This is very late as I’ve been busy with uni classes among other things, but the show must go on. Sadly I missed this one as well. This AMA summary is also a bit unique. The previous three Creator AMAs were collected manually (it took several hours to do). But this is the first one that has been collected automatically. I’ll be doing this for all future AMA summaries (including the Economy AMA
If you notice any issues because of this automation, please message me.
With that said, here’s the summary for the last Creator AMA
Just as previous times, here’s the Q&A:
Asked & Answered
Q:
While I have this opportunity, I’d like to address the following:
In My Longer Response to "Discovery on Roblox: Past, Present, and Future Vision" , I point out the flaws in Roblox’s current discovery system while detailing how Filters & Tags would improve it.
Filters & Tags is an industry standard when it comes to content discovery. Why is it not on Roblox? Is the core value of “tak[ing] the long view” the hold up? I fear this is a particular decision by someone at Roblox to stray away from transparency and user action in favor of ‘Semantic Search’, which I deem to be a flawed vision.
Imagine Filtering by Price (hopefully robux or USD), Server Size, Genre, etc. Not just one sort made by Roblox. That’s the system for 10 percent of the gaming market. That’s the system for a billion users.
A:
Thanks for the question! As hardcore gamers, we know that tags are an important way of organizing and looking for games. We’re starting with updating and revising the genre taxonomy first and you can expect us to augment that with other mechanisms in the future.
More generally we are excited to help users browse our experiences the way they want. We recently rolled out Top Charts, which allow you to filter by device on the web. We plan to expand that to other filters including genres.
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This is such a great question. During the Economy AMA back in May, Enrico said that we are thinking deeply about if and how to introduce PBR textures to avatar items. We are definitely looking into it. We don’t have any new updates to share onthis topic at this time, but I do want to re-share Enrico’s original answer:
We will be sure to update the community when there is more news to share on this topic.
Q:
When can we expect to see UGC creators get more of a fair revenue split, similar to what game developers see? Right now, Roblox still takes over 90% of UGC creator revenue, making it impossible for most creators to make meaningful earnings off of their creations.
A:
Thanks for that question! Enrico also answered this at length at the economy AMA earlier this year, so I’m copying most of his response below. But one key thing that we announced at RDC this September is that we plan to make a shopping template available, which should make it easier for everyone to build a shopping experience and earn the affiliate fee. This should be coming soon.
In the near-term we are not planning changes to these revenue shares, but we are always looking for ways we can make them better for all members of the community and exploring new ways for creators to monetize.
For avatar item revenue shares, the split between affiliates and creators encourages the marketing and distribution of items beyond the Marketplace, which in turn attracts more buyers to your items. Today, generally speaking, there is more effort and investment involved to grow and retain an audience for an experience than creating an item. We see a major opportunity for avatar creators to build their own experiences to drive item sales, capturing both the revenue share from the original item (30%) and from being the affiliate (40%).
As a way of comparison, an experience selling developer products gets 70%, but the developer 1) creates the dev product 2) creates and markets the experience. Comparing the 30% to the 70% is not apples to apples because there is a lot more involved in creating experiences and developer products and marketing the creations (which carries — in many cases — monetary investments).
As an aside, we allow resales of community-created Limiteds which is another way for creators of items to earn more into perpetuity through a 10% cut on every resale transaction. Avatar creators are the only group on the platform who has access to this revenue stream.
Q:
Hey there! Always like seeing these.
Can you tell us a bit about the new voxel lighting grid coming next year and occlusion culling, which is scheduled still for this year?
A:
Thanks for the question! We are testing occlusion culling now in select experiences, and our goal is to roll it out to everyone very soon. You won’t have to do anything to enable it–it will just work. The improvements can vary a lot based on your experience, but in our testing, we’ve seen up to a 35% improvement in frame time on some of our most resource-constrained devices. Your mileage may vary, as many creators have already implemented their own optimizations. In some cases, your optimizations may be better than ours, but I think in general, the less optimizations you’ve already implemented, the more you’ll benefit from our automatic occlusion culling.
As mentioned in our keynote, we paused work on the voxel lighting grid to focus on improving performance and stability. We think that was the right tradeoff, but we’re excited to get back to work on the new lighting system as we think it is a great visual step forward for many devices!
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We’re testing it right now and, pending any issues, will be rolling it out to all experiences over the next month or so. We’ll post on the DevForum once the rollout begins. It’s fully automatic, and you won’t have to do anything to adopt it.
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In the Opening Keynotes, it was mentioned that there are efforts to making Search and Discovery more transparent for experience creators. Will this be extended for the avatar marketplace as well? (e.g. search, relevancy, and recommendations)
A:
Really great question. Our goal is to provide creators the transparency they need to optimize the discovery of their avatar items on the Marketplace. A recent change we made to help avatar items get discovered is Today’s Picks, which is a curated selection of items that updates every day. We shared our selection principles with the community back in July.
