Roblox Corporation (RBLX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Head of Investor Relations, Anna Yen.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for being here. Was that not the coolest thing ever? I am so honored to introduce the man behind all of this, our first speaker. The community knows him as builderman, a name that really couldn't be more apt. Because building is so ingrained in his blood that he's made it his mission to help others do the same. And today, we all get to see just how powerful it is when you give people the tools to create just as he had always imagined. The results so far have been amazing. Millions of people around the world use Roblox to build engaging experiences entire companies and huge communities. His vision is huge, and his desire to keep innovating is unwavering. I know I'm speaking for all us Robloxians when I say it's a privilege to help our first speaker build whatever comes next. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to our Co-Founder and CEO, David "builderman" Baszucki.

Wow. Welcome, everyone. This is our first Investor Day. I can't believe we're here all together. It's really great to be together in real life. So we've been online for long. It's great to be here. I want to start by highlighting everything you saw in our trailer video there is real footage from real Roblox creators running inside Roblox with hundreds of millions of people experiencing it. And it highlights really the enormity of our vision and where we're going to be going. It's been quite an interesting last 18 months for us. We've gone public. We've all gone through COVID. Hopefully, all of us and our families and friends are slowly emerging. And yet in the midst of this, as we come back to normal real life, hopefully, we just had an amazing Q3. And that Q3 really highlighted to us a lot of the learning over the last 18 months. Roblox is a way for people to stay connected, to do things together when they can't be in person, to graduate from high school when you can't be there, to have a birthday party when you can't be there. A lot of this was validated. And as we emerge from Q3, we've seen amazing stickiness. We want you to take away 4 big things today. First, for the last 16 years, we've really focused on being an innovation company. We organize the company around innovation. We have a big vision for this future category, and we're hoping you're going to see that today with a lot of the people on our team. The second is you're going to see civility and safety really working its way into everything we do. It started 16 years ago, a month in the Roblox when Erik and I built the first safety and civility system and started doing moderation ourselves. So it's carried forward today. And we really believe this enormous society and civilization that we're building is going to rest on this foundation. Next is think about our community. Everything you're seeing is not built by Roblox. It's built by our community. There's only one thing we're not building yet, and that is actual avatar bodies. And you're going to hear about how that goes to the community as well today. And this is an amazing community. We have developers that are starting to form companies. You're going to hear more about that. And we're well on the way to one of our developers being a $100 million business. And finally, for the last -- since we got started, everything we do is really focused on this category. We're a pure play, one company name, one platform. It's actually a lot of fun to work on this because all of the groups and teams in Roblox are working on one thing, and it's getting better every day. So let's talk about this amazing new category. Some people -- it's being called the metaverse today. We've called it human co-experience. And this isn't the category that we've invented. This is a category that authors, sci-fi writers, futurists for 30, 40 years have written about it, talked about it. We've seen a lot of movies that envision this. What's interesting about this category is it rests at the intersection of 2 technology trends that have been going on for thousands of years, literally. The first is we're always trying to find new ways to communicate, whether it's drums, whether it's smoke signals, whether it was the mail system, whether it's telegraph, telephone. Now for thousands of you, this video call, we've always been trying to find higher fidelity ways to communicate. And this category is the ultimate extension of that. We've, at the same note, always been trying to figure out how to tell stories around the campfire, writing, black and white movies, color movies, 3D movies. And these 2 categories of communication and storytelling are converging in this category we call human co-experience. The category borrows from mobile gaming and gaming because this is immersive. People are together. It borrows from the entertainment industry because this is -- these are -- this is being together in stories. And so there's experiences. There's plots. There's avatar. So borrows from entertainment. And finally, of course, it borrows from social networking. This is about you and friends being together. Now we think there's an amazing opportunity for this category. We envisioned it almost 16 years ago. And this is -- what you're seeing today is actually the first business plan slide of Roblox when we started the company. And we have some of our first investors here. So welcome. We believe, and we've been thinking about this a lot, that what this new category of the metaverse or co-experience is, is predicated on 8 fundamentals. And we've been working on these 8 fundamental components since the start of the company. These 8 things together form this category and make this happen, and I'm going to go through them a bit. First, it starts with identity. That means myself. It means an amazing avatar. It means possibly a fun avatar, coupled with a business avatar. And this avatar represents me. It's who I will be when I have an online communication for work or for play. And you've seen a lot of the amazing avatars on Roblox. You're going to hear more about that today. Second, this is social. This is not solitary consumption. This is me and friends doing stuff together. And research shows that when people do stuff together, you make friendships. When we go fishing together, that's a great way to make friends. And a lot of the friends on Roblox come from real life, but our platform also encourages friendships with people of like views around the world. There's a lot of exciting friendships being created on platform, and this is somewhat unique for this category, both real-life friends as well as new friends coming together. We're always working to make this more immersive. It's hard to make this immersive on a phone. That's a fairly small screen. It's more possible to make this immersive on a larger screen. And ultimately, on a VR headset, this can be real immersive. So a lot of the technology we're working on is how do we create that illusion of immersiveness with lots of people around the world on different devices. When we talk about low friction, take a use case, student studying ancient Rome. I've talked about this before, and they immediately want to go to ancient Rome. Low friction means doing that as fast as you would with a video in 1 second. And there is a lot of complex technology to make that double process of where do we want to go and then doing it in a second possible. It's really difficult, and you're going to hear about that today. The variety of this category is all about UGC. There is no way we at Roblox can build all of this content. We're not going to build the ancient Rome. We're not going to build an awesome educational lab. We're not going to build some of the awesome games. And we saw this happen very early in the company when we said we're going to be a platform company, and everything is going to be built by our community. So there are millions and millions of experiences being built on the platform, and it's all by the community. There's a lot of leverage there. Anywhere means not just playing anywhere, but low latency communication between someone in Germany and South America. That's really tricky. We have the speed of light. We have networking. So there's a lot of technology here to simulate that to give you highly responsive local avatar control, coupled with that feeling that you're together anywhere. And you'll hear more about that and our architecture today as well. This all rests on an economy. And when you hear our economy team come out today, you're going to hear something surprising. They focus primarily on engagement, not on making money. We've built an amazing economic system. It's very similar to the real world. It's a virtual economy. You'll hear about that, and you'll find that our economy team is primarily trying to make Roblox better because we have this economic engine that as we scale, just keeps growing for us. And then this foundation of safety and civility that I spoke about already is just everywhere throughout the platform, and we think about it with whatever we built. So there's 3 big markets that we can take a look at, and this highlights our optimism for this category. This human co-experience category may take a while to build out. It borrows from those immersive elements of mobile gaming. It borrows from that -- those UGC elements of streaming video. It borrows some of the social elements of social media. But arguably, when we imagine this convergence of communication, technology and storytelling, we're optimistic that this category might ultimately be larger than any of these categories and borrow elements from all of this. And it highlights our mission, really, to get to 1 billion monthly active users, which we'll share more how we plan to do that. Now this type of a business is really fun to run. And it's really fun to run because there's core virality built into the business in 2 separate ways. It's almost like, no, we've got 2 viral loops, not one. And that's kind of fun. The first is a content viral loop. The better the content on any content platform, the stickier the platform and the more people come. The more people that come to Roblox, the more money is in the system and the more people can dedicate large teams, not just hobbyists, but 20, 30, 40, 50, going on 100-person teams to making this amazing content. So that's an amazing feedback loop. But that viral loop doesn't just sit in isolation. That content then forms the scaffolding where people come together to play, to ultimately learn, to hang out, to connect when they can't be in person. And so it reinforces its second social viral loop that we're all very familiar with. The larger the network, the more valuable the network, the more likely other friends are to come. That's Metcalfe's Law. And so we have these 2 things intersecting and really driving our growth. So we're really always focused on making this as easy and frictionless as possible. You'll hear how we're focused on making our developer loop more seamless with better quality content. And today, you'll also hear about how we're talking about making our social loop easier. How is it easier to find friends and come together? Let's take a look at the Roblox ecosystem. We'll start with Roblox Studio. Millions and millions of people every month come to Roblox Studio to build all this amazing content. It's on PC and Mac. It runs in many languages. And the key thing to note is behind the scenes, it's cloud connected. Everything created there really runs in our cloud. So Roblox Studio is building out as one of the most widely used game development environments in the world. And really, millions of people have learned to code already by wanting to create something on Roblox Studio and picking up scripting as they go. Our clients, we're all familiar, PC, Mac, iOS, Android, Xbox, Oculus and others to come really. Thing to think about our clients is we saw this once with 2D HTML content. When Apple introduced the iPhone, for those of you that can remember, 2D HTML content was pretty much reserved for a big screen. And that innovation of the pinch and zoom on the iPhone, all of a sudden, made the same content available on multi-devices. And we started browsing the exact same websites on our phones that we used to do really only on a large PC. Our view of this immersive 3D multiplayer, physically simulated in the cloud metaverse stuff is very similar. All of the experiences on Roblox, whether PC, phone, tablet, computer, console, are all connecting to the same cloud and participating in the same simulation. Different user controls, different camera controls, but all the same content going all the way through really VR. So these clients really each present a great way of consuming the same content together. And finally, the Roblox cloud, which behind the scenes is driving the performance and the scale and the low cost of our ecosystem. We are running our own cloud. We have tens of thousands of servers in many POPs. There's one in Poland. There's one in Singapore. There's -- they're all over. It's contributing to the raw performance of Roblox and helping us give more money back from the developers because we can run a lean infrastructure. And you'll hear more about that. Jumping on to our creator economy, you'll hear about that today as well. It's amazing. Everything on Roblox created by these teams. Teams approaching someday soon $100 million a year for one team. And Mike will share the economics of how we're trying to give more money always through our environment back to those teams. Finally, on our users, amazing user growth. As I mentioned, Q3 and October were amazing. October was trending to 50 million daily actives when, of course, we had a very unfortunate outage. And I just want to highlight, we are going to be releasing a public analysis of what happened there. We're going to be sharing what we're doing to make sure that never happens again. And we take it very seriously. It highlighted both that we have a very loyal community. They all came back the second we were live. We didn't see any loss of daily active users, but it also really confirmed our responsibility, and we have a huge responsibility to that community to be live all the time. So you'll hear more about that. And then finally, this foundation of safety and civility, which is what everything rests on. And as we get into more older people on the platform and into voice, into that, we'll be sharing our vision of what we're going to do there today. We got this. Once again, it's a fun business to run just like we have 2 different growth vectors, we also have 2 different viral loops. We have 4 different ways we are growing right now. You're going to hear from Craig Donato, our Chief Business Officer, in a little bit about our global expansion. This is very mature. We had the vision 6, 8 years ago that if we dynamically translated automatically and we had high performance in all these countries, we would see this viral growth. And we're seeing it right now. So we're well on the way. This is a hardcore execution thing, and we're really comfortable with this. Really extending our age demographic is -- we're also right in the middle of this. We used to be majority under 13. The majority of people on our platform right now are over 13. Our 17 through 24 segment, as you'll hear from Manuel, is growing very, very rapidly all around the world. And in the Roblox way, this has been an ongoing thing we've been working on for many years. You're going to see a lot of the functionality that's contributing to this and really driving it. We ultimately believe various types of things that we've already seen in the midst of COVID are going to sit on top of Roblox in addition to play, in addition to socializing. We're already deep into music. We think there's an amazing future around a new way for artists to participate with fans. We're already really deep into education for learning to code. You're going to hear from Rebecca today about a much bigger vision for education. So we believe there's a lot of vertical ways that will grow. And then finally, you'll hear from our economy team today around some other interesting ideas on how we'll -- we can ultimately improve dollars per user, although that's really not our primary focus. We're primarily focused on engagement growth. So one thing just in closing that you're not going to see, but you might pick up is we're hoping you pick up a little bit of the hints of the architecture of how we run the company. And we actually view the primary product that we're working on is the company and the people, how we run it, how we drive innovation. We call it the Roblox operating system. And we sometimes say that is the product we're working on. That's the product that then builds Roblox, and then Roblox is where all of this great stuff happens with our community. So we're not going to talk a lot about that, but you're going to see great leaders, I believe, today from a lot of the different teams and the architecture of our company, which is 12 major product development groups, very autonomous but connected with our overall vision and our primary strategy arcs composed of around 4 to 5 teams a piece, with the goal internally of having every one of these teams be an innovative leader, taking the long view, building world-class technology and doing innovative stuff that will drive our long-term growth. So big agenda. Really, you're going to see a lot of people today. We'll keep it moving quickly. But to kick it off, we're going to be talking about international growth and all age group. So I'd like to welcome Craig Donato, Chief Business Officer; and Manuel Bronstein, Chief Product Officer.

Thanks, David. It's my pleasure to talk to you all this morning about all the work we're doing to expand our global footprint. As Dave mentioned, it's our most mature growth vector. 75% of our traffic is already outside the U.S. and Canada. And while we continue to see healthy growth rates in the U.S. and Canada, we're seeing faster growth rates all over the world. For example, 75% growth in Asia Pacific right now. The best way to understand and give you a sense of appreciation both how we're doing as well as the opportunity for growth for global expansion is to look at penetration rates. This penetration rate shows an audience distribution curve in the U.S. and Canada over the last 2 years, Q3 '19 to right now, and you'll see 2 things. One, you'll see continued progress in terms of acquiring users in our core 9- to 12-year old segment, but you'll also see the area under the curve expand as we recruit and bring on more and more older users onto our platform. And that's what Manuel is going to talk about a little bit later on. But now I want to overlay the audience distribution, the penetration rates in different areas of the world, Europe, APAC and Rest of World. I -- 2 things really jump out at me. The first is that these curves are flatter. They're more evenly distributed in terms of age. This is the impact of entering them a little bit later with a lot of our age-up stuff working. And second, we're really just getting started. We've got -- we've made good progress in Europe, which is the top curve, but we've still got lots of headroom, and we're really just getting started in Asia Pacific and Rest of World. So a lot of opportunity for global expansion. As Dave mentioned, our growth is driven by those 2 network effects, and that's not any different. We focus our global growth engine, these 2 network effects to drive global expansion. And the first is our content network effect. So our content network, like Dave said, the better, more compelling and more engaging content we have, the bigger an audience that it attracts. The bigger an audience, we end up having more and more creators under our platform, both building for that audience as well as new creators from those areas. And we harness -- we focus the content network effect on global expansion through localization. We localize all that content. So it's more compelling, more engaging for a local audience, and that attracts a big local audience. That, in turn, fuels our social network effect, right? So people come to Roblox to be with other people. The more people you're with, the more engaging, the more fun it is. So you're incented to invite your friends. Those friends tend to live near you. They come on the platform. They invite their friends who are also local. So both these social -- both these network effects really work to drive global expansion. And the linchpin of this, how this all gets all rolling, how we focus these network effects is through localization. And we've done a tremendous amount of work to enable ourselves to localize Roblox at scale, right, given the sheer amount of experiences on our platform, over $20 million, given the fact that they are constantly being updated, trying to do this with human translators would be impossible. So last year, we built machine technology that automatically translates experiences, automatically localizes both when they're published and every time they're updated, keeping them up to date, so they're engaging. We also do work with matchmaking. When we bring players into an experience, we match them with other players. And we use our matchmaking algorithms to place players from the same region and an experience together. This enables them to have good online communication, but it also fosters that social network effect that we're talking about. So when we enter a market with machine translation, with matchmaking, and we release these things, we see an immediate increase in engagement. So we know these things are working, and it's been very effective. It's important to note, though, that localization doesn't stop there. There's a lot of work we do to fully localize our experience. And one is all the work we do around trust and safety. So we need to train all the machine learning algorithms to -- as we enter a language, to detect inappropriate behavior, inappropriate language, especially protecting the younger players from an appropriate conduct. We also bring entire teams of moderators and customer support staff that speak that language that are in that time zone to work with our users. There's an additional amount of work we do on our client, which is our app as well as our corporate website, our blog, all accompanying documentation like our parent's guides to localize it into that content. And this is a fast follow. You'll expect -- you'll see Russian and Indonesian pop up here shortly. But all this work all happens in unison to make sure that we're really showing up in a local region and effectively localizing our experience. We're also doing work to localize our experience for our developers. So we're now localizing studio in different languages and the documentation associated with it. We also have a very -- and you'll hear about this later, an online community where devs support each other, and we bring in moderators that speak those language to create different sections for people in that region. So really making sure that we are localizing experience, both our users as well as our developer community. And this is important because our developer community is quickly becoming global. That network -- content network effect I talked about earlier is working. As our audience grows around the world and kind of a little bit of a lag effect, we see our developer community expanding across the globe. This is a distribution heat map of our top 10,000 developers in 2016. And here it is now. Now obviously, during this time, our community has gotten much, much, much larger. But just looking at the distribution of top devs, we now have active top dev communities in Latin America, in Asia, Russia, all over Europe, right? And this is really important for 2 reasons. One, we're getting the best talent from around the world building content for a global stage, right? But we're also developing vibrant communities all over the world that understand local and cultural preferences. And we are starting to see indications where different regions have very different interest in local content, right? So it's -- we would expect to see now in the future maybe a team in India building a Roblox version of cricket, right? And that can happen now because we've got this incredibly culturally diverse global creator community that's all working on Roblox. If you go into the office in San Mateo -- hopefully, we'll be able -- you'll be able to do that at some point. When you walk in, you're going to see a big screen with this globe on it. And this shows in real time where all of the users on Roblox are right now. This is a video. So this isn't quite live. But you'll see it's -- you just watch and people tend to be really amazed watching it light up all over the globe. And it's our job to light this up all over the globe, and we're going to do that really in 3 ways. First is we're going to continue to roll out new languages. We look at -- when we're figuring out where we're going to roll out a language, we look at 2 things. We look for organic traction even without localization as early signs of product market fit. And we also look at total addressable market size. We haven't announced the languages that we're going to roll out next, but you could expect -- I don't think you'll be surprised if you see Hindi and Vietnamese in the not-so-distant future. The second thing that we do is there's a lot of work to make sure that we are locally compliant with laws and regulations. We've built our own compliance framework that allows us to customize how Roblox operates in a given country. So we can change the way identity is authenticated, or if there's screen time regulations, we can honor those. And we'll continue to update that compliance framework as regulations evolve and as we enter areas with new laws. So that's very much in hand. Lastly, in areas where we're not seeing as fast organic growth as we'd like, we're starting to get much better at a strategic growth acquisition. And we do that in a couple of ways. One is we can do targeted user acquisition to help jump-start that organic flywheel as well as leverage our brand partnerships and our app store partnerships to generate awareness in region. And we most recently did this in Japan. And with a little bit of focus, we're able to really jump-start that flywheel, and now Japan is one of our fastest growth rates out there in our platform. So really exciting. So expect to see more of that. Ultimately, as I said earlier, we are already a global platform. This is our most mature growth vector. I think we're really -- so we have this, I think, well in hand. We understand we have the systems, the processes, the technology to do this well. So we're not only super excited about all the growth ahead of us, but we're absolutely ready for it. So I'm happy to answer more questions later. I'm now going to hand it over to Manuel, who's going to talk about our efforts to expand the demographic center platform. Manuel?

And Craig, I just wanted to highlight. Besides Japan, any other countries you might want to share? Like for me, I think Russia is really exciting.

Russia has done phenomenally well, and we're excited to see that. Also East Asia now is also taking off in all different countries across that sector. So seeing a lot of great organic growth in all those regions. Thanks, Dave.

