[Update] June 3, 2026
Hello Creators,
As games on Roblox become more technically ambitious, featuring complex physics, advanced AI, and high-fidelity simulations, we know that having the right amount of server processing power is critical. Historically, we’ve given you a fixed amount of server compute resources for your games, and recently, we increased those resources and made them increase with each player that joins your game. Sometimes, especially with server authority, you might still want more.
Today, Compute is joining the Extended Services lineup. Extended Services for Compute is a new opt-in feature that more than doubles the amount of per-player compute (CPU) resources your game servers receive, which may help with very complex server authoritative and server-physics-intensive games. We’re not changing our current compute limits: if you don’t opt into this feature you’ll continue to benefit from the recently increased limits.
If you choose to enable Extended Services for Compute, it’s billed by playtime hours, the first 100K playtime hours your game receives a month with Extended Services for Compute enabled are free, and after that, it’s $0.001 per hour of playtime while enabled. You’ll be billed whether your game servers use the compute or not as resources are reserved for your game, and if your game is not hitting the current limits, you won’t benefit from this new service. This is unrelated to the baseline usage your game gets for free: those limits don’t change, and any playtime where Extended Services for Compute is disabled doesn’t count towards the Extended Services free hours.
Do I need Extended Services for Compute?
In general, the vast majority of games today will not benefit from Extended Services for Compute. We estimate approximately 200 games are hitting existing game server CPU limits–as they have heavy server-side physics–and might benefit from Extended Services. When you hit the limit, you’ll see server heartbeat drop and players might experience simulation stuttering in particular.
If you’re building a game with server authority, it’s more likely you could benefit as server authority uses more server compute per-player. This is not required for server authority, and we don’t expect most server authority games to need it.
To determine if your game would benefit, we’re updating the Server Performance Observability dashboard to include a refined CPU core utilization graph and insights for you to assess your consumption. You can access this graph on your Creator Dashboard under Monitoring > Performance. When your game consumes a high utilization of resources, you’ll receive an alert through Creator Hub notifications and email. If your game will benefit from Extended Services for Compute, the insight will specifically recommend it.
Pricing
- Each game that opts into Extended Services for Compute will get the first 100K playtime hours per month for free.
- Beyond 100K hours/month, the rate is $0.001 per hour of playtime (i.e., 10,000 users playing for 1 hour each will be $10).
- These limits and prices only apply to games enrolled in Extended Services for Compute. Games that do not enroll will continue to have unlimited playtime hours at the current limits without charge.
Extended Services for Compute is billed based on the duration by which Extended Services for Compute is on, billed in minutes of playtime. If the additional compute is not consumed, the charge remains as enabling this feature reserves more compute for your game.
While not a direct comparison, for reference, across public cloud service providers, average compute pricing is roughly $0.025 per hour of CPU time. Our goal with Extended Services is not to profit, and instead to offer super powers sustainably.
Managing Your Budget
We understand that managing infrastructure costs is a priority. To give you full control over your spend, Extended Services for Compute includes a robust budgeting and alert system:
-
Defining Budgets: To enable Extended Services for Compute, you must first set a monthly upper bound budget that is shared across all enabled Places. If your budget is hit, Extended Services for Compute will automatically turn off until an additional budget is made available (either the next cycle or an increase in budget for the current cycle).
-
Proactive Alerts: Below 100K hours each month, you’ll receive alerts as you exceed 80%, 90%, and 100% of those hours as part of the free tier. Afterwhich, when consumption is charged, you’ll receive notifications to your account when your spend reaches 60%, 80%, and 90% of your set budget.
How to Get Started
-
Enable Extended Services: Ensure your account is enrolled in Extended Services.
-
Configure Cores Quota: In Creator Hub, navigate to your game and open the Extended Services page. Toggle on Cores Quota and select the Places to enable for.
- Set Your Limit: Define your monthly budget
- All set: That’s it! View your Performance Observability dashboard to view the change in your available utilization.
In this example, you can see a drop from ~70% utilization down to ~20% utilization to denote Extended Services for Compute allocating more available resources. And likewise, a return to ~70% utilization once Extended Services for Compute is turned off
Note: you’re responsible for the impact to your game when turning off Extended Services for Compute (including halting of payment), and running out of budget. In that scenario, your game may risk sudden performance impacts, such as framerate drops.
For a deep dive performance optimization strategies, review the document here.
We can’t wait to see the novel games you build with this new flexibility.
FAQs
Click here to view
What is the free tier?
-
Upon enabling Extended Services for Compute, your game will be allotted 100K play time hours per month. This is to help games, especially during development,smaller, or those that do not have a steady monetization stream yet, get a taste of what is possible to be built with greater compute availability.
The amount of free usage available will be displayed as a counter next to where you enabled Extended Services for Compute. We will fire alerts at 80%, 90%, and 100% to inform you of your free tier consumption. The free tier play hours will be used first before we automatically switch over to use the budget you set.
What are some examples of heavy games that can benefit? How huge and at what scale?
- First, scale is measured by both player count and by script complexity. On one hand, a “heavy game” may be a handful of players in a large simulated “living” world with sophisticated NPC day/night cycles. On the other hand, a “heavy game” may be a battle royale with dozens of players shooting projectiles and every projectile has an impact on the world. In general, games that are doing a lot of calculations - especially physics calculations-per-player - will benefit greatly.
Why is additional compute that is not consumed still charged?
- Additional Compute resources are made available and reserved for enabled games regardless if it is consumed or not.
How do I evaluate if my performance issues are optimizable versus simply buying more?
- This usually comes down to a balance of time, cost, and goals. Because you have the best “under-the-hood” view of your implementation, you’re in the best position to decide. We recommend evaluating whether the hours spent on optimization will save you more in the long run than the price of a hardware boost. Your ideal player experience should always be the priority.