We also announced at RDC that community-created avatars will be coming to Marketplace in the coming months. When that happens, we will introduce new ways for creators to get discovered on the Marketplace. We will have more to share as we get closer to launch.
Q:
Hey Nick and Tian!
Now that Roblox seems to be giving more to paid access games, will we ever be allowed to advertise paid games via sponsorships? I’d love to work on more involved projects but having to purely advertise on off-site platforms (twitter, tiktok, etc.) tends to be a hit and miss if we have to purely rely on 3rd party algorithms and people remembering that the game exists.
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Are there plans for the future, to improve the lightning system? Perhaps after android gets future is bright update, could we expect to see higher quality shadows appear on desktop devices?
Roblox’s 2010-2012 shadows had a better resolution compared to what we have today, once properly optimized, could we expect to see higher resolution shadows come to roblox engine?
We already got high quality shadows for the dynamic lightning but not the sunlight-shadows
A:
Last year at RDC, we showed a preview of our new voxel lighting system, which will be a big step forward visually for mid-range devices. We’re really excited about the potential for this, but we chose to pause its development so that we could focus on improving performance and stability right now. We think that was the right tradeoff – and hope you’ll like new features like automatic, dynamic occlusion culling, too, and we’re looking forward to resuming work on lighting features.
Please keep the specific feedback coming for things you’d like to improve, such as shadow resolution, so that we can ensure it’s on our radar for consideration in our future product roadmap.
Q:
Are there plans, aside from the new improved revenue split and USD pricing, to make paid access experiences more sensible/worthwhile for developers?
For example: lowering the minimum from 9.99 USD, regional pricing, not disabling engagement based payouts etc.
A:
We want your paid access experiences to be successful, and have discussed many of your ideas. Based on community feedback, paid access games will be able to participate in engagement-based payouts (EBP), and we’ll allow for paid access to private servers (using real currency).
As the program grows, we also plan to add more tiers and regional pricing. The other piece of the equation is discovery. We’ve already added a ‘Top Paid Access’ chart to help surface great content in this category. We’ll have more to share when we get closer to launch.
Q:
It was announced we were getting improvements to data stores. I assume some less notable changes were not included in that segment.
Given that assumption, do any of these planned improvements include getting a key’s position in an ordered data store?
A:
We hear this feedback in the context of leaderboards. We’re working on a GetRank API for memory stores, to help with use cases like finding a player’s rank in a list of competitors or finding a particular server in a list.
We are considering this on data stores, and also considering providing a more deliberate leaderboard offering.
Q:
My other question about the Shopify x Roblox integration is below
** When do you guys plan to post information regarding payment splits? (or any other associated fees?) **
I imagine there is a lot of parties that all want a cut of each sale (Shopify, Roblox, Appstores, etc) so I’m curious how this dilutes the creator’s margins.
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It’s my Birthday! Anyway, how will the Player-Made Studio Templates work in terms of “an algortithm?”
Like, how would the algorithm work to display good Studio Templates? Is it based off most used, or another type of algorithmic system?
Will there be multiple template sections using different types of algorithms?
A:
Happy Birthday! Our team will manually curate our first version of the templates. As we grow the number of templates, we will explore different ways to allow people to sort and search for templates. We will be reviewing each template against our Community Standards. As a reminder, please ensure you only submit things that are your original creation.
Q:
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We plan to launch detailed analytics for avatar items by the end of this year. It will solve the limitation of only showing the top items, as we will expand to show metrics for all items. This initial launch will not expand the date range past one year, but we are exploring expanding the range in the future.
Q:
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One of the priorities for Next Gen Studio is customization. We believe this is the best way for experienced creators to fine-tune Studio for their own personal workflows. We will be releasing a very early version of custom tabs in the Preview Beta within the next few weeks. This will allow for any combination of tools and plugins on a single toolbar.
We are still in the early days with Next Gen Studio UI, and we are actively discussing what levels of customization we can offer and what the interfaces for customizing will look like. We will continue releasing regular updates to the Beta, and we encourage you to keep trying it out and giving us your feedback.
Q:
Adding onto regional pricing - which would be a win-win for creators & players - have you considered A/B testing on pricing?
Pricing gamepasses properly is difficult, especially with the high fluctuations of players. Running tests sequentially doesn’t produce reliable results.
Being able to run price experiments for new players would give us much more insights - and inform us when prices are too high.