All right. Thanks, Craig. Hi, everyone. I'm Manuel Bronstein, and I lead product design and data science at Roblox. I joined the company earlier this year after spending many years in the consumer product, technology, entertainment and gaming space in companies like Xbox, Zynga, YouTube and Google. And in many ways, as Dave said, what I saw in Roblox is the evolution of all these mediums and something that made this opportunity something really, really hard to resist. At Roblox, we want to connect more than 1 billion people in the metaverse. And in order to do so, we need to build a platform for all ages. This is a huge growth vector for us, and I'm going to share how we're going about it and how we're working towards that goal. First, let's look at the opportunity. As you can see in this chart, while the penetration of the 13-plus population has increased since 2019, there's still significant room for us to grow. But the good news is that we've been making significant progress year after year. And as you can see in these 2 charts, the hours engaged by the 13-plus demographic on our platform has steadily increased year after year. So in 2018, they represented 40% of the total hours engaged on the platform. And now today, they represent close to 50% of that time. And as Dave mentioned, the 17 to 24 segment of the population is the fastest-growing cohort on our platform. So how are we achieving that? There are 2 major forces driving the growth of the 13-plus population on the platform. First is our investment in key strategic platform features that supports the needs of a broader demographic on the platform. The second one is our support and the organic growth of content categories and new content categories that appeal to a broader set of users. So let me start with the platform. As mentioned earlier, we want to build a platform for all ages. And today, I'm going to share some of the features that contribute to growing and increasing the appeal of the platform for people of all demographics, things like avatar's expansion, voice communication, personalized recommendation, dynamic, policy and experience guidelines and connections. I will just share a brief overview about each of these areas because later today, you're going to hear from my colleagues who are going to share a lot more details about the work we're doing in this space. Let's start with avatars. Avatars in Roblox have been evolving, and our motivation is to give users of all ages the ability to represent their identities and self-express with a variety of bodies, clothing and accessories. One of the things that we believe is that as we increase the breadth and diversity of avatars on the platform, the developer community will also embrace this diverse visual styles in the Roblox experiences. And it will create a wide range of look and feels on the platform so that there's something for everyone on Roblox. Then there's communication. We have begun to introduce voice communication through a spatial voice. We believe that voice will allow Roblox users to express themselves more freely and make communications more natural, fluid, dynamic, appealing to a broader set of users. And you will hear a lot more about our work here later today. We have also seen tremendous improvements in our personalized recommendation that support our search and discovery on the platform, and this has been a major driver of the growth in the 13-plus population. You see, when you're at a UGC platform, our user-generated content platform, with millions of developers all over the world and tens of millions of experience published on the platform, personalization becomes very critical in helping users discover the content that matches their interest and their affinity. And this will always be an area of investment for us. We also want to empower creators to connect people around the world through content that spans language, region, ages and devices. And we're building the tools and services to help our developer community make their experience suitable, be it ensuring the content reaches the right audience, takes into account cultural conventions and references and, of course, complies with local laws and regulation. So in order to support our developer community, we have developed a system of dynamic policies that allows developers to reach more users all over the world. This essentially means that Roblox developers can build a single experience with different behaviors based on policy, supporting different cultural reference and laws and regulations in local markets. And beyond dynamic policies, we're investing in experience guidelines. As Roblox users and experiences continue to age up, we want to provide informative guidelines that allow users and parents to determine if an experience is right for them. So it starts by clearly labeling the age appropriateness of the experience and then also adding more informative details like the content genre or the platform features, allowing people to make informed decisions about which experience is to join and try on the platform. And last but not least on the platform features is friend connections. As you saw from our 2 powerful flywheels, one of the core aspects of the platform is to help grow your social graph, making sure that you can find friends or people that share common interest in the platform. With features like friend recommendations, invites and contact importers, we will make it easy for people to find and join their friends. We also continue to improve our player matching system, as Craig was mentioning earlier, so that when you join an experience, you're enjoying that experience with relevant people. It could be people from your same locale or the same language, but it could also be people from similar ages. So you can always have an enjoyable experience on the platform. Now let me share a little bit more about the content vector. The amazing thing about having a user-generated content platform is that the diversity of experiences on the platform will be organically created by our community. We continue to invest in the tools to give the developer community the opportunity to build experiences that delight the users on the platform. So on the gaming front, our improvements in the engine, material, developer tools and services allowed the developer community to build richer, more complex and higher fidelity experiences that appeal to users of all ages. All of the visuals that you see on the screen are from experiences built on Roblox like [ semi irate ] and Rolling Thunder. One of the key stats that we continue to see is that the amount of relevant age-up content on the platform continues to increase. We define this age-up content as content where the majority of the users experiencing are 13 plus. And as of September 30 of this year, 28% of the top 1,000 experiences of the platform qualified as age-up. This is a material increase over the 10% in 2020. So we -- more than 2x the number of experiences that fill age-up. Also earlier this year, we established a game fund to support the developer community with resources and funding to wheel experiences that pushes the boundary of what you can build on the Roblox platform and help the platform age up. We have begun to take input and submissions from hundreds of developers in the community and also from indie developers who had never built for Roblox before. And we have greenlit some of these projects already, and we're excited to see what they're going to be building in the years to come. And then there's brands and music. These are new experience categories beyond gaming that will continue to increase the appeal of our platform for all ages. Brands and artists have the power to bring their fans to enjoy immersive experiences on the platform together, be it like concerts like a Lil Nas X concert or Twenty One Pilots or KSI, or brand experiences like dolls built by Gucci with the Gucci Gardens and Vans. And you will hear more about the work that these partners are doing by some of my colleagues. So as you can see, we have been very deliberate with our investments on the platform to drive growth across all ages, and these efforts are paying off. Now I'd like to hand it back to Dave to continue to share the amazing work that we're doing. Thanks.

Manuel, that was awesome. Thanks. All right. Craig and Manuel, thank you. Yes. I remember the early days of Roblox, we were, by far, 2/3 or more under 13. So we made a lot of work today, and we've come a long way. Okay. So let's go to our next segment here. We are going to be now talking about social. Can we get the screen up here of the globe, by the way? There we go. Thanks. So we're going to dive into a few of our key points here. We're going to talk about identity, friends, being anywhere and civility. We've got several Roblox product and engineering leaders who are going to come up here today. So I want to bring up now Dan Sturman, our CTO; Bjorn Book-Larsson. So come on up. Morgan Tucker, Kelly Mayes and Mahesh Ramasubramanian. So come on up, and take it away, Dan. Thanks.

Thanks, Dave. Thrilled to be here today. A big part of making an immersive virtual experience is tied very much to the human experience. How does one express, represent themselves on the platform? And how do they connect with others, especially those closest to them? So in particular, users want a choice to bring their own concept of identity onto the platform. And then they want a rich, high touch, civil engagement with those around them. Four supporting elements that we've seen are essential are, first, that your identity and what a user looks like, who they share experiences with, from where and what and, importantly, how. So start this presentation with Bjorn, who is going to take us through avatar tech and an explosive amount of combinations for customizing the technology. We're going to [indiscernible]. We're then going to have Morgan, who's going to take us through social and how we are connecting online. Kelly is our lead for voice and will take us through all the incredible things we're doing this year with voice. And then Mahesh will take us through dynamic heads and the expression and animation and emotion that we can get on our avatar is making them much more life-like. So with that, I'll turn it over to Bjorn.

Thank you, Dan. All right. So my name is Bjorn Book-Larsson. I am the VP of Product for the Avatar team at Roblox. And quite appropriately, the very first thing that happens when you make a Roblox account is that you also make an avatar. So you create your first digital expression of yourself. Now the avatar system at Roblox has gone through a lot of changes over the past few years, and we're making a lot of changes to it going forward. So I'm going to walk you guys through a brief history of the avatar system. So for those of you who have either played or have kids who have Roblox, you've seen the classic blocky avatar, which really has been very much the same since 2006. Initially, it was 6 parts tied together with motors. And the way that you can actually customize your avatar was to paint it. So the clothing we created at the time was really paint that was then mapped to these bodies. Over time, the technology evolved and became a 15-part avatars that had a little bit better fidelity in the animation and the movement system. And very popular was to also make these things we call 3D rigid accessories, and those are things like tails and wings and other kinds of things to adorn your avatar with. And the system essentially gradually evolved over those first 14 years until we got to 2020. So last year, we released a system called skinning. Skinning is a technology that lets you make organic shapes. The first time we really used it on a large scale was in the Lil Nas X concert that some of you guys have seen. And it also came with something called a skeleton API, which is the foundation for a lot of the things my colleagues will be talking about a little bit later today. Just 1 month ago, we released the first studio beta or what's called the layered clothing system. And that's a patent-pending system that basically takes any kind of clothing item and wraps it perfectly to any shaped avatar. So we're going to show some demos of how that actually works and why that's important to increasing the amount of combinations you can have on this platform. And then looking into the future, we have some really cool technologies. First of all, we're encouraging the community now to participate in the creation of bodies. So when we talk about full UGC avatars, what we're really doing is getting people in to make heads, faces and body systems, which then, combined with these new clothing technologies and expressive technologies, is what we believe is going to cause a huge amount of combinations on the platform. And finally, as we roll out these really complex technologies, we have a huge effort internally to also promote ease of creation. So part of us succeeding means we make it easy for the developers and the users to actually use these really advanced systems. So what we're going to do here, and you can roll video on this. This is a live video demo, showing you our avatar is here on the right, and this is in the actual Roblox editor. And as you can see, this character is going to put on a T-shirt, then puts on a little hoodie on top. But of course, if I'm a turtle with the giant channel, I can put on the same T-shirt and hoodie. And the system works remarkably well. So if I'm a skeleton as one maybe, I might want to puff a jacket. And that same puff a jacket, of course, will work equally well on my [ dinosaur ]. So you can imagine that as a content creator on this platform, I only have to make one jacket. And no matter what these hundreds of millions of monthly users actually equipped, I'd be able to put that same jacket on absolutely every type of character. So the power of the system is pretty apparent. And again, it was just rolled out in beta this past month. We expect to put the actual content from this in the catalog in 2022. Right now, this is limited to individual experiences. But as we move forward, this will become actual content. And here's a bit of a summary. This is the traditional way we made the clothing. It's essential with these type of squares that then map to the square bodies of the blockies. And as we head forward, we're now encouraging the community to make these 3D clothing items as well as to participate in the creation of the actual bodies, heads and faces. And you may have heard Dave said this in previous presentations, but he's talked about the combinatorial nirvana, which is the idea that with so many ways of participating as a community creator, we will see a huge explosion of combinations. And we believe strongly that this will map to the type of expressions our users want to make. So this is the near term. Now we're going to just going to take a quick -- just glance into the near-term future and the long-term future. So we can roll this video here. In addition to the 16 parts that we used to have, we have added a system that we call dynamic heads, which essentially adds animation capabilities to micro bones that's in the character's head. And by doing that, this again is inside a Roblox Studio. We can pick expressions. And then the character, no matter what character I start with, would be able to smile, be angry or do other types of expressions. And this is going to lead to even more advanced technologies, which my colleague, Mahesh, will speak about shortly, which is a computer vision-driven system based on these type of automations. So that if I smile at my computer, my character will smile as well. The next big evolution is going to be our AI-assisted future avatars. This is critical to support things like ease of creation. So for example, here, if I take a selfie, it'll be great if that could turn into an actual avatar. If I take a video clip of myself, it'd be awesome to use that to generate my dance sequence. And then finally, making the avatar themselves environment aware means that I as a developer don't have to spend so much time making the perfect animation sequence. So this is a glimpse of things we're working on right now, not yet launched, but it's going to come out over the near-term or long-term future. And thank you for joining me on this avatar journey. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Morgan Tucker, who's our Senior Director for the social team and is going to continue the conversation about how do we connect these evolution items into the social fabric of Roblox itself. Thank you.

Thanks, Bjorn. I just want to, Bjorn, highlight up until now, community makes everything on Roblox except avatars. And I think that's why this is so significant.

Yes. And bodies were something, which was not really included in the initial UGC. And enabling that now, I think, is going to cause a huge amount of new combinations to become part of the platform.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Thanks, Bjorn. Good morning. My name is Morgan Tucker. I head up the social product group here at Roblox. I'm really thrilled to be speaking with you today about something I care really deeply about and I pursued here for the last 4 years, which is connecting people and empowering meaningful interaction and communication. Here at Roblox, our mission is to connect 1 billion people around the world, and that's no easy task. But we do this by empowering people to create thriving communities where they can strengthen friendships or make new ones, learn, collaborate, play together, using rich immersive communication and interaction. Our foundation is built upon a self-reinforcing loop we call connection, communication and co-experience. This approach connects you to the people and experiences you love and sets the stage for meaningful conversation and interaction. It all culminates in a rich, detailed and immersive experiences that are as powerful as real-world memories. Last month alone, 534 million new friendships were formed, and almost 60% of people playing and 3 quarters communicating are doing so with friends. That amounts to a staggering 66 billion messages and over 976 million hours spent monthly with friends. Furthermore, people that enter this loop are actually our most engaged citizens. They're 3x more likely to be retained in over 3 months. They engage 2.4x longer in sessions, and they spend 8x more every month. So now we're going to review some of the features that we've released on the social team in the last quarter. Roblox is unlike any social platform that's come before. People are connecting in real time, making their experience a special in a way that mirrors the real world. And we've recently optimized your friends list to show you the people you connect with most, where they are and what they're doing, giving you the ability to join your best friends instantly in experience. We've also redesigned the friend screen to be more visually impactful, letting you view your friends' avatars in all their unique glory while granting quick access to the sorts that allow you to see their availability and join them instantly. As we've discussed before, there's millions of new friendships being formed on Roblox every day. We're making it easier than ever to remember how and where you met that friend by displaying contextual information on every friend request and profile. But this is only the beginning. Soon, you'll be able to instantly find and join your friends in an experience. No matter where you may be in the metaverse, rich presence notifications will let you know when your best friends are online and available to meet up, creating more opportunities for serendipity and connection. Many people have friends who haven't joined Roblox yet. We will provide the ability for you to share your current location and have those friends join you seamlessly, expanding your friend circles and methods of connection. And lastly, Roblox believes deeply in giving people choice. We think that combining the type of immersive experiences that we provide with the deep social utility of apps like Guilded will usher in a new era of digital experience that brings together the best parts of the real world, visceral immersion, with the best parts of the digital world, control. I'm excited to announce that today, we're launching an integration with Guilded that allows people to link their Guilded identity and communities to their Roblox profile, group and experiences. And I've already connected my accounts. You should do the same. And with that, I want to thank you, and I'm going to hand it off to my colleague, Kelly Mayes, to talk about communication on the platform.

Awesome. Thanks, Morgan. That's awesome.

Hello. I'm Kelly Mayes. I'm the product lead for communication, and I'm going to talk about our new voice product. So earlier today, you've heard Dave talk about a new category of human co-experience that spans gaming, entertainment and social. And communication is at the heart of all of these experiences. We already have a robust communication platform on Roblox and a long history of letting people talk to their friends and others they meet. Our users send over 66 billion messages a month; today, over text. But our vision is much bigger. We want communication to be very natural and very seamless. We want to redefine the idea of social to be based on doing things together, not just passively scrolling through a 2D feed. And this year, in September, we took a big step towards that vision with the launch of voice. So our voice technology is spatial voice. It is fully integrated with the environment so that when you look at somebody, you hear them louder. You can hear who is on your left and who is on your right. If you're with a group, if you walk away from them, their voices get quieter, become a murmur and eventually fade out altogether. Voice adds a new immersive layer to all Roblox experiences. If you're in a virtual bowling alley, it is 10x more fun when you can chat with your friends and even trash talk a little bit. It also helps friends coordinate without using other products. So a group of friends exploring an amusement park together or even a virtual fantasy world like World Zero, which you'll see about in this video and hear more later today from the creator, RedManta, friends can coordinate and find each other and explore together. Let's take a look. [Presentation]

Awesome. Voice makes all the experiences today on Roblox much richer. It also opens up new types of experiences. Imagine, instead of spending your day on the 2D video call that businesses could use the Roblox platform to enable their employees to collaborate in 3D, hold conferences, have team building events. It's closer than you think. In October, Roblox hosted parts of our Roblox Developer Conference in voice-enabled spaces. And teams at Roblox have been using our product, our virtual offices to hold planning meetings and brainstorms. Here's what it's like. [Presentation]

And all of this is available today on the Roblox platform with the prerelease version of voice. Now prerelease is an early version of the technology that we've opened up and allowed developers and users to opt in and try out. Let's take a look at some early results. Voice appeals to an older user base. Now the product is limited to users aged 13 and up. And during prerelease, we are asking people to verify their age using an ID. And even then, we're seeing not just 13- to 16-year-olds adopting this, but also older teens and young adults. Developer adoption has also been strong. Within only a few weeks, we've seen 20% of the top 100 experiences integrate voice and offer it to their users. Community feedback has been awesome. Here's what people are saying. Game changer. That's from Asimo, creator of the hit game, Jailbreak. And KreekCraft, an influencer with millions of followers says voice is going to be huge for the platform. And even though we're really excited, we are taking a measured and thoughtful approach to rolling this out to our community, taking a very phased approach so that we can carefully monitor safety and stability at every step. Safety and civility are core to the communication vision. It's important to us to maintain a community where everyone is welcome to participate. And so we're baking in stability from the start by giving users control. Again, take a look. Already today, you can mute all of the voices in any experience or unmute them. You can see who's talking. And if you want to, you can report, mute or block that person or, of course, unmute them as well. And these signals are important, not just for our safety and moderation team, but also for automated systems and AI systems that we're building. Furthermore, we want to create -- use these to create feedback for people. In the real world, if you say or do something out of line, you know pretty quickly by people's reactions. The standards for stability we use in the real world to control our behavior need to carry over to the metaverse and the digital world as well. So as we look to the future, we see voice becoming a part of all Roblox experiences, and we see people increasingly socializing in these kinds of spaces. Voice allows you to talk and collaborate with friends or coworkers and experience things together no matter where they are in the world. We're building in controls so that people can control their own communication needs and building up natural enforcement of civility similar to how we act in the real world. And finally, our voice technology is fully integrated in the scenery for realistic acoustics. So a conversation in a church will sound different than the conversation in a cozy cafe. And we're connecting it to your avatar so that your face and gestures can add nuance to your words, and you can express yourself easily, naturally and authentically. And with that, I'm going to hand it off to Mahesh to talk about how we're bringing voice and avatars together. Thank you.

Awesome. Hey, Kelly, is it fair to say that when our voices mature, all of those people out there watching a streaming now might be able to participate via Roblox?

It's absolutely right, Dave. And it might not be as far off as a lot of people think.

All right. Cool. Thanks.

Thanks, Kelly. Hi. I'm Mahesh Ramasubramanian. You've heard about our avatar system. You've heard about our voice system. I'm going to share how we're bringing these two together to bring faces to life. I worked on visual effects in movies in the past and more recently on emotive avatars in a company I cofounded with Kiran called Loom.ai, which was acquired by Roblox. Our team is busy integrating our technology, which can actually track people's faces while they're talking to bring more emotion to their avatars. Let's take a look. In this video, you're about to see... [Presentation]

So what you're about to see in that video is something that is live in Roblox. And apart from the mouth movement and lip sync, look out for the live nonverbal cues that you get from facial tracking like eye contact, facial expressions and head nods. These are really important for a feeling of immersion and being able to effectively communicate. And now we can see the video. [Presentation]

Exciting. Let me take you a little bit behind the scenes. We're building our facial tracking technology to work with the real world, and the real world is hard. We have to account for a bunch of scenarios like poor lighting and busy backgrounds, imagine a low-quality webcam in a dark room or off camera poses and occlusions. You'd surely want to be drinking something while playing Roblox. And all the while faithfully trying to reproduce a variety of expressions. The magic to doing this is neural networks. Neural networks that have been trained on a vast amount of data to be robust to work under varying conditions, have a compact footprint and be able to run efficiently so that it can be at real-time speeds on a variety of devices. We have multiple patents in this domain. One novelty in the way we have set up our pipeline is to have two separate neural networks, one for video and one for voice. From video, we get expressions. And from voice, we get mouth movement and lip sync. So imagine that you're smiling while talking, the smile will come through from video and the talking will come through from voice. The final output of these neural networks is facial animation data. As you have seen how we roll at Roblox, Bjorn earlier mentioned the combinatorialism that you get from our avatar system, and we continue to embody the spirit. You can be whoever you want to be, and your facial animation data gets mapped on to you. Please roll this video. In this video, you will see a few expressions being simultaneously mapped to different avatar styles. Also notice how the beard, glasses, eyebrows, eyelashes, they all fit and move consistently with all the facial expressions. More and more, your avatar is going to represent you, the way you want to look and the way you want to move. With our avatar technology, our voice communication and neural networks, we are bringing faces to life. Thank you.

