New Engine Capabilities

Create everything from 2D games to 3D worlds with upgrades to our engine that increase range and improve fidelity:

  • Capabilities for 2D Games (Late 2026): New orthographic camera, animated image containers, and direct sprite-sheet import; UI improvements including blur, text shadows, and improved gradients.

  • Improved Collision Geometry (Late 2026): New algorithm auto-generates better collision geometry, with a real-time debug overlay and granular controls to tune the performance-precision tradeoff.

  • Cone, Capsule, Disc and Rounded Primitives (Late 2026): New primitive shapes for BasePart, and rounding support for all applicable base part shapes.

  • Minimum draw distance to 500 studs (Late 2026): Even on a low-end android device that might be running at quality level 1, you’ll get more than double today’s draw distance of 200.

  • In-Game Creation Persistence (Early 2027): Persist assets that were created within their game, similar to how game data can be saved to a data store.

  • Material response improvements (Mid 2027): Improve how PBR materials respond to lighting by adding more granular controls on specular response and more accurate simulation of light scattering and reflecting in surfaces like skin.

  • Material layering (Mid 2027): Layer PBR textures with custom masks and control how they appear and blend to create richer surface details like weathering, damage, and mixed materials.

What we revealed at RDC is just a portion of the roadmap we plan to deliver over the next year. We’ll share a full list of updates on our roadmap next week.

We can’t wait to see what you create with these new features. Let us know if you have questions or feedback. Until next time, happy building!

1. As of the quarter ending June 30, 2026
2. Last twelve months (“LTM”) ended June 30, 2026 vs. LTM ended June 20, 2025
3. Creator earnings through DevEx during the last twelve months ended June 20, 2026
4. “New” refers to the top 10/100/1000 games by hours engaged for the month of August 2026 and launched in the 90 days before the month start. “Launch Date” indicates when a developer transitions a game’s status from private to public.
5. Payment services for US customers provided by Airwallex US, LLC, a licensed money transmitter in most states (NMLS #1928093). License and complaint filing information is available on the Airwallex website.
6. The Roblox Card is not yet available. Card issuance is subject to bank partner and the card program is subject to change.

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Good job roblox! A lot to unpack here but it all looks really good.

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Impressive additions, thank you. A new era begins.

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RDC Rating: 9.67/10

This RDC26 is approved by The Real Developers Nation :vulcan_salute::white_check_mark:

Nice j*b Roblox! I hope y’all add the search by genre filter too after almost 10 years of waiting!

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UI blur is finally happening :smiley: this will change everything for UI design

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Hey this is misleading. You state there is going to be more ways to cash out, but reality is you are sunsetting the DevEx system eventually.

We’ll transition away from DevEx in mid-2027 in the US. DevEx will remain longer in other regions.

I dont care for instant or daily transfers, nor do I want to be paid via this wallet in perpetuity after mid-2027 because lets be honest, it is not without its cons. What options will there be in the distant future for me? It would be great if there were more transparency as to why you guys made these really sweeping changes to the payment structure but I don’t expect to get that litigated in public.

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Almost all of these might be the best updates we ever had

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Roblox is healing. And I love it.

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i suggested that roblox adds sss, and they actually listened??? YOLOOOOO

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genuinely these are all really good updates and i can’t think of a lot to complain about from rdc today. good job

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i think its 11/10, cuz these features are AWESOME

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THEY’RE CALLING IT THE GREATEST UPDATE ANNOUNCED THIS YEAR

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subsurface scattering in simple terms

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Would love more information regarding this. “standalone app” is interesting. But

is also worrying? It rather sounds like security issues waiting to happen

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Hoping we get more details on the PBR and material response features soon, better skin is exactly what realistic characters were missing

The other half though is that small meshes still don’t cast shadows in daylight, so hair doesn’t shadow a face and a jacket doesn’t shadow the shirt underneath, everything stays flat no matter how good the material is

Curious how this will look in plain daylight rather than the controlled interior in the showcase

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will playing roblox in browser/chrome be supported on linux

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Anything on transparency support for UGC items using PBR?

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These are all AMAZING changes. I’m genuinely excited for the future of game design on Roblox. :grin:

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everything being up is a bit contradicting to the effects of the age checks, restrictions, and age segrications that happened this year, many developers had there games nerfed of there players, how is it possible that there are improvements to game visits?

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