A:
We love this question. It’s true - pricing game passes and in-game items is one of the most important decisions you make. Pricing is something that’s totally unique to each experience - what works for one creator might not work for another. In the coming weeks, we will be launching price optimization to help creators find the most attractive prices for their items and their unique set of users. Price optimization will allow you to A/B test your product prices on a subset of your users over a two-week period.
At the end of the test, creators will receive a price recommendation per item and can choose to update their prices based on the recommendation or leave them at the current level. We will have more details to share when we launch in the coming weeks.
Q:
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Great question - I spend a lot of time on genres as everyone here knows. Regarding making genres more community-driven, we’re evaluating crowdsourcing feedback from verified players to help classify experiences beyond genres.
But to provide more context on what we’re doing for genres, we’re taking a two-pronged approach. First, we’re making a taxonomy that makes sense for Roblox and honors the genres that are popular and unique to our platform. You can expect similar high-level genres as we have today, but we’ll have more nuanced subgenres — and we’ll share more information on the full list with you on the DevForum soon. So for example, we’ll have an Action top-level genre, and we may have a ‘Battlegrounds/Fighting’ subgenre since that is a very Roblox phenomenon. Second, we’ll be revising this constantly as new genres emerge. Themes, gameplay mechanics and aesthetics often transcend genres, and we will want to call attention to what’s trending on Roblox in new and interesting ways.
Q:
Hey, as shown at RDC24, there’s a new asset manager being worked on, however this new “improved” variant will be merged with the toolbox. Is there any reason behind that? is there any way to keep toolbox as a separate window? I think that would ruin many developers’ workflow if toolbox gets replaced & merged with assets manager…
A:
We’re excited about revamping the Asset Manager so everyone can work more efficiently with their assets.
Our plan is that Toolbox will be focused on the Creator Store, while Asset Manager will be a separate view that replaces the Inventory tab now in Toolbox. Asset Manager will have more features than the Inventory tab now supports – for instance, better handling of large asset libraries, better search capabilities, and bulk editing support. Please share your feedback once it goes live!
Q:
How will the recently announced “avatars in marketplace” cut work?
A:
Great question. When a creator curates an avatar on Marketplace, the original creators of the items will get the same 30% revenue split that currently exists. The curator of the avatar is not considered the affiliate. So, if a creator curates an avatar with all items they themselves published, they would get 30% of the sales of that entire avatar.
Q:
When are we going to get batch writes and/or transactions for datastoreservice?
I remember asking two years ago and the reply was due to budget constraints the engineers couldn’t justify researching it, but recent development has been made for “profiles” which quite frankly I think Roblox needs to realize that is a very useless ergonomics feature that doesn’t distinctively solve anything. Developers can implement session locks trivially, but we cannot ensure data atomicity which requires a lot of engineering effort. Roblox could save developers and players a lot of money by shipping a robust system in place to aid the implementation of trading systems.
A:
We support a wide range of creators, many of whom face challenges with session locking, retries, and managing player data. Creators shouldn’t need to be distributed storage experts to build great experiences.
Some creators need high-level solutions, while others prefer low-level primitives for greater customization.
For high-level solutions, we’re focusing on player profile storage and improving integration with Roblox systems like economy. For low-level, we’ll continue enhancing data store primitives, including exploring atomic transactions for trading systems.
We’d like to hear more about your batch write use cases!
Q:
At the end of the Creator Keynote on day 1 of RDC, progress in the area of Modesty Layers & 2D Clothing for UGC avatar bundles was briefly mentioned.
Can we get some insight of how Roblox is planning to improve the interaction between 2D Clothing and Modesty Layers on bundles, and what timelines for any update on these would be?
A:
Thanks for the question! We know there are still issues with 2D clothing and modesty layers. While we removed the requirement for modesty layers for certain avatars like inanimate objects and animals, we’re still working on an overall long-term plan for 2D clothing and modesty layers, particularly for its impact on bundles. We can’t share an exact timeline at the moment, but we are actively engaged in ensuring the safety of our avatars across the platform and addressing this creator need.
Q:
Last year’s RDC had a major portion dedicated to security, outlining the alt-detection and punishments system. Sadly, this year’s RDC had less of a security focus. Top competitive games on the platform still have to ban over 2000 cheaters every single day. When these games grow popular, the developers wind up having to switch their focus away from developing cool new features and instead towards endless anti-cheat battles to keep players happy. Could you elaborate on the future plans for assisting developers in combatting exploiters and helping ensure competitive games have a place on this platform?
A:
Thanks for this important question. We view anti-cheat through two lenses: what can we provide automatically to all experiences, and what tools can we give you to make your own anti-cheat decisions.
Over the past year, we’ve continued to improve our Windows anti-tamper system, Hyperion, which helps prevent many cheating exploits from running automatically. While we can’t disclose specifics, we are developing multiple mechanisms on Android and other platforms to prevent, detect, and respond to exploiters, which will also work automatically.