Hey, Mahesh, one question. So when you showed those -- sorry for interrupting. We'll clap at the end. When you showed those two tracks, there's a hidden thing there that you shared with me that if your face is occluded, we can still use the lip sync track to drive the...

Yes, yes. No. Absolutely. I think we want to use the best information we have available. And so if you're playing a game or in an experience, and we are using your facial expressions from camera to get you to be smiling. But if you happen to lift your hand and cover your mouth while that's going on, we can still continue with the lip sync because we can hear your voice.

Yes. It's awesome. Okay. Thanks, Mahesh.

Excellent. So I'm going to hand it over now to Dan Sturman, who's going to talk to you about the universal app, which delivers all this cool technology.

Thanks, Mahesh. So again, I'm Dan Sturman. I'm the CTO of Roblox. So you just heard about amazing features we're working on in two main tenants, which is identity and friends. Being able to access Roblox anywhere from any device in an immersive way is equally important. So what I'm going to take you through now is how we're aiming to fulfill that promise to be on any device. That is how we've developed a strategy around what we call our universal app to efficiently build a great experience on increasingly large family of devices. So how do we deliver Roblox to any device? The key is we build the Roblox app in exactly the same way a creator would build a Roblox experience. That is we build our app in Lua on top of our own rendering engine. Let me explain a bit more what that means. So Lua, if you're not familiar, is a scripting language used in a wide variety of applications but quite popular in the gaming industry. At Roblox, we've extended and enhanced Lua to be Luau, and that is the language all our creators use inside Roblox. In fact, Luau has gotten so popular that earlier this month, we released it as an open source project under the MIT license. So all our UIs are built in Luau, and thus, able to harness the full rendering power of the Roblox engine. Now we still need to make this work across a wide variety of platforms and operating systems. So to do that, we have a consistent but thin layer that we port each target platform. So what's give us in the end. It gives us a really consistent user experience from a single code base. It gives us highly performing both 2D and 3D interfaces. And we live in our developers tech stack, which means all the improvements we make in building our app go directly back to accelerating the community. Okay. So building out UX from a single code base. If we can move the notes back up. Okay. So let's try this again. Okay. This all started from our mobile-first push. We need an efficient way to implement the roadblocks app for both Android and iOS. We then thought, hey, this worked really well for Android and iOS. Maybe we could use this for more platforms. So we did an early experiment with Xbox. We've now taken that same concept, and we are in beta with new apps for both Windows and Macintosh. So we now have the same platform running across core devices in our market. In the process, though, we've realized that common platform -- while common platform accelerates future delivery, we also need to be able to customize the look and feel for each device. So we've added the ability to extend and customize key UI elements for specific platforms while keeping the vast majority of our code common. This allows our design teams to really make a phone app feel best of breed, while at the same time, providing an experience on PC that feels truly native. So for example, we expect and leverage a mouse on a PC, of course, while a phone or pad is a touch experience, and both of those have to come to live within the app. A common code base also allows us to share support for different interactive modes across devices like a game pad. So we build that once, and then you can use it both on PC or with consoles. Another great advantage is all the performance enhancements we make. So for example, improvements in app rendering or for actions like resizing, automatically go to all platforms. A great example of our success here is the new connect screen, which is shown in the diagram. We built this once, and then we were able to ship it on all UI platforms at the same time. So if you could advance the notes. Here we go. Thank you. So our big advantage of building our own engine is we get direct access to our powerful 3D engine. If you could roll the video, you'll see this. So increasingly, we're seeing an idea that for our users, the app itself can be a mix of 2D and 3D. This is our avatar editor for load clothing, which you saw earlier. But I want to call out, it's a fully animated interactive 3D avatar. Smooth animations at up to 60 frames per second, and we get seamless transitions while trying on virtual accessories, animations and emotes. So why does this all work? Because we're using it exactly the same way we'd be using and manipulate avatars within an experience. As you know, one of our core values at Roblox is respect to the community. Besides giving us incredible power to deliver to new platforms, our approach to universal app pays back in innovation that directly helps our developers. So dog food in our own tech that is living in the same technology our community uses has driven a number of advancements. Some examples. In Luau, the extension of Luau used across the platform, it's led to adding support for strict typing, which drives better code quality and reliability. In our rendering engine, it's led to parallel Lua execution that accelerates rendering and computation by better utilizing multi-core devices. And to support better 2D UIs, it's led to high-performing Luau frameworks with reusable components, smooth animations, responsive layouts that make building 2D UIs fast and easy. And last but not least, it's driven a large number of improvements in Roblox Studio because we're using that technology to build the app ourselves. This led to improvements in performance, code highlighting, intelligent auto complete, better device simulation and more. So where are we going to take this next? I want to touch on 2 key areas that we're really focused on. The first is that we've known for years that 3D is much more immersive than 2D, and we're applying that to the app. So for example, be able to chat with your friends in a 3D environment, discover new experiences, browsing through 3D categories or being able to walk in avatar into an experience instead of just launching a game. What you can expect from us is that whenever 3D makes the UI easier to use and more engaging, we'll be applying the power of our Roblox engine to bring that to life. The other area, of course, is being able to target more devices. So as we look to the future, we're going to go even further with device support. A clear obvious target for us is expanding other consoles and possibly cloud gaming platforms. Getting more adventurous, we're really thinking about smart TVs and what it means to bring Roblox into every living room. And then there's the platform that's been getting so much attention lately, virtual reality. We're exploring and revamping our VR support and being ready to support AR as real devices hit the market. So as I said before, we want to be able to deliver an incredibly immersive experience to any user, any in the world on any device. Our strategy with the universal app is enabling us to provide better experience on more devices more efficiently and effectively. Thank you. I'm going to turn you now over to Dave, who's going to introduce safety and civility.

Thanks, Dan. That was awesome. And just awesome. And so what we're saying here is our whole UX framework is cross-device. Of course, can you comment on the core Roblox client? Because that's amazingly cross-device as well, right? Like we're building the exact same client on every device.

It's exact same client on every device, with those customizations I mentioned, so you get that really native feel on each of them.

Yes. Okay. Awesome. Thanks. Thanks again, Dan. Awesome. Okay. Now we are going to bring out two members of our safety and civility team. So I want to welcome both Jeff Maher and Eliza Jacobs. They're going to share all things safety, civility and policy. Welcome you, guys.

Hi, everyone. I'm Jeff Maher. I'm Head of Trust and Safety at Roblox, and I've been here over 4 years now. I'm really excited today to be joined by Eliza.

Hi, everyone. I'm Eliza Jacobs. I lead policy here at Roblox. I just joined about 6 months ago, but I've been in the test and safety space for the last 10 years.

Great. And today, we are going to talk about how our group is responsible for ensuring that everyone has a positive and healthy experience on Roblox every day. So at Roblox, what we're really building is a safe, civil and diverse community. And this is our vision statement, and it guides us in almost everything that we do. We feel like safety is the foundation of diversity and free expression because if you don't feel safe, you won't express yourself. So we are relentless in our pursuit of safety because it enables so much of the incredible creativity that you see on Roblox every day. Stepping back, safety has been a foundation of our platform since day 1. And I am so grateful for Dave for volunteering this picture, not just because of the sweater vest, but because I think it really speaks to how long safety has been a part of what we do. We built safety systems as some of the foundational, fundamental components of Roblox. From the earliest days of Dave coding by day and responding to customers by night, it has been a core part and a competitive advantage. But we've grown a lot since then. Now our safety systems span product, engineering and operations. We have thousands of employees and contractors operating 24/7 around the world in 10 different countries. Just last month, in September, we monitored 66 billion communications for appropriateness. We handled 39 million reach-outs directly from our users. We had 33 million experiences reviewed to make sure that they were appropriate. And we analyzed over 10 million assets from images to audio, to mesh. Any part of UGC that comes into Roblox touches our team in some way or another. How do we manage to do all that? By layering safety systems, what we really like to call a "belt and suspenders" approach. Our first line of defense is human review. All of those assets that I talked about, when they're sent up into Roblox, a human being takes a look at it and make sure that, that asset is appropriate. Once those assets are combined inside the experiences, then we actually scan the experiences with a wide array of machine learning techniques. After our users jump into the experience and start co-experiencing together, we use a variety of different techniques to make sure that those interactions stay appropriate. People can report each other or report things that they don't necessarily feel as appropriate. And then our tech filter uses cutting-edge deep learning algorithms like [indiscernible] to make sure that all of their communications stay safe. The result for us is an environment where everyone can express themselves, and Roblox stays one of the most civil places on the Internet. Key to maintaining our success in this space are our incredible partners. We collaborate with over 20 different leading global organizations across child safety, Internet safety and regulation. These agencies help us make sure that our policies and practices stay current against emerging threats and evolving standards worldwide, and we truly could not be successful without the help of all of our partners. So I want to pause and just say thank you so much to all of them for all of their support. So clearly, over the last 16 years, we've learned a lot about safety and civility. But as we continue to scale and get older or go to different markets, we're thinking a lot about what systems would scale to 10x our size. Today, I think most large platforms take a very uniform approach to safety and stability where one policy or one set of rules applies to all users equally. Our future is going to be looking a lot more like the real world where we will have different policies and rules for different places, people and environments. It's a more dynamic version of civility. I'm going to hand things over to Eliza Jacobs to talk about it.

Thanks, Jeff. When we think about our vision for safety and civility, we're building a dynamic set of systems that support personalization across multiple dimensions. What safe for one person isn't safe for another, and that's why we're architecting civility in this way. To start, we have our Roblox platform policies that define what isn't allowed for anyone anywhere. This is our baseline for safety, and we'll always maintain it. Hate and discrimination, bullying and harassment simply have no place here. Next, we layer on country and location-specific requirements so that our global audience can connect and experience seamlessly without worrying about local laws and regulations. Then we work with our developers to create experience guidelines so that users can make informed choices about what kind of content they want to interact with on the platform. And we complement that with age gating for certain content to ensure that users are engaging with things that are appropriate for them. To cap it all off, we give our users tools to set their own individual preferences, things like customized tech filters and parental controls as a final layer of personalization for safety.

Great. So when we're talking about scaling our systems to 10x the size or 100 billion hours, human review still plays a role, especially where cultural nuance is required, but it's dwarfed by our investments in machine learning and AI, which we expect to grow significantly over the coming years. And really, for us, the tipping point is community empowerment. We want to give our users and developers more control over the civility of their own experience by externalizing our tools. Our tools, combined with age verification and experience guidelines, will provide a safe foundation that will foster even greater freedom of expression and greater civility across all of Roblox.

And if we do this right, we won't just have safety and stability on the platform. We'll have built a civilization.

Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Thank you, guys. That was awesome. And I just want to highlight that both enormous challenge and opportunity of what the team is doing is really providing policy that will both support young players going to an amusement park as well as we saw a voice conference at our office. So with that, we're going to take a little break. We have a lot more to come after the break. So we'll see you back, I think it's in 5 or 10 minutes. So thank you all. [Break]

Once again, welcome, everyone. And following our break, let's bring up our globe again and share what we're going to be diving into in this next session. We're going to be getting a little bit more into the guts of the Roblox engine and the Roblox developer tools and community programs that support our amazing communities. So I'm going to welcome our next team. Manuel Bronstein is going to moderate. We're going to bring up Antoni Choudhuri; Matthew Dean; Alan (sic) [ Alex ] Hicks, Arseny Kapoulkine. Welcome. Thank you.

Thanks, Dave. I'm glad to be back on stage. At Roblox, we constantly are focused and investing in even our developer community, the best tools and services, so they can build ever-expanding immersive experiences in scalable and efficient ways. Next, you're going to hear from Antoni and Matthew, who are going to share -- they represent our developer group and are going to share the amazing work that we're doing to empower our community. You will also get a chance to hear from Alex Hicks, CEO of RedManta, one of our top studios and developers, and he's going to share the work that he's doing to build on the Roblox platform and grow his studio. Last but not least, you're going to hear from Arseny, our technical fellow, and he will dive deep into the investments in our tech stack that powers all of these amazing experiences that you see on the platform. He's also going to share how we're investing in scaling and improving performance. So with that, I want to introduce Antoni. Take it away.

Awesome. Hi. Good morning, everyone. My name is Antoni Choudhuri. I work in engineering and the developer group here at Roblox, and I've been with the company for about 10 years. I've seen the company grow. And I wanted to start first with what Roblox looked like, and it still looks like that today, but how much it's grown. All of these images are from the Roblox engine. You can see the growth in the different variety of styles that we support. And look at the hyperrealism on the right. A little bit about the Roblox architecture. It's really 3 parts: the client or the player, iOS, Android, PC; the Roblox Studio, how our developers build, and we'll talk more about that; and the cloud, you'll be hearing about that from Matthew. So diving into Roblox Studio. Here it is. This is how our developers build on Roblox. It's a full IDE, or integrated development environment. We have millions of developers creating millions of experiences every single month. They can write code, they can do 3D modeling, and there's a really powerful collaboration part of it, too. So looking into some of the recent releases that we've done and how we power the platform, I wanted to share some of our recent releases. First, our device emulator. This is a powerful tool, which developers use to find and debug things in their game, specifically around the different platforms. Roblox is a cross-platform ecosystem. We have everything from iOS to Xbox, and developers are able to use the device emulator to see what their experience looks like on that platform. It's really powerful for understanding the user experience. Next, we have our debugger. Some of our developers are running massive games, with millions of players across servers all around the globe. And debugging that can be challenging. It's a big task. The debugger allows developers to understand their game better and to find any issues and walk through them and figure them out. Here's a taste of what collaboration looks like in Roblox. You can see everyone on your team. You can place bricks and build creations together. You can also even write code together. This is one of the powerful secrets of Roblox, is that you can do all of this in a single program. Lastly, we have our autocomplete feature, which recently came out. This is helping developers script faster and more accurate. They can use the predictive text to make sure that they write their code efficiently as well as correctly. The common theme with all of these features is that we're hyperfocused, sorry, on making developers able to innovate faster. This means that they can realize their imagination faster and create more immersion and drive engagement. Continuing, we have Roblox Studio translated in 6 languages. Currently, it's in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Every time we release Roblox Studio in a new language, we see millions of developers open up and able to join the Roblox platform and create on it. We are continuing in 2022 and on to strategically add more languages to Roblox Studio. Every time we open it up, more people can create on the platform. Changing gears a little bit. This is Roblox, a screenshot straight from our engine. You can see how photorealistic it is. But that's not just it. Everything is also -- our goal is everything to be physically accurate, meaning simulated. And so why this is important, the reason this is important is that photorealism plus physical accuracy drives immersion. When you're in a space and your experiencing it, it should work like the real world. This creates immersion, and that drives engagement. And this also leads to an older player base. Here, we have 3 images, again from the Roblox image, a desert, an ice glacier and a mountain lake. All of these are our materials, and they work just like they do in the real world. Sand works like sand. Ice works like ice. We have -- if you're slipping in the real world on ice, it should work the same in Roblox. And this is how to drive immersion. And this is really powerful because it allows developers to create the place and the experience that they want. Going further, very Roblox style, we want to open this up to our community to create their own materials. Here, you have an example of a stone created by the developer, Artemis. It's beautiful. They choose how it works with our physics and our engine. And imagine a world where we have millions of creators uploading and creating their own materials. The amount of permutations and combinations will just blow your mind. So this is a really exciting thing that we're going to continue working toward and deliver. So putting all of this together, I wanted to show a video. Please roll the video. [Presentation]

There are so many amazing things that the developers have created on Roblox, and I'm so excited what they will continue making in the future. That's all for me. Thank you, everyone.

Hey, and Antoni, I think you could remember when our Roblox Studio team probably had 2 engineers on it.

Yes. It's grown a lot now. So we're one of the larger teams, and it's super exciting to keep powering the vision. Up next is Matthew Dean. Thank you.

I just want to highlight one other thing that Antoni mentioned around physical materials. Really, the vision of easy creation on Roblox is ultimately in our vision. We'll have an experience where whatever you build on Roblox, you have to be careful that you don't accidentally drop a match out in the woods because everything is going to catch fire and burn down. And so it's a little bit of the notion that the more we physically simulate reality, actually the easier it will be to program. So that's awesome, Antoni.

Thank you.