In the long term, our goal is to provide an anti-cheat toolbox for developers that you can customize according to the level of protection needed for your experiences. We want competitive experiences to have all the necessary tools to ensure a safe, fun, and fair gaming environment.
Delivering this goal started with the Ban API, which automatically works with alt-detection, and we are working on systems to provide you with additional tools to detect and take action around cheating. One important part of this is something we mentioned at RDC: better support for server authority. This is in active development, and it will help mitigate things such as physics exploits.
Q:
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We don’t currently have any plans to release an offline version of Studio. We have listened when folks have told us about their problems working with patchy connections, and we will continue to make Studio more robust and performant in those scenarios, but to run Studio for extended periods you will need to be connected to the internet.
Q:
Hi everyone! I have a question regarding the new feature about paid access games for real currency. Since the sunsetting of user ads, there’s currently no way to advertise ANY paid access experience. This has been a major setback for my team and me, as we’ve been working full-time on a paid access experience for 3 years. I want to ask if paid access games for real currency will be allowed to be advertised on Roblox, and hopefully, games using Robux can be advertised as well. I’m really looking forward to this because, at the moment, it’s very difficult to launch a paid access project.
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Q:
I know this isn’t related with RDC, but it was kind of surprising that it wasn’t in RDC, are we going to get a Talent Hub update any time soon? There are a lot of missing features people requested in the DevForum category, as well as many bugs which need addressing.
A:
Thanks for your feedback. The team that owns Talent Hub has been hard at work on top creator pain points like collaborator permissions, group revenue sharing and experience ownership transfer. We don’t have any major Talent Hub updates planned for this year, but stay tuned in 2025 for improvements that will make it easier to find new collaborators.
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Will the 3D Foundational Model be able to generate individual assets by itself?
From the demo it looks like it kitbashes already created assets to create a whole environment + editing certain properties.
I’m just confused if it can create those assets by itself. Rather than only doing world-building with them.
A:
Yes! While we’re still in the early stages of working on the 3D Foundational Model, our first steps will be to generate individual 3D assets from scratch, and in the longer term, we plan to work on helping create full scenes.
Further questions will be in the replies below…
AI Summary
- AI generated content may not be accurate.
Read the linked "Relevant Post" for accurate information.
Discovery System Enhancements :
Roblox is working on new genre taxonomy updates and improving the discovery system with filters and tags.
Relevant Post
PBR for UGC Accessories :
No new updates on PBR textures for UGC accessories yet, but Roblox is still working through the challenges.
Relevant Post
UGC Revenue Split :
No immediate plans to change UGC revenue split, but Roblox will offer a shopping template for creators to earn affiliate fees.
Relevant Post
Occlusion Culling & Voxel Lighting :
Occlusion culling is being tested and will roll out soon. The voxel lighting grid development was paused to focus on performance.
Relevant Post
Paid Access Games :
Paid access games will be able to participate in engagement-based payouts, and regional pricing will be introduced.
Relevant Post
Dynamic Heads for Groups :
Dynamic heads for group uploads are expected by the first half of 2025.
Relevant Post
Improved Analytics for Avatar Items :
By the end of 2024, Roblox will provide detailed analytics for all avatar items, not just top sellers.
Relevant Post
Accessory Positioning Customization :
Roblox is testing accessory refinement tools to be rolled out to all users and provided as APIs by the end of 2024.
Relevant Post
3D Foundational Model :
Roblox aims to generate individual 3D assets from scratch using its 3D foundational model, with plans to generate entire scenes.
Relevant Post
Shopify Integration :
Shopify integration will be piloted in Q4 2024, allowing creators to sell physical merchandise to U.S. users aged 13+ in early 2025.
Relevant Post
Next Gen Studio Customization :
Next Gen Studio UI will feature custom tabs in Preview Beta, allowing users to arrange tools and plugins as per their workflow.
Relevant Post
Alt Detection and BanAPI :
Roblox continues improving alt-detection, anti-cheat systems, and server authority.
Relevant Post
New Data Store Features :
A new GetRank API for memory stores will help creators track leaderboards, with considerations for more deliberate leaderboard offerings.
Relevant Post
Streamlined Avatar Creation :
The Avatar Auto Setup feature will soon support partially completed models, with updates expected by Q1 2025.
Relevant Post
UGC Modesty Layers and Clothing :
Roblox is developing long-term plans for modesty layers and 2D clothing for bundles, but no specific timeline was shared.
Relevant Post
This AI summary does not include everything, nor does it cover the RDC Keynotes.
Because this is related to the last RDC, here’s the Keynotes:
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 ev…
Previous AMA summaries can be found here
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