All right. Thanks, everybody. All right. I'm Matthew Dean. I'm a Product Lead here at Roblox under our Creator Cloud. I've been at the company for 5 years. But before that, about 10 years ago, I joined Roblox as a player and became a successful game developer. And that is where a lot of my passion and drive comes from. And like Antoni, I saw and I see the massive potential in giving developers the tools to realize their imaginations. So one of the key ways we're looking at doing this is through our Open Cloud initiative. We've talked a little bit about this already, but it's really about opening up our ecosystem and allowing large teams of developers, we're talking hundreds of developers, to really interact with our ecosystem in an effective, scalable way. And we believe that's really what will take us to the next level and help us satisfy their needs at scale. So I'm going to dive a bit deeper into how exactly we're planning to do this. So the general point is we want to allow developers to build, for each other, tools and apps to help speed up development. There are kind of 3 foundational pieces to this. One is, first, giving them, and we've already done this, giving them that secure foundation and be able to reach in the cloud securely and access their content. This is a recent launch of ours. Then there is taking all of the cloud infrastructure that we've already built to power experiences, power a studio, and opening that up widely so that developers can plug directly into it. So things like our data stores system, which I'll go into more detail, and assets, I'll dive deep into these first 2 and give you some examples of how exactly this will help us. Ultimately though, what we're expecting to see is organically a rich creator tool ecosystem spin-up around this, where developers are building, for each other, tools to help speed up development. They're selling them. They're offering them for free. It's like sort of whatever economy model they want to offer. And that's powering the next generation. So first, I want to dive into content, which is probably the most important piece here. So with Antoni's presentation, we saw a really rich-looking world. That's only possible through allowing developers to bring in assets like 3D textures and models and audio and video. All of those, you'll be able to easily bring them into the Roblox ecosystem. So the way we're doing that is, again, by opening up that functionality to our cloud. So you can imagine a developer working with any external tool can pull that content into Roblox quickly and seamlessly. In that way, they can make sure it works super well. The other benefit of our cloud is we will automatically serve up the best asset for the different use case. So the developer doesn't have to think about this. We will just -- based on the device, based on the network and other conditions, we will serve up what is optimal for their scenario and give them the best possible experience. A concrete example of what this could look like would be here on the left, you see a third-party tool, where the developer is building their 3D model. They're making changes. They're moving the wings. On the right is in our Roblox environment, you can see those same changes reflected. And now, we're applying the rendering, we're applying the physics so the developer can see exactly what to expect. This takes an iteration loop, which today would be in the minutes. As they're going through and making changes, it makes it instant. And as you can see, this will really help speed up development. All right. So we talked about assets. I want to move on to one of our other key services. So in order to power the millions and millions of experiences, 27 million experiences on the platform today, we have built out a really hyperscale storage system, where any player progress, any player creation, is stored in the cloud for them for free as part of the engagement of their experience. And this has 1.6 trillion records, and it has incredible, incredible scale. We offer a bunch of features around this that you would typically expect with cloud services, so things like autoscaling, reliable versioning. But the fact that we handle it all for them and they don't have to think about and learn some separate service is really valuable to them and helps them get their experience up and running much, much faster than other ecosystems. We want to take this though and make it exposed beyond just the experiences themselves. So you could imagine a developer building a website or an app that would use this same storage back-end outside of experiences themselves. We like to think though a lot of what we build, and the reason I joined is we see people building really innovative things beyond what we can imagine. So I just wanted to give kind of 2 examples of what we expect to see and will organically see as we open these things up. So one example would be a developer builds a live ops tool for another developer. So sort of they're building a platform where anyone can go and manage rollouts of their features that can understand sales behavior. Things like this would be possible and would be optimized for different use cases. So no longer do we, as Roblox, have to build every single tool ourselves, we can scale and build a platform for tools. The other one is democratizing creation. So today, players can go and build and arrange furniture in their houses and many different experiences. But we want to go further and allow them to take those experiences and that content that they've built and bring it outside the experience. So by publishing their creations to the platform, directly from within an experience, they can take that piece that they've built and potentially put it out into the avatar catalog or you pull it into another experience. And it creates a more rich ecosystem where what they're building lasts longer and has more value to them. All right. So I've talked through -- that was the sort of the Open Cloud and the value proposition there, but I want to talk a little bit more about our developer community and what we're doing to empower them on the community side. So we have a community of millions and millions of people around the world. Many are community-grown developers, like myself, who have learned coding and Roblox is their starting point. But increasingly, we're seeing more and more development studios and companies who are rallying around Roblox as a meaningful way to connect with a huge audience. So our vision is to, regardless of where they come from, our vision is to enable as many people as possible to make a living fulfilling their imagination. We have 10.5 million cumulative developers. 1.4 million of those are earning our Robux virtual currency. And then nearly 1,000, in the last 12 months, have earned more than $30,000. So as you can see, we already have a lot of people making a living off of Roblox, and we want to just keep accelerating that progress. So why are there so many developers on Roblox? We believe that we've created one of the best-in-world dev ecosystems. And because of some fundamental tenets that we have, this is why developers choose to build on Roblox and why they choose to stay. So the key value propositions really are we provide everything you need. So I mentioned data storage, but we have so many different services and tools, our free studio that Antoni mentioned, where developers can go in and they don't have to learn a lot of peripheral things, they can just really focus on the content development, which is the piece that they want to focus on anyway. We have really, really fast publishing and iteration speed. So anyone can go and start at a game and publish it to the platform. And they can make updates very freely compared to other ecosystems. Those are key because they enable people to learn much more quickly and iterate and make changes, which is a huge advantage over, say, the typical AAA approach, where studios are much more slow-moving and go for big launches. But Roblox developers can move very quickly and respond to the market. The last piece here is instant global access. So as you're publishing your game, you're not just getting into sort of like native speakers in your own language. As Craig talked about, you're leveraging machine translation, you're making it accessible to a huge audience across the world, across devices, and that enables you to become profitable quite quickly. All right. So in addition to that, we also want to power our development teams as they're scaling to build themselves up and find talent. So we do a lot to self-accelerate the community growth. We recently launched our product around the Talent Hub, which is a way for users to connect with each other, to find teams, post job listings, apply for job listings. And since our October launch, we've seen hundreds and hundreds of jobs filled already. So this is a key value proposition. A lot of other ecosystems don't have this as a way to connect and start accelerating the progress of those teams forming. This will also eventually be a place where we expect brands to come in and directly partner with our community more and more to automate that. All right. Then I'll wrap this section up by talking a little bit more about some of the longer-term pieces that we're working on. So we do provide rich analytics to developers today, but we want to increase those. We want to provide more and more out-of-the-box and more capabilities there so they can understand and get insights really quickly about how the game is performing and respond well. The second piece is around our documentation. So we have an incredible documentation site with a wealth of resources, but we're actually working to open that up to the community so they can write and contribute to it. They can write their own guides. They can make any edits they want and suggest them to our team, and that we think will help -- as the Roblox product is massive, it will help ensure that it's all well documented and people can understand it super well. The last piece is, and I touched on this in the Open Cloud section, really that tools and API ecosystem where anything you could imagine, like a matchmaking system, could already be built by someone else. And you can simply plug it into your experience, save a lot of time, and ultimately, that will help accelerate the success of our developers. So that's it for my section. I do want to -- let me pause here.

Yes. So there's one I wanted to ask you. And we shared about this fantasy for a long time, that if Open Cloud is built well enough, rather than using Roblox Studio, someone could build a procedural creation and publishing system, constantly push updates to the cloud into that raw 3D digital stuff. Can you just share the possibility of that?

Yes. That's absolutely possible, not just sort of some -- a parallel desktop program similar to Studio, but you can imagine inexperienced people will be building lightweight, fast-creation experiences, where you can build early experiences there and pull them out. So a lot of opportunity there. All right. With that, I will kick it over to Alex Hicks, who is the founder of RedManta, a development studio on Roblox. But he has a similar story to mine. He started as a player. He joined Roblox and became a game developer and has found great success on the platform. So with that, I'll hand it over to Alex.

Okay. Hi. I'm Alex Hicks, the Founder and CEO of RedManta. I joined Roblox in 2009, when I was about 12 or 13 years old, and then just started developing on it and eventually ended up running my own studio. So here we go. So RedManta was founded in 2018, and we've got over 15 people working there now and over 50 years of combined experience, so people like me that grew up on the platform. Our mission is to build experiences for evolving audiences because we really see the type of people, the demographic that's looking to come experience this stuff online, it's a lot different than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and we really want to get these emerging audiences. And then finally, we've got 2 live games, Robloxian High School and World // Zero!, and they have over 5 million monthly active users and 1.3 billion visits to date. So we'll take a look at our first game. That's World // Zero!, and this is our most popular title right now. It's an MMORPG fantasy world. And we've got a primarily older audience on this one, but it flips for our other one. And we've got a really high engagement on this title. So we're seeing over 100,000 hours of engagement every single day. And Roblox is now paying us for engagement, and this has now gotten to a point where the engagement-based payouts, which you can see there, was $22,000 in October. This is covering the development cost of the game so that we're able to focus on what we want to focus on. So by rewarding us for engagement, we're now able to think about, okay, we don't have to upkeep a bottom line or anything like that. We can make the title as fun as possible by focusing on getting people to engage more, and this results in them sticking around and ultimately spending more money. And I just wanted to show kind of a demo or a screenshot of what that looks like in that game here. This is an area that users will come group up at to socialize, try dueling each other, trade items like a social hub within our universe. And then our second game is Robloxian High School. So you can see on this one, we have a younger audience. And this one's kind of interesting. We're seeing a lot of countries that are not North America are finding this game interesting, and we're told that that's because they think this is what an American high school looked like. It's a -- I don't know if that's exactly the case, but yes, players get to live their dream high school life. They can do whatever they want. They don't have to follow any of the rules. They can [ make it flat ]. So people really have a lot of fun there. And yes, like I mentioned, we have a younger audience with that. So I think that's people that haven't gone to high school yet that are looking to experience the high school experience. But the same with this game is we're getting the monthly engagement payouts that are covering our development costs. And this is just like -- I can't stress how awesome this is because we're working on a third title as a studio right now. And we don't have to worry about, okay, are we going to sell founder's edition packs or all this kind of stuff just to try and break even while we develop because we're going to make money just for building it and then focus on monetization once it's out and it's got that huge audience. And then just to show you what that looks like, a really bright, nice warm aesthetic. Everything is very over-the-top in this game, of course. Okay. So why are we developing exclusively on Roblox? So the first one is collaboration. Roblox almost gamifies development in a way where when you're developing, it's not like you're sitting in a room alone, it's dark, you're not talking to anyone. You see people's cameras flying around. So you can see, in this image here, I can actually see what my teammates are selecting, and then I can watch them drag it around in real time and see exactly what they're doing. So maybe if I get, let's say, distracted for a minute or something, I see a teammate nudge something in the background. It feels like being in a virtual office almost. So this just really changed the game for us, when this came out a few years ago. The next one would be out-of-the-box analytics. These are really nice because you get things like daily, monthly active users, engagement hours, retention, monetization metrics, all out-of-the-box. So the developer doesn't have to worry about hooking this up and then interpreting it or even knowing that they should look at analytics in the first place because I think a lot of developers are starting out, that is not high on their priority list. So being out-of-the-box like this makes it really convenient to go look at. We can find issues in our funnel. So if there is an issue with our retention or something, it's very easy to identify and correct. And then the ability to build once. This one, I think, I've grown -- I think I just take this for granted at this point, but it really is a big deal. So I've never had to write native code for specific platforms or anything like that because on Roblox, we just develop the game once and then it will work across every platform that Roblox is on. So this screenshot here was taken like about a minute apart on an iPhone 12 and on my really powerful desktop. And you can see that they look nearly identical. And all we've done different is added some buttons for mobile users to use their thumbs on so that they have a better experience. Everything else is the exact same codebase. And on top of that, we can also tailor our games based on people's regions. So we don't have to ship different versions to different regions of the world. We just have one version of the game, and that goes everywhere. All right. And finally, 3 things that RedManta or myself personally are really excited about. That would be voice chat. I can't stress enough how big of a deal this is. I used to socialize a lot on Roblox when I was younger and playing it, and I would always be typing. But it's almost like -- it's like texting and driving. They tell us we're not supposed to do it because it's difficult to do, right? So imagine playing a game where you're trying to drive a car and someone's chatting with you. You can't really take your hand off the wheel to respond to them because you might crash. And this applies to any kind of gameplay where both of your hands are engaged, or you just don't want to stop what you're doing and switch into social mode. So it's almost like going from 2D to 3D games. I really feel like voice chat is another dimension to games, and it's going to really change what's possible there. The next one would be layered clothing, which I think you've seen already today. But I'm really excited for this just because avatars are going to look a lot different than they used to, and it's going to let us try out things that weren't possible before, so fabrics and capes and things like that, that were previously just not really hitting their full potential. And finally, I'm excited for this feature called memory store. This is a persistent storage across all of our game servers. So every server can send and pull data from this. And this is really nice because we'll be able to let users have new social features across the game. So we could do like a marketplace, where users can sell things between servers, sending messages between servers. All sorts of new social avenues are going to be possible because of that. So as a game designer, things like that get me very excited to see what I can do with them. And that's it for my part.

Awesome. So, hey, Alex, thank you for lending your valuable time because you're running a studio. And congrats on your success. I think we met in person at a developer conference right when you joined Roblox, wasn't it?

Yes. I went to RDC West in 2015. That was the first time I had met you. That was the first time I had gotten on a plane alone, visited a country, a foreign country. I'm from Canada, so I had never really traveled alone. So that was an experience I'm glad I did.

Yes. Thanks for being here. All right. So next up, I want to introduce Arseny Kapoulkine. Arseny is a technical fellow. He's worked at Roblox for almost 10 years. We should have Arseny's Twitter handle up here because he's a very well-known technical expert in simulation and gaming. I recommend you follow him. Welcome, Arseny.

Thanks, Dave. All right. So we are here to talk about scale and performance. And really, this is the sort of past, present and the future of the Roblox technology that makes some of these experiences possible and makes them work well. And you've all heard the word "coexperience" today. We are really trying to go into a bit of a different space, where there is thousands of people in the same session, a lot of social hangouts, a lot of -- whether it's a concert or a workspace or something like this. So the question is, how do we get there? So what are we trying to do? The vision for the engine that we have is very, very simple. It's thousands of players in a single session. It's instant joining. You can instantly join an experience. You can leave and go to another one. All of this is quick. And it's real time performance on the client and the server. And of course, we've seen various examples of different worlds at different scales, different complexity. We want to support all this. And we want to do this across all of the devices that people play Roblox on. Now it's important to note that this problem is difficult. So why is this difficult? Well, the core of the issue is, really, you can look at the hardware that you run on, you can look at the client hardware, and there is 10, 100, sometimes 1,000 like differences across really any dimension, whether it's memory, performance in the CPU, GPU, like bandwidth, latency. So many variables are just very wildly off. And at the other end of the spectrum, there is the experiences that developers create. Maybe you have a 5-player experience. Maybe you have a 500-player experience. These are fundamentally very different in the resource that they need. And all of the other things like worlds, et cetera, they all differ. So there is a giant matrix, like here's all the possible devices in the world Roblox runs on. Here's all possible experiences in Roblox. How does every cell in this matrix perform well? So this is a challenge, an opportunity, a value proposition, if you will. Nobody really solves this today in full capacity, and we are building a lot of foundation technology. We are doing a lot of innovation with this solo, so that this problem gets solved, this problem gets solved by the technology. Our developers don't have to worry. Alex was just talking about a one-click platform compatibility, et cetera, et cetera. The goal is developers don't need to think about this giant, complicated matrix because the Roblox technology, the Roblox engine automatically scales the experience to any target device. And this does mean you are playing a bit of a different game on every device. I don't know if you noticed this, but on the screenshots that Alex just had with the mobile versus desktop, you can actually see the level of detail is different on the desktop versus the phone, and this is very much intentional. So we want to reach maximum performance on any device, and we want to maintain the level of fidelity that is feasible given the level of performance that we have. So let's walk through a few of the pieces that make this possible. So it starts with the streaming architecture, where you have clients of different platforms. They connect to RCC, which stands for Roblox compute cloud. This is where the game server is running. This is where a lot of simulation, game logic is being processed. And we also have a bunch of CDN servers. All of these are distributed around the globe to deliver static content. It's important to note that when we say streaming, we don't mean video streaming. We send metadata about the world. We send 3D object positions, 3D object characteristics, material definitions, et cetera, et cetera. And this gives us a few important advantages. One is our infrastructure cost is much lower because we don't have to deploy GPUs or expensive hardware in every single server that the clients would connect to. And also, it keeps the latency down and gives us a lot of flexibility in how to prioritize different parts of the experience, how to prioritize bandwidth. We think, ultimately, this will allow us to get to instant join at a better level of fidelity than what is possible with other technologies. So how this works from a very -- who is really top -- the 10,000-foot view. So the player is somewhere in the world. There is different regions in the world that have different types of data. Sometimes, it's terrain. Sometimes, it's objects. Sometimes, it's other players. At any point in time, there is the constant stream of data that goes from the servers to the client that, sometimes, we say, oh, you are getting closer to an object so we need to send you a high resolution version of this. Sometimes, we say that the player -- another player needs to kind of have a higher level of fidelity on the screen. Sometimes, there is other types of data that need to be kind of sent and processed. All of this, there is complex algorithms running behind the scenes that we are starting to build more complex mathematical models around this and kind of try to figure out what is the best user experience in the first 100 milliseconds of the join, 200 milliseconds of the join, 1 second of the join; how do you maximize the experience, the quality of the experience, the enjoyment that the user gets kind of every step of the way, while, of course, staying within the bounds of bandwidth, memory, CPU, et cetera. All right. Can we go back, and can we roll the video after the slide? Thank you. So this is how it looks like. In practice, you join. You see a small part of the world around you, maybe it's all-terrain. There is the objects. Then we start sending objects to you. But sometimes, if you look at the buildings far away, they start at low resolution. You can still see the building's shape, but it doesn't look very pretty. And then, after this, we stream the high resolution version. This is the general model of the world, right? And the complexity here again is how do we balance all of this, how do we tell whether it's valuable to send a high resolution version of one object versus something else or terrain or other players. All right. Can we go next? So this mostly covers -- I'm skipping a lot of details, but this mostly covers the RCC portion. There's also the CDN. CDN is what we use to fetch the assets, like textures, measures. They're the most static and immutable. We've talked a bit about this already, where there is this cloud compute processing for the assets that automatically takes every single asset and says, okay, let me compute for every device, let me compute automatically without developer involvement and optimal version of this asset for the given device. And one key component in all of this is to make sure that every asset is multiresolution, so that again we have the flexibility to download worse-looking but much smaller version of a given asset. This helps performance, this helps memory consumption, and we are starting to look into doing progressive downloads as well so that just as with the world data, we can progressively stream higher and higher resolution versions of everything, up until you saturate the bandwidth or the memory capacity or whatever. So you got all of this data on the device, what do you do with this data? We just saw a breathtaking demo running inside Roblox, but we can't run this at -- on every device with the same level of fidelity. So because of this, our rendering system is pretty unique, in that almost everything that it does has a lot of different knobs that the system automatically tunes to reach an optimal balance between fidelity and performance in every device. So you start at the sort of top end of the spectrum, the game or the experience looks as the creator intended it to look. And then we could downgrade it to not render objects in the distance, not render special effects. You can see the lighting here looks much flatter compared to what it was originally, but it's still the same level. So you can still coexperience this together. It's just that you do this at the optimal level of fidelity and performance for the device that you're using right now. So from the simulation angle, there is a similar challenge, right? There is like a lot of different objects in the world. There's a lot of different, complex physics mechanisms. So what do we do with all of this? So there's a lot of different solutions that we have pioneered over the years. We are continuing to invest more on this. Our simulation is distributed, which means that different peers in the sort of server and client network, they control over different parts of the world that simulate them. We are building a lot of sophisticated algorithms that automatically recognize patterns inside the developer's world and optimize for them. And again, all of this is without the developer having to know that these things are happening because we are automatically making the experience perform better without the developers having to worry about this. And something we are starting to explore, which is not live yet but is in progress, is can we drop the fidelity of the simulation for parts of the simulation that aren't heavy, like don't have precision demands as much as other parts and again, gaining back performance, reducing the fidelity of the simulation, but in a way that is adaptive, in a way that doesn't affect -- doesn't visibly affect the simulation results, et cetera. The other super-important aspect of this is parallelism. So most of the hardware that we deploy on clients or server users are mainly processing core. Sometimes, it's as few as 2 or 3, which could be the case in some mobile phones. Sometimes, it's as many as 32 or 64, which is the case on our infrastructure. So every system at Roblox has been rebuilt, redesigned to maximize the level of parallelism that it gets. And the goal here is you have a Roblox engine, you take the engine, view loads and experience in the engine. You say we have x cores, can we saturate all of these x cores and use essentially the entire slice of the machine, or when we talk about the data center, it doesn't have to be the entire machine, this could be the slice of the machine appropriate for the given experience. So we have [ potentials here ] with profiles from the networking and physics system, where you see various levels. So like the more bars you have, the best for this. You see we are not perfect. Like ideally, you will just see 16 or however many rows here are horizontal bars that are completely solid, but we are getting closer and closer. And the other big part of all of this performance story is, of course, scripts. So a lot of the code that is running inside the experiences, we [ call it our developers writing ] prescription language. This is where -- one other area where we are really controlling the entire stack, top to bottom, and super critical for us. So we have our own scripting language derived from [ Lewis ], our own implementation. We are really heavily tuning in for performance. We have improved performance by several times over the last year or 2 as far as the execution goes. We're optimizing kind of every little bit. But that's a really big thing that I'm super excited for, that is just launched the first version of, is our actor-based multithreading framework. This is essentially a way -- it's a new paradigm to let our developers write their scripts in a way, that once they do, a, it's safe, as in the execution goes without any errors; and b, it scales across arbitrarily many cores, on the device, on the client, on the server. And so we think this is the future-proofing, where the more code developers writing with this, the better the whole game, the whole experience will scale across any device. And to kind of finish this, this is what a lot of the engine work is about. We are committing to performance. We are committing to solving this device content matrix for performance and for fidelity. We've progressively ramped up pretty much all of the different factors over the last few years that kind of contribute to the increasing challenge of scale. This year, we started -- so every week, we have what's called the Town Hall. That's a meeting inside the company. And part of this Town Hall is actually a live experience, where up to 500 of employees just join and hang out together in the social space. And there is voice chat, and there is the [ whiteboards ] and all of that. So we are going to continue this, but also, we are really, really starting to look at really maximizing this parallelism and utilization. We have 64 core machines in our data center, but a single experience right now uses probably up to like 16 cores. So there's room for us to grow. But also, every single part of this system, where previously, we were just looking at performance, we are starting to look at the human factor, like how do you maximize the user's enjoyment of the experience given the performance budget that we have. And so that's all I have.

So, hey, Arseny, before you step off, so you highlighted a couple of things. We have our own data centers. We have 64 core boxes. They're super high-speed, network-connected. So for the audience, what might be possible someday with 32 of these servers, for example?

Yes. So I think the way we are thinking about this is maximize the utilization of every given box. It's kind of interesting that 64 cores is not necessarily the limit there. But once we reach this limit, right, the big question is how do we go multiserver. And the way we think about this is, right now, our projections say that we can run 1,000 to 2,000 players per a 64-core box. And then you kind of multiply this by the number of -- depending on how big of a rack you can build with high-speed networking. You multiply this by the number of servers in the rack, and you get something that starts looking pretty appealing.

That's an awesome number. Okay. Thanks again, Arseny. That's awesome.

All right. Thank you.

Thanks. Okay. Okay. So we're going to shift a little and go back to that original diagram we shared about our different ways we're growing, and one was around our platform verticals. So we're going to jump into a little discussion around growth and highlight a few of those verticals: brands; music; learning; and a general overview of growth. So we're going to bring out Matt Kelly; Christina Wootton; Jon Vlassopulos; and Rebecca Kantar for our next section. Come on up.

Hey, everyone. I'm Matt Kelly, VP of Products, and I lead a number of areas at Roblox, including personalization. Previously, I led growth at Facebook, and I joined Roblox about a year ago as I was thrilled about the opportunity to grow the community to billions of users and creators. So the goal of personalization is to provide the most relevant content and connections to every user so they get more value out of Roblox. And as a result, this directly increases time spent and engagement on the platform. Personalization is huge for Roblox, and as an opportunity, it has 2 key ingredients. First, every day, 43 million users engage with Roblox, and the amount of new users continues to grow. Second, Roblox has a combinatorial explosion of content and activity, and there's much more we can do to help every user find the right content and connections and that's what we're focused on improving. In order to do that, we have hard challenges to solve. First, constant -- content is changing constantly, so we're building flexible and scalable systems to catalog, understand and rank it. Second, it's complicated to understand what an individual user might enjoy, such that we can reliably recommend the right type of connections or content, particularly when they're new to Roblox. We need to build a system that deeply understands users' interest and adapts to all the changes. Last, our demographics are increasingly broad as more global and aged-up users join Roblox. These are unique challenges because there are a bunch of interesting problems that come with those 2 demographics, like recommending the right content to older users, while also helping children with things like misspellings when they search. And these are deep challenges that will be focused on for many years, and we believe the upside is tremendous. Search is an important personalization interface because the user tells us exactly what they're looking for. And this is what search looked like in 2019. Due to all the challenges that I described, it was nearly impossible to find the right experience. It was difficult to navigate because there was little design and branding consistency. Not all experiences had icons, and results weren't sorted properly. Even if the user entered an exact query, they usually wouldn't be able to find the content that they were searching for. As I mentioned, misspellings can be prevalent, and search didn't account for those. This is what search looks like now. There's consistency of design. Results are significantly better, and users can search for a larger variety of queries. This is due to the deep investment we had made in the algorithm itself, the signals fed into the algorithm, tagging and cataloging content and focus on a new consistent design. The system is increasingly flexible to ever-changing user-generated content, resilient to things like misspellings, is on a path to become personalized and will scale with the amount -- the increasing amount of content and potential connections on Roblox. An example of this is genre search. So if a user searches for the word "simulator" on Roblox, he'll get the most relevant results. If they then search for a game or a more specific genre, even if it's misspelled, like driving simulator in this example, search will find the right content and also make it clear what experience is the most relevant and engaging. We're extending search into other areas as well, like searching for people. Roblox is better when users coexperience with their friends, so it's important that users can find them. If someone searches for their friend's username like builderman, we'll show them the most relevant person so that they can connect. These changes have had massive impacts. Search click-through rate and play sessions, meaning experiences played for more than 9 minutes, are 2 important metrics that we track. And since 2019, both have increased by many multiples as a result of our improvements. All of these are directly contributing to overall growth as users are able to find the right content and connections they're searching for. The home page is focused on suggesting content and connections that a user might be interested in, and it's also dramatically improved. Our new discovery system will find the right content based on someone's age, where they live in the world, their past preferences, what their friends are experiencing and more. Each home page shown here represents what 4 different users see on Roblox. Imagine that Jack is a 9-year-old in Ohio that enjoys building things, so his home page suggests experiences focused on physics and simulators. Meanwhile, Adeline is a 9-year-old in Iloilo that prefers playing obstacle courses and role-playing experiences with her friends, so her home page reflects those interests. High-quality experiences show up for every user, and each category sorts between and within those categories and sets of experiences shown or personalized to that user. And we're just getting started with this new system. There's a tremendous amount of constant activity within Roblox, and we see a huge opportunity to help users discover that on the home page. Beyond discovery and experiences, we plan to introduce a variety of units on the home page that will allow users to know what's happening on Roblox, like updates to experiences, in-experience events, what their friends are doing and new virtual items added in their favorite experiences. In parallel, we're continuing to invest in our algorithm, including transitioning to a deep neural network aggregating -- and aggregating more signals on content and users. And this is just scratching the surface. And we're excited about the long-term potential, again given the combinatorial explosion of content and activity on Roblox. These search and discovery changes are not only great for users, but it supports creators by helping them find their audience by matching their content with the exact right users that are most likely to be engaged. We're continuing to improve analytics so that developers know how to optimize in order to reach the right audience, including understanding sources of distribution and monetization from interfaces, including home page and search. Summarizing, personalization is focused on improving search and discovery so that users can make Roblox their own. We can't wait to get these changes into the hands of users and developers and contribute to drive Roblox' overall growth. And next, we'll hear from Christina about brands on Roblox. Christina?

Awesome. Thanks.

Yes.

Hey, welcome, Christina. Matt, before we jump in, there's something unique about a platform like Roblox in this genre in that we have content, but we also have real time signal, players' playtime, all of that. Can you share just a little. Is that helping us do better with search and discovery?

Yes. I think real-time is a really important part of our Roblox, particularly given the speed at which people can build new content experiences. And I think also just the amount of depth we can understand because content is built on Roblox, we can really understand what is happening and what kind of -- what are the details of the continent experiences. So again, we can understand things like is it a science-fiction-focused? Is it cel shaded? Is it focused on role playing? And then again, we can hone in on the exact users' interests and merge those 2.

And at any moment in time, I can see what all your friends are doing and help inform what I might show for you.

Yes. Ultimately, it's about getting people co-experiencing in the right content...

Awesome. Thanks again. Christina, let's go for it. Thanks, everyone.

Hi, everybody. My name is Christina Wootton, and I'm VP of Brand Partnerships at Roblox. And I've been working with the company for over 9 years, partnering with some of the world's top brands who want to integrate on to our platform. And it's a really exciting time for us because we're on the verge of a tipping point. The way that brands think about interacting with their fans and consumers has really evolved. Brands have been on the platform for many years. And when they first came on, they created virtual items or branded missions and scavenger hunts to integrate into existing experiences. At the time when I first joined the company, our teams were going out proactively pitching brands and educating them on Roblox and telling them why they should be on the platform. And many of them started to come on and they saw engagement numbers they've never seen before. And now we have so much demand. Everybody is reaching out how they can enter this space. As I think about more -- how they're going to engage with their fans and consumers in a deep way, they're still coming on with virtual items. That's usually their first step into the space. And then they think about moments, how can they really engage their fans -- their audiences, whether it's a short time, limited time event, pop-up event. We saw this with Gucci Garden. This year in Florence, Italy, they wanted to open up the Gucci Garden. It was during the pandemic, and there was a lot of physical limitations. People couldn't get there. So they wanted to open it up on Roblox where anybody around the world could experience this beautiful exhibition. When you walked in, you shed your Avatar, you become a mannequin and you grabbed patterns and colors from the environment, and you become a work of art. You could also dress up your avatar and get the beautiful Bee bag. And in 2 weeks, it saw almost 20 million people from around the world come into the experience. We also saw this with Warner Bros., where they launched the launch party for In the Heights. And they wanted to create immersive experience where you felt like you were part of the movie. You were in that scene. And you could learn dance moves from the choreographer. You could have a Q&A with the cast. And in one day, we had a virtual flash mob where you could dance the streets of Washington Heights, and we saw almost 900,000 people come together in one day and do this together. Long term, brands think about having a persistent experience on Roblox, a constant presence. If you think about the future of how people will interact with one another on Roblox, you want to be able to engage them all year long. You want to be providing content, listening to them iterating. We saw this with Warner Bros., Netflix for Stranger Things and Vans World. The opportunity for brands is enormous as we're really seeing the shift in how brands think about engaging their audiences and engaging them in an immersive experience. Brands are connecting directly with our developer community, our UGC creators to create digital fashion, and they're seeing engagement numbers they've never seen before. We hear this time and time again from so many partners that they're just blown away. And so this ROI, you can't find anywhere else. Some other thing is brands typically come on, they think of Roblox for reach and engagement because the numbers are so massive, but then they start to think this is a new revenue opportunity. By selling virtual items, this is really a big business opportunity for them. Also, they're getting that real-time feedback. There is nowhere else you can do that. If you go into an immersive experience and you're able to watch what your fans are doing, what they're saying, and you can have that 2-way conversation. Also, co-creating and collaborating with one another, this is huge. Brands are becoming more open to sharing their brand with their fans, and they want to create together, whether that's digital fashion or for beauty brands. And also, if you think about how brands want to reduce their carbon footprint and go towards -- more towards their sustainability goals. Digital fashion virtual items is the biggest opportunity. Our brand partnerships team, we work with the world's top brands, and we really have asked our users, "Who do you want to see on the platform?" We surveyed them, which brands, celebrities. And you can see a few of the categories and brands right now that we're working with together, Gucci, Warner Bros., NFL, Chipotle, and so many more. And these are really brands for all ages. So as over half our audience is over 13 now, we want to make sure these brand partners are resonating with everybody. Also, they have a global presence. This is one of my favorite examples. This is Vans World where not only were they a brand that our community wanted to engage with on the platform, but they also work directly with our developer studio from our community, The Gang, Stockholm. It was such a beautiful relationship because Vans really wanted to have their brand values come across in the platform in an authentic way, which is self-expression, creativity, a community, such a perfect alignment. And so they worked together with our community, which we always recommend because they are the experts in this space. They've been building for years. They really know what resonates well. And so they just partnered together. They said, "Here are our brand values. Here's how we envision people coming together, having skateboarding competitions, doing ollies and kick flips." And what I love is I always hear from people who say, "I would love to do this in the real world. I've never been able to, but now I feel like I have." And that's what's really important about these experiences is they're memorable. People feel if you speak to them, they say, "Oh, I've been to the Gucci garden." They feel like they've really been there. And in the first month of launch, September 1, they saw almost 40 million visits and a 94% rating, so our audience absolutely loved it. So how are we going to scale this? We're going to create the tools to make this a self-sustained ecosystem. We're going to enable verified accounts improve it through our talent hub. We're going to easily enable brands and developers, UGC creators to seamlessly connect with one another. And what's great is we're already organically seeing this happening on our platform. Cartoon Network launched Ben 10 Experience with the developer studio and saw over 160 million visits already. Zag from Miraculous Ladybug partnered with Toya, who's a female-led development out of Israel, and they've seen over 250 million visits. And then I don't know if you've heard of Jailbreak, but it's one of our top experiences that has 5.4 billion visits. Nascar saw this huge opportunity to partner with them and have this beautiful collaboration where in 10 days, they saw 24 million visits. And in the first 10 minutes that they launched, 40,000 concurrent users. After this was over, I spoke to both of the developers and the brand, and they're so excited about the results, but also see the future of how brands will share their brand with others. In the next 3 to 5 years, every brand will have a Roblox strategy, and the ones that already do are at the forefront. You can see here 2 examples, Vans and Gucci, and you can read their quotes there. What I love is Alessandro Michelle, he says, "Roblox is a virtual place that will launch to new generations. We are facing a moment that could be the real opportunity for a change." I 100% believe that. 12, 15 years ago, when you saw a company thinking about their social media presence, how are they going to have this channel. It didn't have a team to build that but they were hiring individuals or teams to work on this. We are seeing the same thing happening right now. Brands are coming to us and they're saying, "How can we enter this space?" They're thinking about hiring individuals or teams to work on this. Ad agencies are popping up to help brands enter this space as well. This has taken off so quickly, and I'm so excited for what's to come and what you guys will see soon.

I think, Christina, before we intro John, we've talked for a long time, many years about fashion and what that might look like. And then we've seen today, we've been talking a lot about clothing and the technology to support true 3D clothing that can be layered. Can you share a little of that fantasy?

You know I love digital fashion so much. So yes, as identity is so important on Roblox and how people express themselves, we're actually already seeing this right now with some of our developers and UGC creators creating designs and experimenting with fashion. We're going to see this even more. We're going to see luxury fashion brands, influential people in the fashion industry coming on. And with our developer community they're going to be creating clothing together, layered clothing. They're going to be walking virtual runways. They're going to be designing and collaborating, and I'm just really excited about this because I think digital fashion is one of our biggest opportunities. . Thank you. Next up is John to talk about music on Roblox.

So good morning, everyone. I'm Jon Vlassopulos, Vice President and Global Head of Music at Roblox. So the theme of my presentation today is going to be unlocking fandom. So we're at the beginning of a very exciting new social era of the music industry that is going to unlock new self-expression, new creativity and significant new revenue opportunities by connecting artists and fans in a new and exciting way. So at Roblox, we're very sophisticated and have been doing for a long time, bringing people together around millions of experiences. So we thought it was a natural first step to bring people together around music, artists and bands that they love for concerts and events. So working with the music industry, they saw this opportunity to reach our tens of millions of daily active users and bring their artists to this new audience. So we have 3 main ways that we work with the music industry. I'll take you through. So virtual concerts, so avatar-based performances in virtual worlds that are imagined along with the manager and the artists together with mini games and scavenger hunts and VERCH, which is virtual merchandise. We have launch parties, which are generally video-based experiences, again, with these magical virtual worlds imagined by the artist. And then a new one that we've been launching recently our listing parties, which is where artists can directly launch their albums and new music within experiences on Roblox with customization done by the developers. So I have 3 little case studies to take you through, hopefully to give you a little bit more of a deeper understanding of each. So virtual concerts, Lil Nas X was our kind of groundbreaking moment. Sony Music, we worked with their label Columbia. Lil Nas X directly and created this magical world that he could perform within. And he performed 4 of his big songs, had 37 million visits to this. So during a time when it was difficult for artists to connect with their fans in the real world, he was able to reach millions and millions of fans around the world on a weekend on Roblox virtually. And it would take him a decade to do that in the real world and obviously leave a fairly large carbon footprint as well. So a huge opportunity for artists, for virtual concerts. And his virtual merchandise, the verch is now approaching 10 million in sales to date and continues to be on the performance. Secondly, we have a launch party. So we did this with KSI, a top U.K. rapper, who is launching his new album on the platform, one of our biggest launch parties working with BMG and one of our developers, Mellon. So this reached 17 million people. Again, a huge kind of off-platform ripple in social media with views there and more than 7 figures in verch for KSI. So this is great revenue directly for the artist. And then Poppy, again, around these listening parties. It's a big problem in the music industry. I don't know how many of you ever know what music is coming out on a Friday. Not many people in the industry know either. So it's an issue for the music industry and an issue for artists. So we came in to try and help address this challenge with listening parties. So Poppy is an independent artist. She connected with 9 Roblox experiences, and they did custom integrations. And she did sort of meet and greets within these worlds. And she ended up getting 4x as many streams in only these 9 Roblox experiences compared to all of her DSP streams that's Apple and Spotify, et cetera, combined. So very powerful, out of our millions and millions of experiences, only 9. And then also millions of these free virtual items that she created were acquired by the user base. So everyone is running around the platform, kind of promoting her music. So very impactful for the label. They're very excited. And it was also very good for the developers who saw increases in users that sustained beyond the promotion. So here, I'm going to -- a little bit of show and tell. So recently, we did a virtual concert with an Arista artist called Tai Verdes. He has the song, A-O-K. So this will give you a little bit of a sneak peek of what it looks like inside these magical worlds dreamed up by, in this case, Tai. Can we roll the tape? [Presentation]

Thank you. So he was watching it in the airport with his manager, and he was texting us saying, "Oh my God, it's so cool." He looks so much like me, right?" So he was excited to do it. So we get all this feedback when KSI was in his world. He gets so excited. So artists are very creative. They've been locked into this little box in streaming platforms of a play button, kind of a picture and a bio. So they love this new form of self expression, this palette to paint with. So another way that we're, again, connecting artists and fans is around virtual merchandise, verch. So historically on the platform, the community loves dressing up their avatars, which are met with amazing items, which have traditionally been non-branded, backpacks and hairstyles. And now they can do that with merchandise from their favorite artists, Lil Nas X, Zara Larsson, KSI, Tai Verdes and more. So this is very impactful for the artists and the fans. So Lil Nas X recently did a refresh campaign where we launched more virtual merchandise. He promoted it on his social media, as you can see there. And his sales spiked to $100,000 in sales in a day, right? So this is very impactful. And we feel, over time, can potentially even eclipse the money that artists are receiving from streaming revenue. And this is a great way for, again, artists to connect directly with their fans and support more artists on the platform directly. So expect to see more of this in 2022 and beyond. So to give you a sense, music, we're really at day 1. We're just getting going. Again, up to now, we've been doing these virtual events that have been very impactful for the music industry. We've been doing the virtual merchandise, the verch. And we've also been supplying a catalog of hundreds of thousands of tracks to our developer community to put into their games to make them more engaging and more exciting. So we're going to be growing that catalog significantly in 2022. And then the next step for us, we're starting, as Christina had with the persistent worlds, so where we'll be launching more persistent worlds from music brands. So think of Apples and Spotifies and radio brands and artist brands and labels, Gibson guitars, all these type of brands want to have a permanent home on the platform to reach and engage their fan. And that gives us a much more exciting pallette for our user base who have music fans to connect with. And we recently launched Insomniac, which is one of the biggest dance music promoters in the world, and they launched their EDC festival on Roblox. So that's now a persistent festival world on the platform. And then beyond that, all the billions of hours, I think, that are spent off-platform with people listening to music and consuming music. Imagine these start maybe coming onto Roblox with consumption. We're looking at new formats that we're launching around self-expression. So think of a ringtone for your avatar, an avatone, with these short clips. And then a lot of the experiences also we're going to be moving towards live experiences, so artists performing directly in front of a wall of fans looking back, interacting together. So this is really actually even better than the real world. So I'll leave you here. It really is this fundamental paradigm shift that's happening. There are a few nice quotes here from industry visionaries that you can read that really tie back to that theme that we talked about of unlocking fandom. So we're really excited again to unleash this new more social, immersive, more lucrative sort of music business, along with all of our partners, developers, fans, et cetera. So thanks so much for listening.

So John, the fun thing we talk about is more and more artists are economically supporting themselves with live concerts. Those don't always scale beyond 60,000, and we're starting to see this vision of 3 million, 4 million, 10 million-person concerts. So what's your riff on the economic opportunity there for artists?

Yes. I think it's massive, and it's -- I was with an artist last week in Lisbon. And so we talked a lot -- so artists love performing as a creative opportunity where they love that connection. Imagine a 180 screen with a lot of avatar faces looking back at you like, "Hey, it's Dave from San Francisco." And the artist can go, "Hey, Dave, what's up?" And that's a magic moment for a fan you can't really replicate in the real world. So they love the creative connection. They can also then reach millions of millions of fans without having to tour around the world for years. So I think there's a creative opportunity where artists love performing directly and engaging with their fans. And plus, there are only so many physical venues. I see physical venues with large stadiums maybe declining over the years and more intimate venues happening and then expanding connection in the metaverse on platforms like Roblox.

Exciting. Thank you. Thank you very much.

I would now like to introduce Rebecca, who's going to tell us about our education plans. Thank you.

Hi. My name is Rebecca Kantar. I came to Roblox by way of the Imbellus acquisition, spent the last chapter of my career working on game-based and simulation-based assessment, and I'm now thrilled to be introducing Roblox' next chapter of education work. So to sum it up, we see a new era for Roblox to offer a really immersive medium for education beyond textbooks, beyond video. Think about immersive experiences that let kids experience history, unpack STEM concepts, really dive into concepts phenomenon and practicing skills that are otherwise very hard to imagine bringing into the classroom. So just to back up, Roblox has been in the education space for its entirety. And we've really seen organic adoption to the state focused primarily on Roblox Studio being integrated in a variety of in-school and after-school programs. We've seen 240 organizations that focus on everything from STEM summer camps to after-school, extracurricular activities, incorporate a Roblox Studio-based curriculum to teach to code, to build video games, to design video games. And those programs have spanned 74 countries to date, so a huge international footprint already. We've also launched our Learn & Explore sort, which features educational experiences on the client side of our application, and we've seen 7 million or so monthly users in those experiences to date. So we're building on a really strong foundation with fantastic partners. And as we look to our next frontier, we're really going to continue driving a partnerships-oriented strategy, but increasingly moving our work towards focusing on during the school day, not just after. So just like Roblox overall enjoys kind of a flywheel and a network effect, Roblox education ecosystem is very well poised to take advantage of more and more educational content development, spurring more student engagement, particularly in classrooms, which then drives more educator demand for more high-quality educational content. So the crux of our strategy really hinges on this network effect and flywheel of getting more and more students engaged in higher and higher quality content. Today, we announced in the Wall Street Journal that we're launching the Roblox Community Fund, which is an initial philanthropic investment and really bringing high-quality curricular and instructional providers who already have tremendous reach into schools, onto Roblox, building content in STEM, in history, in English language arts and social and emotional learning skills. So to give you a little bit of an example, we've kicked off our initial 3 grantees. The first is Project Lead the Way. Project Lead the Way provides STEM curricular instructional materials, hands-on projects to tens of millions of students a year. And they'll be working with Roblox developer phenomenon to create 2 experiences. The first is leveraging Roblox Studio to create 25 hours of circular programming around computer science. And the second is really focused on biomedical engineering pathways for high school students. So we expect about 250,000 students in school to engage with Project Lead The Way's content. Our second grantee is FIRST Robotics in partnership with Filament Games. And if anyone is familiar with FIRST Robotics, the long-standing, high-impact robotics organization that has traditionally relied on large-scale competitions in real life. And those robotics kits to compete in those events are extremely expensive. So FIRST Robotics and Filament are psyched to bring their virtual competitions on to Roblox and to think about how to expand equity and access for all students to enjoy robotics. We expect about 70,000 students a year to engage in these kinds of virtual events. And finally, we'll highlight the Museum of Science, also working with Filament Games. This is the Museum of Science, Boston. They reach about 1.4 million students a year through their engineering as elementary curriculum, again, providing STEM computer science and engineering instruction and circular materials to schools nationwide. And together, the Museum of Science and Filament games will be building a mission to Mars, where students really learn about what it's like to be a NASA scientist preparing for a landing on Mars and preparing to inhabit a planet like Mars. So in summary, Roblox Education, like the other ecosystems that you heard about today will be a self-sustaining ecosystem where educational organizations are just constantly building and releasing new content on Roblox. They're bringing Roblox into tens of millions of students in schools and instead of Roblox selling school by school or district by district or funding organization by organization, increasingly, we expect this just to be organic growth where everyone is teaching and learning in numbers. Thank you. Over to Dave.

Thank you, Rebecca. So we -- the prior company I worked in, Knowledge Revolution, we had a physics simulator, and I've always believed that immersive simulation, biology, physics could -- is even a superset of learning to code. Do you think we're going to see that where all the growth we've seen now on computer science, we could go well beyond that?

Yes, I think so. I think increasingly, we'll see experiences on the client side that help students get involved in coding and game designing, game development and increasingly Roblox Studio will become a fundamental tool for teaching computer science.

Okay. Awesome. Thanks again . Yes. Okay. We are -- we have one last section, and I believe then we're going to go to lunch and then we're going to come back with all our executives. So welcome once again to all of our investors and shareholders. We are now going to have the economy financial section. And so we're going to introduce some members of our economy product and engineering team and then also Mike Guthrie, our CFO. So let's welcome Enrico D'Angelo, Matt Brown, Kavita Kanetkar and Mike Guthrie. Come on up.

Thank you, Dave. My name is Enrico D'Angelo. I joined Roblox in 2018, and I'm currently the VP of Product for our platform economy. So Roblox, we think about economy a bit differently. It's not really about how we make money for ourselves but about creating a set of systems that allow our developers and UGC item makers to drive monetization of their experiences and creation. It encompasses a variety of different systems, including our developer marketplace, subscriptions, ads, payments, fraud and all the systems that we use to pay out our developers, including support for micro transactions, and also engagement-based payouts. So let's talk about marketplace. Marketplace is essentially where supply and demand of avatar items meet. As a brief history, these items were not always UGC. In fact, there was a time -- for a long time, Roblox was making and selling all of these items directly to our end users. But it was hard for us as a company to come up with the production volume and most importantly, to guess what our user would find more -- most compelling. And so we decided in Q3 of 2019 to introduce UGC to our marketplace. And as you can see from this graph, that marked a dramatic inflection point for the performance of our marketplace. We almost immediately saw a tremendous increase in the amount of digital currency spent in avatar items, which continued accelerating as more creators joined our UGC program. So what does our marketplace look like today? Currently, it is open only to a subset of around 500 creators who make and publish more than 250 unique items every week. 65% of all 3D avatar item sales are generated by UGC items. And marketplace spend represents around 25% of the Roblox spend on our platform overall. It is growing at 50% year-over-year, faster than in experience spend, suggesting that users really care about investing in their virtual identities. So let me tell you an interesting story about one of our developers -- developers makers of the avatar items. His name is maplestick. He's one of the most popular creators on the platform. He's 22 years old from Lithuania. This is one of the items that he made, it's called the Shadowed Head. And if you look at it, it might not look like much, but this is one of the most successful UGC items ever published on Roblox. Alone, it's sold than 3 million copies and put more than $150,000 this item alone in maplestick's pockets. This goes to show you that what's popular on the platform is unpredictable and not something that any study or analysis or even previous experience on the platform would have been able to predict. And this is one story of one creator, but more than 100 UGC creators today make more than $30,000 per year solely selling avatar items. More than 20 make more than $0.5 million per year and 1 person made more than $2 million in the last 12 months focusing on avatar items. Why are these items so successful? There's multiple reasons. Not only our creators have a great understanding of what's compelling to our users, but they also run like real businesses, doing research, polling users on what to build next and promoting their products on social media. So if you think about Roblox as the one point, the one creator, the one marketing point, and now that moved to hundreds of people doing the same thing with a deep understanding of our community. So now I would like to walk you through a few elements of our future economy vision, some of which will start materializing as early as next year. So first off, we're targeting the first half of next year to open new item types to UGC creation, including layered clothing, avatar bodies and faces. This was referenced in our avatar presentation earlier today. And from that point on, every new item type that we introduce to the platform will be UGC enabled from day 1. Also, as you've heard in the avatar section, we're also planning on opening our closed list of creators to all users to simulate to how anybody can create an experience on Roblox. And we believe this will expand variety by many orders of magnitude and create opportunities for identity personalization at a scale we've never seen before. From a distribution standpoint, our marketplace has been a monolithic destination, one place where all users go to come explore possibilities to build their virtual identities. That's not the future that we envision though. We envision a future with thousands of brands and creator owned stores, just like in the real world. A fully decentralized model is ultimately how virtual goods will be acquired by users. Shopping experiences created by our community at a level of context, immersiveness and curation that a flat centralized catalog just cannot match. As you can see on this page, you have -- these are real experiences built by creators, 2 of them are built by the community. The one in the middle is The Vans experience also selling virtual items. So let's talk digital scarcity. So scarcity is not a new concept of Roblox. For a long time, in fact, Roblox sold limited items that have driven incredibly interesting social and economic dynamics, both on platform and within experience, with a very active community of collectors and traders. We believe that extending the ability to create these scarce, limited items to all of our users will transform our economy and allow community, creators, brands, musicians, not only to define value for their creations more granularly, but also to capture that value more holistically. From a user standpoint, we believe that anybody being able to create limited items will have a truly transformational impact on our economy and the engagement on the platform. The experiment we ran with our Gucci partnership, that Christina mentioned before, showcased the true power of scarcity on Roblox. Not only scarcity made limited Gucci items highly desirable, in fact, some of these items sold for higher prices than the real-life counterparts, but the event itself recorded off-the-charts engagement. Last but not least, we envision an architecture supporting ownership of not only avatar in clothing, this is what having today, but virtually anything you can own in real life, from art, to pets, cars, houses, anything really. Our users will be able to create, sell, buy, trade, collect, showcase, any of these items. Developers will be able to allow users to bring items all these items in experiences the same way today, a user can walk in any experience wearing his own avatar in clothing. So hopefully, this provided a helpful overview of what we're thinking about our economy and our plans to evolve it to continue driving engagement for our users and making our creator community financially successful. Thank you.

Awesome. So Enrico, there's a lot of talk around NFTs in the future. And we've been doing, as you said, UGC limited items for the long term. So can you compare and contrast what's going on on platform, within platform?

So I think NFTs are a good framework to think about how our limited items work on the platform. From a user standpoint, in fact, the experience is quite similar. Again, people can acquire, they can sell, they can trade. And in fact, by extending limited to everybody, user actually can also create these items. One thing that I would say is unique about Roblox is that a lot of NFTs exist in isolation, whereas on Roblox, you can actually take these items and actually bring them to an experience. You can share them with your friends. So in a way it's more immerse than the average NFTs out there.

Yes, awesome. So once again, highlighting no promise of any future NFT product, but a really good interesting connection between our platform working. So thanks.

Now I'd like to introduce Matt Brown who will take you through some more details about the marketplace.

Hey, guys. I'm Matt Brown because you can never have too many Matts. I think we have 4 today, which is a good baseline. I've been with Roblox for about 3.5 years, and that whole time I've been focused on Avatar's user identity. And what I'm going to talk to you about today is the team that I lead now D-Roblox Marketplace. So you've just heard Enrico talk about how critical it is to our economy and to our creators, to our community to open up the entire platform to user-generated content and some of the new systems that we're going to be rolling out to help creators make successful businesses and new types of businesses. So now I want to talk a little bit about how we optimize and sort of amplify a lot of that. So the Roblox marketplace is special. I think by association, it means I'm special. But the Roblox marketplace is strange. I think it's the only marketplace I'm aware of where we do not optimize for revenue as our top line metric.

Is that really true?

I probably should have told you that a couple of years ago.

I mean I think it's an awesome thing about Roblox. It's working.

So we focus entirely at the top, we focus on engagement. Basically, our goal is not to -- the way I joke about it is our goal is not to squeeze money out of 10-year-olds. Our goal is to engage you with the platform, it's to help you find who you want to be in this magical place. So what we've learned is that there is a direct causal relationship between players acquiring items, customizing their avatar and the actual amount of time they spend on the platform. So the more we personalize the content that we deliver to you, the better we were able to show you exactly the things you want to build your identity, the more you acquire items, and what we call our high-intent acquisition. So for us, that means you paid for it, you worked for it, you earned it in a game or you wore it. So it could be free, but you cared enough to actually engage with this content. And the more we see players engage that way, the more we see them investing in their identity, the way we see their identity evolve and become more and more personal and more and more special to them. And the more they do that, the more time they want to hang out with us. And that's really what we're about. We're about getting everybody to join us here in the metaverse and to have a great time there. And the bottom line is, if you're enjoying it, you'll spend money there. So now what I want to show you is over the last handful of months of this last quarter, we've embraced that even more. And just some very small changes can have some huge, huge impacts. So for example, this may not sound like much to some people. This is just recommending entire characters for you instead of just individual items hats, wings, things like that. But just this tiny change alone, recommending a single new asset type drove overall marketplace engagement up significantly, drove the engagement that players had with their identity, and then by association, the amount of time they spent on the platform as well. Second example, just redefining and redesigning the way -- your browsing experience. So it's just slightly more personal so that what you're seeing, when you know you're just looking for hats, but I don't really know what I want, we can take that lead from you and show you exactly what you want. And we see, again, huge lifts in the engagement with the marketplace, in engagement with the player's identity and by association, with the platform overall. And then lastly, again, very, very simple, just starting to look at our new users. So users where maybe they don't even know what they want yet. How do we show them the perfect content? And again, because we're focusing on engagement, the content could be free. It could be paid. It could be something you earn in a game in the future. But in the end, basically, if you care about your identity, if you can be who you want to be, then you'll stick around. So going forward, now that we have all of these different ways of optimizing and sort of engaging players, we want to get that in front of players wherever they are. So next up for us is to bring the marketplace experience, this personal experience to the top level home page, so the place every player goes. Every user sees this whenever they watch the app or they're on the web. We just want to make sure that they understand there's this huge opportunity there for personalization and customization. And it introduces new types of players to the marketplace. So they might end up seeing shop or marketplace and not thought that was a thing that they wanted to do. But now we can say to them, "No, no, no. There's stuff here that you probably do want that will make you who you want to be." And if you're already engaged with avatar, you've already clicked that big juicy button at the bottom of the middle of your phone, then we want to bring as much as we can about this space to you. So maybe you're somebody who cares about aesthetics, I just want the best hair, then that's what we want to show you. Maybe you're a trader, maybe you're a collector and you just want to trade these limiteds as Rico just mentioned. We want to show you trends. Maybe you're a creator, and we want to show you how your content is selling. So we just want to be there with whatever it is that you want. And then lastly, even if you don't even need -- you've made it all the way in here you're editing your avatar and you don't even know what this universe can be. We want to be there saying, "Okay, as you're customizing, we can help you." We can sort of hold your hand and say, "Okay, well, here's some more content right? Here's some content that we think would be perfect for you." And we just want it integrated, unified and seamless everywhere. So you're just constantly discovering new ways to build your identity. We want to help you be you, no matter how you engage with Roblox, whether it's aesthetics, peacocking, in-game functionality, we don't care. We want you to be you and have the time you want to have inside our universe. That's it.

Thanks, Matt. Awesome.

And now I'd like to introduce Kavita to talk about ads.

Hi, everyone. My name is Kavita, I lead Economy Engineering at Roblox. We have a thriving virtual economy that runs at a massive scale. We have tens of millions of items bought and sold every day in our marketplace. We have millions of requests per second hitting our APIs and services and economy. And we have hundreds of millions of monthly virtual transactions. So at that scale, we are not just innovating to keep the flywheel of users and creators going. We are also making sure that users' money, real and virtual, is very safe on our platform. But for this presentation, I'm going to focus on one aspect of economy, and that's ads. We currently have on-platform ads for developers to promote their experiences. So this year, we rebuilt the whole system. We launched dedicated ranking on game discovery pages to improve the user experience. We saw that it did not just improve the user experience, but it improved ad conversion rates, 40% on desktop and 60% on mobile. We added targeting criterias like age, gender and platform. We fixed reporting, we worked on it. Now we are able to track and attribute game play sessions to the sponsored ads. And what's in work is we will be working on launching world-class ad serving system and adding and optimizing more outcomes and more targeting criteria as we go. As more and more developers, brands and music come to our platform, they will be looking for new opportunities to drive traffic to their experiences and product. Of course, they can use the sponsored experience, as I showed on the home page, but we will be innovating on ads, and we will be working on ads that are native 3D, social and connected to multiple experiences in the metaverse. We call them immersive ads. And we have been experimenting with this format with a bunch of partnerships where users go back and forth between experiences with their friends. So we believe that this is not just an opportunity for creating a new revenue stream for our creators. But we also believe that we can look at ads as social and engaging features of metaverse experiences. So what's next is our futuristic vision of what immersive ads will look like. We have a demo, can we play the video? So users in an experience, there is a sponsored ad, an immersive ad, user is intrigued... [Presentation]

and then user is transported to this immersive ad. Now we're in Washington Heights. And users can choose to stay here, interact with the ad or go back and forth between the experiences. So ads is not the only business model we are thinking about. As more and more real-world businesses come to our platform, they will be contributing to our economy in a much more meaningful way. For developer subscriptions, developers will be able to charge users recurringly for the in-experience upgrade or -- yes, in-experience upgrades. The way we think about subscriptions is exactly the same way we think about creation of experiences, which is decentralized. Developers will own subscription, so they will be working and optimizing and improving it with respect to content strategy and marketing standpoint. The third pillar is real world commerce. This is where real world brands will come to our platforms to sell physical goods and services. They can do that through experiences or leverage different experiences who can act as affiliate sellers for their products. Because our experiences are social, engaging and immersive, we believe that we can scale commerce on Roblox and really become a primary channel for all these brands on our platform. So in closing, yes, we are working on all these business models, experimenting with them. And our goal is to put more money in the hands of creators. But doing that, we also want to make sure we keep increasing the engagement on our platform. Thank you.

So, Kavita, that was awesome. And I think we have many brands where we're starting to have that vision of when I'm already wearing that brand with one more click, having the physical version of that delivered.

Exactly. We are at that inflection point. I think It's the right time.

Okay. Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Okay. We would -- so thanks again, Kavita. I'm going to introduce Mike Guthrie, our CFO, who's going to finish us with some financial updates. And then while Mike is going, I'm wondering if I can get an estimate on the lunch return time. So we're going to take a break after this, come back to lunch. When Mike's done, I'll announce the lunch return time for all the people out there who are watching us, and we'll see you then.

Thank you, Dave.

Thanks, Mike.

It's so nice to have our first investor day. We're thrilled to have some of you here in person and many, many, many online, and we're excited. I actually was a little bit late coming in this morning. It's a longer story. But if I happened to cut you off in the parking lot, I just want to apologize and say, just grab me outside, and we can talk about it. We'd still like you to be an investor in the company." We listed the business about 8 months ago. And so this is our first real chance to talk to each of you in a really intense and in-depth way. And we, in a sense, had 2 primary goals. The first was to help you understand really how did we get here. This is a unique business. It's just different. And it has so many pieces to it. And so often, we get questions about just how have we gotten here. What is behind Roblox? What is Studio? What is the cloud? What is the client all about? What do we do? So hopefully, we reached our goal of explaining how we got here. And second one, of course, is to explain where we're going and what the future looks like. We're so excited about what this platform can be. This is, again, a 16-year-old company, and it has many, many, many years in front of it. So hopefully, we've, at the highest level, achieved those goals. Whenever I talk about the financials, I really start in the same place, 3 things. This is a business of great scale. This is a business with fantastic growth. And this is a business with great unit economics and cash flow. As technology investors and growth investors, often you can pick 2. Sometimes you may only be able to pick one. And with Roblox, you get to pick all 3. And we're going to talk about each of these as we go forward. But this is really a big business. We are now into multiple billions of dollars of bookings. We earned hundreds of millions of users, billions of hours on the platform. This has truly become a scaled business. It's been a high-growth company well. Really, the business started to tip in around 2015, 2016. So we've gotten to this place, in a sense, in a relatively short number of years even though Dave would look at it as 16 years of building and having a vision and sticking with it. So that really shows you the high growth. And then the cash flow is all driven by incredible unit economics. And people talk about unit economics, but in our case, we just produce cash. We invest incredibly intelligently. We're very disciplined about where we put our capital. It's all very well thought through in terms of return. And if we see something that's not going to generate return, we simply don't spend that money. So we just reported the third quarter, so I really actually can't say too much more. But if you think about just the numbers that we reported, you'll see the scale and the growth and the cash flow that really came through in the numbers. On daily active users for the third quarter, 47.3 million. We were up over 50 for the first 27 days before the outage in October. In terms of hours, we had never had a quarter of 10 billion hours, and then we went straight to a little over 11 billion hours in the third quarter. So we were very excited because we really do focus on engagement. When we go through these numbers, that's really the first thing that we look at. And bookings, we had another up over 600 million of bookings, which is just an incredible number for us. That was basically what we did a few years -- in a full year just a couple of years ago. And we're right around 2 billion of bookings for the first 9 months of the year. And then cash flow. So we have both cash in terms of adjusted EBITDA, and we'll talk about how we calculated adjusted EBITDA and then also free cash flow, literally just the cash that's left over. And at Roblox, really -- usually, the difference is a little bit of working capital and then the investment in the infrastructure. So it is important to understand that we are building our own infrastructure, and that weighs into the free cash flow numbers. So if you're modeling our business, we talk about this a lot, there's really almost 4 things that you need to keep track of. On the far left of the dashed line is cost of revenue. Since about 2/3 or 3/4 of our business are on mobile devices, whether it's a phone or a tablet, a big chunk of our cost of goods sold is really Apple and Google fees. And we've always said that as we get to efficiencies in any part of our cost structure, what we really want to do is invest those dollars back into the developer community. So everything to the right are really our areas of investment. And the first one is developer exchange fees. I'm so excited that we had Alex here today. I thoroughly enjoyed his presentation. First of all, I love seeing entrepreneurs building businesses on our platform. It just feels good to be at a business where people are doing stuff like that, and it's super exciting. I was also really happy that Alex talked about, not just the monetization through the transactions but also the impact of engagement-based payouts. So we have really, over the last year, one of the primary tools that we've used to grow developer exchange fees has been these engagement-based payouts. And you heard it first hand today how productive and effective that has been. We really think it has been a game changer for us, and we're incredibly excited. After that, it's really about personnel costs. 80% of our employee base are engineers and product professionals. The other 20% of us in finance and legal and our people team, we're there to support and grow the business. As a business team, we're here to grow and support the business, especially with brands and user growing at education. But the personnel costs are about investing in the absolute best people that we can find, the most talented engineering and product people and business people around the world and continuing to grow. When we make those investments, it always pays off. And then the last piece of our model is infrastructure and trust and safety. Hopefully, by now, you've understood the importance of civility and safety on our platform. And you also understand the fact that we build our own infrastructure. So those investments are critical. And again, we have found over the years that if we make those investments and prioritize them, they come back to us in a multiple in terms of the growth of the business. So we're kind of -- we're basically ending where we started. A few slides into Dave's presentation after we talked about the founding and the mission of the business, we talked about the growth vectors, how are we going to grow this business? And I just want to return to those. Global expansion has been happening for a very, very long time. We are incredibly excited about growth in Asia, growth in the rest of the world, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and that's just going to continue, and you saw a lot of great data today explaining why we're so confident of that. Expanding the age demographics. That's also something that's just been going on for a very long time at Roblox. And we really think it is driven so much by the technology in our platform and then what our incredible creator community does with that. And so we believe that we're still in the very earliest stages. And you saw some of Manuel's graphs talking about the ability to grow in different age groups and in different age groups around the world. So that's just going to continue. We're extremely excited about that, and more and more the content is going to be appealing to an older audience. And then it really starts to get exciting and fun. And I imagine from your seat the thing that was newest was this discussion of platform extensions. We talked a lot about it when we listed the company back in March, but now it's becoming quite tangible. And the potential for brands and for music and education on Roblox is really exciting. And we just have many, many years in front of us where those things are going to power incredible growth. It's going to bring in new users. It's going to change people's experiences. And ultimately, it really links to the last piece, which is around monetization. In a sense, I'm the CFO of a company where the growth team just told you they don't look at revenue, but we do have to think about monetization and expansion, and it does tend to happen because there is so much more for users to do because we have this incredibly talented creator community that just keeps producing amazing content. And as that grows and as the platform extends, we're quite confident that more and more people will become payers, and they'll spend actually more time and ultimately more capital with us. And we're incredibly excited about that. We don't -- we're not pivoting the business. We're staying true to the original plan 16 years ago. And hopefully, this vision that you see here is what we'll be reporting to you on over the next few years as shareholders of Roblox. Thank you so much for your time and for being here and supporting us. We're super excited. And the thing that we -- the tagline I'd like you to -- like to leave you with from the finance team here is we're really investing in innovation. So thanks again. And I think now, Dave, we're on to lunch.

Yes. Thank you, Mike. That was awesome. So we are going to take exactly a 30-minute break. We touched all the areas of our 8 key aspects of this platform. When we come back, we will have Q&A, both from people in the audience as well as people online. So see you in 30 minutes. Thank you. [Break]

Hey, we're back, and we are live. Once again, thank you to the group that's here with us today, and thank you to all of you who watch -- are watching us live streaming. This is the Q&A section. We want to introduce 2 more of our executive team, first Matt Kaufman, Chief System Officer. Matt is partially involved in what we -- I refer to as the Roblox OS, which is building actually the company, the people and the systems that then builds Roblox. And also Barb Messing, Chief Marketing Officer and Employee Experience Officer who also participates with that. So we will -- we would invite everyone here who's live to come up to one of the 2 microphones with your questions. And as we get through the live questions, we will also be building up questions from our streaming audience, which we will handle as well. And we'll go back and forth. So we're going to start off on the microphone to my right. Welcome.

Dave and teams, Thomas Reiner with Altimeter Capital. I just wanted to kind of get a better sense of your strategy around branded and the experiences there because it seems like you guys are taking a more kind of self-service approach. And we see some of the other, I guess, human co-experience/metaverse partners taking a more handholding, whether it's Epic or Manticore, really doing a lot of the heavy lifting themselves, and you guys are handing that off more to the developer community. How do you guys see that developing over the next 5 years? Are we going to see this cottage industry of developers who are specializing in this? And how do you see that going?

So self-service is at the core of everything we do, all the way back from the very first day we introduced Roblox Studio for game creation and play creation. On brands, it's one of our primary arcs, and I'm going to ask Craig Donato to speak more on that topic.

So absolutely. Right now, I'd say, where we are in the arc of working with brands is we're working with handfuls of brands right now, trying to understand all the different requirements, what will make the brand successful, all the different ways that they might want to engage with users and using that information to really make sure that we're building out our systems such that it can be done in a self-service fashion and at scale. We want tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of brands on our platform. Similar to how any brand can create a Facebook page on their own, we want any brand to be able to create a presence on our platform. And looking down the future, how that gets done, it could be by partnering with someone in our community. We expect ad agencies to have the capability to build metaverse experiences. And similar to how big companies bring their social team in-house, I would expect to see something down the road that people would have metaverse teams in-house.

Thank you. Great question. Let's go to the left mic. Welcome.

It's Dan Kang with AO Asset Management. One of the tenants of the metaverse is this idea of interoperability, right? The idea that I can take my digital identity and actually go from one platform to another. So I'm curious what Roblox's role is in helping build a more interoperable metaverse in the future? And if you feel the platform today can actually exist in that more interoperable future.

Yes. This is a great question. A lot of people are talking about it. I will highlight, we shared earlier our globe and the Roblox 8 key tenants of human co-experience. That isn't one of our tenants, but it is a widely held tenant, and it goes all the way back to the -- I don't even know how old I was, those days of VRML a long time ago, when people had this dream of interoperable 3D fabric and shared avatars. I think we're going to see this in various stages. With our acquisition of Guilded, we shared that we believe there should be some connectivity between immersive 3D metaverse-type platforms and social community, communication type platform. So we will be mocking up and sharing possible APIs and interfaces. I think we're at the phase where a lot of 3D content is becoming more and more interoperable. Avatars are arguably slightly higher fidelity than a lot of that. There are some standards. So we will probably see avatars someday, but I do think this will continue on with that [ virmal ] vision that's really been around for a long time and will take a while to get all the way there. Okay, we're going to go to the right. Thank you.

It's Matt Cost from Morgan Stanley. Just are there any key hurdles you would highlight about driving off-line commerce on Roblox? You mentioned that you were close. Are there any specific examples you would give? And then just on immersive ads, how are the tests with those going? How are they being received by developers? And what are the key hurdles to scale that product?

Yes. I'm going to leap in, and I'm going to hand it over to Manuel. I mean part -- the off-line commerce is huge. We're working on a lot of things. So we sometimes sort what we work on. I'll let talk Manuel talk more about ads in the ecosystem.

Yes. And on the commerce side, I think investments in what we call real-world commerce, as you think about currency, wallet, how do you make money exchanges, these are kind of things and the kind of hurdles that we are working on and figuring out to enable that. On the upside, we started with very basic experiences where when we had events on the platform, we gave other developers the opportunity to put those portals to actually show how good you could actually flow traffic from one experience to the other. And they were very successful and very well received by both sides, both the people who are placing their portals and also the recipients of that traffic. So that gave us a very early hint that this is a great way to actually do it in a way that feels immersive and do it in a way that enhances the engagement on the platform. And that's the vector in which we're going to be investing in the future.

Can I tag on a real quick? So one of the things I think that we should see is looking at the immersive advertising hand-in-hand with the brands, right? You don't want to have advertising where you click out of our experience onto some website somewhere, right? You would imagine where you'd want to be. The platform is moved -- that you're moving traffic around on our platform into another experience, right? So you want to basically be creating the advertising infrastructure to be able to move people around as well as having enough brands on our platform such that you have places to take them into to have these experiences. So a lot of things have to happen concurrently for all of this to come together. So it's a multi-threaded effort. Thank you.

All right. Awesome. Let's go to this side. Welcome.

Brandon Ross from LightShed. And just thinking about Mark Zuckerberg just revealing Meta and talking about spending $10 billion a year and growing to invest in this space. I wanted to hear what your thoughts are around your moat to that type of spend. And is money enough to catch up to where you guys are at this point? And do you feel like you need to -- you're free cash flow generative. It's worth investing even more against coming competition.

Yes. This is a great question. And as you correctly know, I think we have almost $3 billion in the bank, and we think about where to invest this all the time. We have constantly, throughout our history, been in a fortunate position where we continuously up the rate at which that economy flows to developers. We're always trying to balance our profitability cash flow with how much is moving in that direction. And I think as you correctly note, that there's continued opportunity. Four -- at the very start of today, I highlighted 4 key things to watch for us, in viewing us as a company that I feel we've been doing for 16 years and what we'll continue doing. First is innovation, 80% product engineering-driven and really building what we call this Roblox operating system to scale that innovation, 50 product engineering teams hopefully all building a super long pool, best in the world type technology, and if not, us helping to mentor them. Second is we really started from this younger civilized spot. And it's an awesome place with such a large audience there to grow upwards from. We think stability and safety is very hard, and we're excited about adding freedom on top of that rather than, I think, many companies have found it difficult to go the other direction starting from an open platform and trying to come downwards. So that's I think worth thinking about. The Roblox developer community and our community is a real -- got a lot of momentum now. And we've seen hobbyists. As we saw today, developer number 1,000 is making a living. That's long tail. I think it's hand in hand with the strategy that we don't make content. We built a platform where that content is made, which is absolutely wonderful. I think we're seeing more -- you can read about VC-funded studios that are getting fairly large valuations, larger than we got as a company in some of our early days now that I think about it. And then I think the final thing is, as I mentioned, when we started the company, it was really -- we're going to have one name, one platform, one company, one thing. And all 50 of those product engineering teams just work on that one thing. So those are things that we're really focused on.

I like to repeat. You wrote the 7 things that we were...

Yes.

Yes. I thought it was well written, and I don't know how did we do on the 7th. We address -- I thought we were going to...

You've answered almost all of them.

When I came up here, it's like, why didn't I have any questions? Just maybe one more very quickly. And as you -- sorry to stick on competition. As Tim Sweeney comes into the play -- into the space with Fortnite Creative Logic, if he does something like [ Raissa's ] developer splits, a crazy amount,does -- are you forced to move your splits with him? How do you think about that?

We think about -- once again, Alex, thank you for being here. For me, in working with some many developers, what is most important is the overall economic opportunity. The take rate is important because it's how much money we can ultimately move to them. But I do think the question is, can a developer earn $50 million a year on the platform? Will a developer someday earn $100 million a year? Are we running the leanest business possible? So we can set that take rate to optimize money flow to the developers. And I think that's more how we think about it.

Yes. In 2018, the pool of capital for developers was about $70 million. This year, it's going to be well over $500 million. So back to the conversation about scale and growth, those things just keep growing at a very, very high rate. So again, it's -- we're thrilled that the total available market is over $0.5 billion this year, but we won't be happy until it's well over $1 billion and continuing.

Thanks a lot. Okay. Let's go to this side. Welcome.

My name is Marcelo Lima from Heller House. On this topic of competition, as a fellow shareholder, I'm always worried about what's coming and potential threats to the platform. How do you think about the rise of play to earn and the whole decentralized Web 3 type of crypto gaming? Is it something that can coexist alongside Roblox? Is that a potential long-term threat? Or is it a fab? What's your view on that?

Yes. I guess short answer to this -- and we -- there were companies 16 years ago where you would check in and do other things once again to drive engagement. Our North Star is ours. We're really driving to real authentic engagement, wanting to hang out with your friends, go to a birthday party, learn together, work together, that's the primary thing. We are very fortunate that we have an economic model that is scaling super linearly with that. When we double engagement, I can't guarantee it, but there's a good time -- chance we're going to double economy as well. And so there is a place for that. But I think that's a little orthogonal. You just said play to earn, which feels different than the engagement we're creating, which we -- it's like, no, I want to go to that birthday party or I want to -- so I think that's interesting, but it's less our focus on engagement. On the left side. Thanks a lot. Welcome.

Jeff Hau from HMI Capital. One of the decisions you made a bunch of years back was to make a platform accessible to mobile, and specifically a variety of mobile devices. I'm curious how you think about after having made that, that relatively early on how you think about the future of mobile, where we are in VR and AR adoption and how you can ensure the platform is accessible for any other part of your platform that emerge in the future?

Yes. I'll go first. And then if anyone on the tech or business team wants to chime in, I'll let them go. We do believe 3D immersive physically simulated digital avatar multiplayer stuff in the cloud is somewhat universal just like HTML is. And we do believe it can be accessible from all 6 of those device types, if not more, phone, tablet, computer, console, living room, TV, VR device. And we've seen this vision play out really, really well. Every day, people on many of these classes of devices are all playing together at the same time. So I am personally very optimistic about all of these form factors. They're all difficult, and they're all fun in their same way. But I think as different platforms grow at different speeds, we'll be there. And like I think we want to span all of them. I don't know if anyone else...

I'll chime in a little bit. I talked a little bit about our universal app strategy. And just like at the core of that is this idea that end client devices will be diverse. We need be able to support them and do that in an efficient way so we can be in as many of these places as possible without just spending all our engineering team on that. So that doesn't just mean like mobile and VR, though, obviously, we're focusing on these kind of big modalities. But even like within mobile, there's going to be a really big variety on the quality of the device and be able to scale up and -- Arseny spoke about for somebody to be able to scale up and down. So you could kind of use the spectrum from like the lowest-end phones, someone -- some kid maybe handed by parent, up through maybe the super immersive extremely high frame rate VR headsets and having the app but then the experiences scale naturally without that being a burden on the developer, right? So that's where we're headed. It's kind of a core part of our engineering strategy, as we internally platform how we build the app inside.

Thank you. Okay. Right. This Mike.

Great. Mike Ng from Goldman Sachs. I just have 2. First, you've spent a lot of time today talking about social and identity features. I was just wondering if you could go through a couple of your favorite examples about which features are the biggest engagement, monetization and retention drivers and how you think about ROI when you invest in these new features. And then second, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the time line. Should we expect to see everything today live on Roblox at, say, the next 1, 2, 3 years?

First, we have no comment on time line. All visionary stuff. We have 60 teams, each staff, amazing people that are trying to do super long pool, world-class visionary stuff as fast as we can. So I think the time line -- you'll have to look backwards and see going forward. I'm wondering, Matt, if you want to do this one because you're intimately involved in social.

So I just want to talk about some of the social work that we've been doing. And it's really about connecting people. So how do I take my friends, which are off the platform, connect with them on the platform and then engage different experiences. And there's different parts of that. There's the social network component of it and building out that graph. But then there's a lot of deep technology around how can I invite somebody to an experience they've never played in no matter where they are in the world, and they can join me instantaneously. And when we see people playing together, in particular, with the strong social connections, we see engagement go up. So I think as that engagement goes up, it translates into economic opportunity for all of the developers. And I think that, in turn, reminds the developers to create these social experiences. So it becomes this flywheel that feeds on itself.

Great. Thanks a lot. Let's go over here. Welcome.

Hi, everyone. I'm Rahul Kishore from Coatue. My question is one big part of the platform that you guys innovated on is Robux themselves. And now it sounds like from today, the applications of what you can use Robux for are expanding materially into even things in the real world. And similarly, there's now ways of gaining Robux that aren't by developing experiences, but maybe by selling items or participating in auctions, et cetera. How do you guys think about maybe letting people get closer to buying Robux as directly from you more often than maybe through app stores? And then the other side, more -- allowing more people to actually cash out of the ecosystem? Is that something that you think about? Or do you want more money to just sort of be flowing inside of your economy?

Yes. So I'll go first, and then maybe -- if Craig wants to jump on this one. We are continuously trying to democratize how many people can pull Robux out of the system. There's certain complexities around just implementing that and taxation and stuff, but I do think we're constantly dropping that threshold. And Craig, I don't know if you want to talk more about the on/off platform.

Sure. In terms of buying Robux, there's lots of alternatives. So about 20% of the Robux acquirers is typically done through prepaid card, whether they're digital or physical, which is sold through all different types of retail channels. There's an ability to buy Robux directly from us using a credit card as well as through a mobile channel. So to the extent we want to make it as easy as possible for people to acquire Robux, whether it be on platform or off platform, through us through a third-party partner.

All right. Welcome.

[indiscernible] from Standard. So I had an engineering question maybe on the education vertical and how that's sort of forcing maybe further development in the Roblox engine. Because like from a gamer perspective, like the concept of a weld, like as an abstract type, it's fine to leave it at that high level. But if you're doing the physics simulation like for kids to learn in school, maybe that weld has to be even like broken down into constituent parts. So is the education business sort of forcing further like decomposition? Or like getting sort of into deeper and deeper like fundamental principles of engineering or simulation that you guys are working on?

Yes. I think this is a 2-part one. First, I just want to rehighlight that we introduced the Roblox community fund, and we've got a huge vision there. I'm going to dance with engineering, then Barbara, if anyone else wants to talk about the community fund more, I'll kick it over to you. I think ultimately, we're seeing more and more experiences like this where Roblox Studio itself will be a place where people build the construction experience. And then, for example, in our first robotics partnership, in that experience, you may see that level of abstraction, where at our core game engine level, we have these very deep physically kind of things. But that abstraction can be changed. And I believe in our first robotics partnership, you're going to be building with the various pieces that come in your robot kit, which will be abstract. And then Barb, I don't know if anything else you want to highlight about the community fund.

Yes. I mean the community fund is really a way that we can accelerate all the experiences on Roblox to help people get core educational, foundational stem skills and working with these incredible partners. It's really just our way to democratize access to education and skills. So we're really excited about it.

Thanks. We'll keep going until we move to the cloud. So one more on the left. Thanks.

Just a question on third-party content is, I guess, what I would call it. So just watching the Squid Game's dynamic kind of develop and seeing how that enabled content on your platform that was great and super valuable. But I would imagine that if someone tried to coopt Mickey Mouse and create that kind of content on your platform, that probably wouldn't be okay. And this isn't about Netflix versus Disney or anything like that. It's just generally higher level. How do you think about what is okay, what isn't? Are there -- is there like a framework that you use around that in terms of opportunity versus risk?

Yes. I'm going to kick that over to Craig. Just highlight -- there's huge fan affinity for Squid Game. And we saw in our platform within days of that show going somewhat viral, many places where you could play red light, green light. And it was absolutely amazing. In that case, it was a brand that makes them like that. But I think Craig can frame it higher for you.

Sure. The principle is simple. The person that makes the decisions is the person that owns the IP, right? And we follow DMCA. So if IP owner wants that stuff of taken down, we absolutely will. But it's super important for us. I mean we have all sorts of creators on our platform. We want to respect everyone's IP. We also recognize that we're in a land where some of the best ways that fans show affection is through doing all these kind of morphs of IPs. So we really depend on the IP owner to decide what they want to do.

And sorry, just to follow up on that. So is that kind of like something might emerge on -- something might emerge, it might find its way on to the -- your platform and then it's up to the owner of the IP to say, hey, guys, that's not okay with us, and then you'll respond to that?

Absolutely. But what we see is a lot of situations that are actually the opposite, where we have NASCAR saying, how do I get my IP into a game, right? How do I get people using my IP? That seems to be where more of what a lot of brands are focused on right now, at least on our platform.

Awesome. Welcome. Let's go to the right.

In our survey of the game developers, the common complaints of not building with the higher fidelity or input richness that you guys are capable of doing tends to be lagged load times, in some cases, just a desire to design the lowest common denominator device. What are some of the things you guys are doing to kind of combat that, to actually get kind of the higher fidelity games to your platform in larger numbers? And then just as a follow-up, how important is this topic actually to drive users going forward?

I think this is really fun in that 16 years ago, Roblox almost didn't work anywhere. And when you look at a Roblox experience, there's a bunch of blocks. And on YouTube, you can follow the trajectory year-by-year of the increasing fidelity. Arseny really framed it well with this radical technical challenge. And the radical technical challenge is combining low latency, fast join, immediate local response, connecting around the world with radical scale of these types of things. So it's a huge opportunity for us to keep refining this. We do think you're going to see more and more P50 average phones getting more and more immersive, more realistic. It's a huge engineering effort. Dan, I don't know if you want to add anything to that on top of what I'm saying.

Yes. I mean I think you hit the main points. But the way you should think about for these developers is they are going to be able to build at the high end, and then we'll take the burden of scaling it down, but I think it'll be a little different from the traditional AAA type game development assumes an extremely expert user to get those effects. Our goal is always to give amateurs -- like I'm an amateur game builder. I'm not a professional, right? How do I get with something that's like really high quality with my skill set, right? So since the other side is we want to be able to scale from the highest to lowest but also allow the, in essence, median developer to do much more incredible things than normally would be able to do.

Let me add one more thing because you asked about the importance of that fidelity. The amazing thing, if you see the history of the gaming industry and the entertainment industry, is that additional fidelity is not the major driver all the time. So there are times where something that looks amazing actually is very successful, but there are times where something that looks low fidelity but still looks nice actually becomes the most successful experience on the platform or on any other gaming platform. So the amazing thing about the UGC platform is that you're going to see that range of experiences, and the market is going to decide where they want to spend their time on.

And just as a quick follow-up. Maybe you can bring Mike into the conversation. Is there a certain level of investment that you need to maintain or increase to kind of continue to build out data centers to be able to support some of these issues?

Yes. I mean, Mike, I'm going to jump in and that we make no compromise here. And more and more of our engineering team is either the infrastructure to support this or what it takes to do this. What you're talking about is interesting also in that it's been a common thread of Roblox developers for the last 16 years. And 16 years ago, it was -- my game barely works. Can I make it work anywhere? I think in 5 or 10 years, when a lot of what Arseny talked about and Mike will support, we'll still have this, and we will still have developers saying, oh, my God, I can't get photorealism on a P5 Android phone, like what's going on, and do more? So I think this is just going to be a constant thing.

Somebody is behind me. I'm going to go ahead and ask one more. Will you guys let -- I'll e-mail Anna about 10 more, but will you guys let third-party developers build their own ad networks?

Yes. I think this is -- I'll let Craig comment on this and how we're approaching this right now.

Sure. We have very much an open platform from that perspective. I think the thing that's going to be -- that we need to ensure is that it's being done in a way that's appropriate for our creators and then appropriate for our users. So making sure that all of our policies, and we talk a lot about safety and civility, and making sure that's done in an absolutely appropriate, safe and compliant way for all the parties involved.

And then will you try to take a cut of any other ad revenue as they build our own ad network on top of Roblox?

I think it's early to comment on that. What I would say is we're in a very fortuitous position right now that we've got this amazing business that really runs without advertising. And so the thought we have is we have an awesome opportunity to control user experience gently, so that Roblox always feels like a place you want to go to and the ads always feel like ads you want rather than things that get in your way. Okay. Let's go to the cloud maybe. And I'm going to look for Anna. And Anna, if you've got any questions streaming, I'm going to hand it over to you.

Yes. I'll read them from here. One question is, as Facebook and others talk about the evolution of the metaverse becoming perhaps the next mobile phone in terms of importance, how do you think about form factor of how Roblox participates in the metaverse, say, 5 years from now, VR/AR applications versus existing ones like phone, tablet, console?

Yes. I think this is a add-on to the prior question, which is our belief is we're developing technology that is going to be amazing on all devices.

Okay. And then it seems like seasonal factors back-to-school, for example, have impacts on the business currently. What's the tipping point for the business and other broader metaverses to make it more stable, "always-on" type of business that's more in against seasonal or macro factors?

Yes. So I think Mike is going to want to dive in on this one because he knows our seasonal charts. I will say that firstly, I feel we have a very resilient business. We've been doing this for 16 years. We know what the seasons look like. We can predict them quite well. And so we actually don't think that seasonality is all a lack of resilience, but I'm going to let Mike jump on that.

Yes. I'm in violent agreement. So many businesses are seasonal. It turns out Christmas is a big season for lots of companies. Things happen in the summer. February is a bad month in almost every business. It's cold and it's short. And so seasonality happens. I wouldn't get too hung up on seasonality. I don't think it's a sign of a lack of resilience. I think it's just big scale businesses have certain periods of the year where consumers are spending and others where they don't. I mean the overall economy has seasonality. So I know we don't get too hung up, but we understand it very well. But I'm not too worried about it.

If I may add, the one thing that we spoke about today, both in international growth and in aging up, that starts smoothing up more of the platform in a way that these changes are not that material over time.

Yes. And just riffing on that, we used to have daily seasonality where at 4:00 every afternoon, Roblox was 5x larger than it was at 2 a.m. We don't really have that anymore because we can see all the different countries, Russia, Brazil, the U.S., Asia, all dovetailing together. And so in that sense, we're already much more consistent.

How do you guys think about the long-term mix of the developer base, in other words, amateur versus institutional? And how might this influence the working capital dynamics?

Yes. Who wants -- anyone want to take that?

[indiscernible] So I mean I think we've seen as certainly as the economic opportunity for being a core platform continues to expand. We're seeing more and more creators come out of the platform of different shapes and sizes. So we have a very vibrant community, basic creator -- creators coming from the community. And we're also seeing indies and professional [indiscernible] coming out of the platform. I think what's been exciting to see it's been very additive. We're seeing them all mix, and we're seeing indies come in and hire community creators and all sorts of interesting things happening. And then I think it's very, very additive. I can't really comment on the economic [indiscernible]

I don't think it's an either or. I think it's a little bit of a false choice. I mean Alex is a great example who started, I guess, probably as a hobbyist. And I don't know if you would call them institutionally, certainly building a big business. So I don't think it's an either or. I think it's an and. There's going to be massive creators and some of them as they grow and get bigger will maybe morph from how this person might characterize them at the beginning to something that looks much more corporate, institutional, whatever your term is from a working capital standpoint. We have a lot of great things in our financial model, one of which is that generally, working capital we're neutral. We tend to get paid upfront through the purchase of Robux and the consumption is very quick. So generally, we're -- over a year, we're working capital neutral as we grow. We do have periods of time like in the fourth quarter where we actually see a big working capital outflow. And then it comes right back in the first quarter. So it shouldn't have an impact.

All right. Thank you. Anna, next question.

You mentioned that the flywheel effects of flywheel growing internationally. Have you seen local developers or local content increase as Roblox become larger globally?

For sure. Yes. I think Craig highlighted that in the world graph there.

Could you say the question one more time?

I think as we've seen, we're a content growing globally, not just from the U.S.

Yes. We're seeing -- yes. So our -- thank you. Our creator community is getting increasingly global. Contents is coming from all different types of places. We're seeing different preferences for content all across the world. So it could just be the rank order of games. And we're also starting to see slight indications of content preference based on where the creators are. So for example, there might be a slight preference for -- in East Asia for content produced in Vietnam, for example. So it's very, very interesting. I think the larger thing to take away, though, is that we have this incredibly large creator community producing content for a global stage. So it's very, very resilient and producing tremendous amounts of quality content.

Okay. The next question is about older users. Can you talk about the percentage of older users that are -- were -- that joined -- sorry, that are part of growing older with Roblox as opposed to new users to the platform?

Cool. I'll take that one to Manuel. And then, Mike, if you have anything to riff on it.

Sure. Yes. I don't have a specific split right now, but the platform is very healthy in both ends. It's healthy in the sense that every day, new users come into the platform. And as those new users join the platform, they may come from different countries. They may come from different demographics and different ages. So we're seeing a healthy inflow in that regard. And the second component is, as Dave mentioned, all of our investment goes towards engagement, which is, in many ways, a leading indicator of retention. As people spend more time on the platform, it's more likely that they're going to continue to be on the platform. So we also see healthy trends in that direction.

Yes. Some folks on my team have been doing some work on this area. It's a great question, but just keep this in mind. Let's use the 17- to 24-year-old age demographic. If you're 19 and you're a user on Roblox, you're likely new because the odds that you were playing 7 years ago is quite low. Just the scale of the platform was so much smaller then than it is today. So in that age demographic, it's really difficult to -- the data is not telling you very much. Almost everybody is new. Now 13 to 16 is really interesting because you have what had been our core age demographic of 9 to 12 is, in fact, aging up. And in that case, it's a little more than half and half. So lots and lots of users are staying -- going from 12 to 13, 14, 15, they're staying on the platform, and we're also attracting new users as well. So that data point is going to get richer and more interesting as time goes on. So I guess another way of saying keep asking us that question, and we'll keep responding to it. But I think it's a really good, healthy mix.

Thanks, Mike.

The next question is about talent. We talk a lot about growing our engineering team and our product teams. It's an incredibly competitive environment. What is Roblox having to do in order to attract that talent? And should we see an impact on perhaps your cost structure in the future because of it?

I'll kick that one over to Barb first. And then Craig, if you want to riff on it.

Yes. So we are in a very fortunate position where we have an incredible vision and mission, right, to reimagine the way people come together and connect 1 billion people on Roblox with optimism and civility. And so that vision and mission is actually incredibly exciting for top tech talent. The opportunity to work on the most complex technical challenges out there are just extraordinary. And so as a result, the more we tell our story and tell folks about this incredible opportunity to work on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to build our platform, that's actually quite compelling. So that's probably the most important thing, it's literally for us to build awareness of what we're doing at Roblox so that folks can know and join what we're doing. So that's a big one. And of course, we are highly competitive, right? We make sure we have the best work environment, the most interesting technology teams. The teams get to work on these individual teams where they have a ton of autonomy, which is very compelling to top talent. And of course, we're very competitive on all the other dynamics and dimensions that product engineering superstars find important.

Craig, do you want to riff more on that and maybe touch also on our new college grad program?

Sure. A couple of things. I think we put the same rigor that we applied to our product and engineering to the talent process at our company. We -- Dave and a lot of the people, this has been said, a lot of time focusing on actually how acquire talent and do it in a world-class way. So working with Barb on our employment brand and compensation and making sure that we're doing cutting-edge stuff, making sure that the candidate experience is continually outstanding and serving the people that come through, building a world-class talent organization and investing in that. So I think there's a tremendous amount we've done. And for us, hiring the best talent is one of the most important things that we're doing. So it's very top of mind for everyone up here. Specifically, in university recruiting, our goal is to have the best university recruiting program in the world. And Rebecca that joined -- ran our education program, she originally joined us through an acquisition Imbellus. And Imbellus allows us to do testing in Roblox. So we can invite any college kid, and it doesn't matter what school you go to. You can actually play these assessment tools in Roblox where we can assess your cognitive skills and your systems skills and your thinking skills in a very, very rigorous fashion, which ultimately lets us really create an even playing field for anyone. It's a very inclusive and welcoming process. And it's those sorts of investments, right, really investing in the innovation of hiring people that distinguish Roblox. So there's a lot happening here.

Just on the financial side, we build up forecast starting with headcount every year and the cost of headcount, and we are -- agree with the question or the comments on the question, quite well aware of the growth in compensation for great people. Great people also produce great results. So insofar, it's really worked out well for us to make that investment. And like I said, we build our models up from that in the developer community. And then everything else comes from those things. And so when we prioritize those, we've tended to be able to build healthy financial models and then have tended to be able to deliver really great top line growth, which leaves room for those kinds of investments and should for many years to come.

Yes. And I think this when we talk about the primary product in the company as our Roblox operating system, the people and how we do it. I'm also going to ask Matt, if you want, just to chime in a little because this is about both people and systems and how they come together through the whole life of the person working with Roblox, how they work on teams that are loosely coupled, aligned with our vision and autonomous. And Matt's actually running teams that are building software to help do that.

I'll just riff a little bit on what others have said. We run 50 different product development teams. And what we try and do is drive innovation across all of those teams in parallel while simultaneously recognizing that there's lots of interdependencies in building co-experience environments like this. And so we are building out our own tool sets in order to let those teams work together more efficiently and still have that level of independence that it takes to really drive innovation. And it's that same level of independence that it's really becomes very attractive from a recruiting and a talent perspective. So I think when you add like the systems that we're building to try and drive innovation, you add some of the work that we're doing through like the Imbellus acquisition to try and open up the aperture of the people who we can look at to try and bring into Roblox, it creates a lot of advantages that we have and that we're building internally.

Okay. The next question is legacy video games -- sorry, legacy video game companies often see drop-offs in engagement, sometimes based on the content cycle. Fortnite in 2019 is one example. You're in a different position with 10.5 million creators versus a few hundred or a few thousand developers and we really haven't seen a large drop off in user engagement at Roblox. Can we conclude at this point you're immunized from bad risk? If user engagement did drop off, would you step into protect developers like you did during the October outage?

Yes. So great question. I like that you're nuancing that we are a technology platform ecosystem company, not a game company, and that a lot of what people are doing on Roblox is play, is learning, is going more and more stuff. We would never comment on what we would do in a future situation like that. I think what we would do is to just what we're talking about today, which is, as Matt said, 50 product teams making sure they're all with amazing people, making sure we're taking a long visionary approach on all of those teams. So I think in a sense, you're talking about a -- what's your reaction to a bad situation. I think our reaction is let's focus on growing the business, and the best defense is a good offense.

I just want to make a comment. It is true that as the question was asked certain games, individual games and companies have a cycle where they tend to go up and then come back down. It's actually not the case that it doesn't happen inside Roblox on individual experiences. It's just -- also, there's just so much content. There are many experiences that have very long lives on Roblox, just to be clear. But we do also have this advantage of content velocity. So there's always so much new content coming onto the platform. We used to look at old like Google Trends data on Roblox. And a lot of times, individual games tend to spike and come down. Our platform looks incredibly consistent over a long period of time. And I think that's just the volume of great content and the volume of great and talented creators, building content.

I'll just add one thing, which Alex referenced in his presentation, as been global, experiences sometimes get ahold in new geos, and we saw the Roblox seem high. He just noted how much volume is getting from non-English speakers, non-U.S. And so I think it just really shows the value of a global platform.

Great question. Anna?

How have you been accelerating the self-service initiative for brands and artists? Is the long-term strategy continue connecting brands with artists -- with brands and artists with developers? Or do you plan to make Roblox Studio easy and simple enough to create engaging formats for brands and music labels to leverage internally?

Yes. Craig and Manuel could jump in on this one. So who wants to start?

I'm happy to. I think the answer to your question is -- both is yes. Again, it's all how it plays out over time. I think we've been working carefully with brands over the last year. I think we really understand what they're trying to do, what they're trying to accomplish on our platform. There's a lot of work we're doing to make it simpler and simpler for them to do it on their own, whether that's them working with a community studio, whether that's them working with an agency that has been trained on how to do that or whether that's them doing it on their own. I think in the long run, as I shared earlier, this -- looking 10 years from now, this will be like Instagram. If I'm a company, I want to have a social presence. I'll have a team that does this. And I think lots of large companies will have teams that will be building experiential interfaces to their brand for users to engage in platforms like Roblox. So absolutely. I think it'll be all of the above.

I'll add one thing. One of the initiatives we're working on is to make more and more of the studio product available through APIs and other interfaces and things like that. So one could imagine that in the future, people will build tool sets specifically for brands or for music that just rest on top of our tooling. And so it may not be us that's building something specific to some particular community, but we would like our developer community, our creator community to be building those tools on top of what we offer.

Yes. And we typically like to think of self-service as a really high mark. It's much more difficult to build a self-service platform than a bespoke handheld platform. It gets into publishing moderation tools, all of those things. So building self-service doesn't, in any way, remove other options, but it's the most difficult way to go.

I'll add one last thing. As you saw in some of the slides that Christina and John presented, some of these brands and artists just start from putting items on the avatar marketplace. Then they may create an event on the platform. And my expectation is that as they look more for a permanent presence in the platform, it's more likely that they take over those teams and actually, they start investing on their own. So this, to me, in many ways goes beyond just having like a Facebook page or Instagram page. This is equivalent to when brands and music partners and anybody decided I want to have my website, I want to have my app and I want to have my place on Roblox. And I expect that to be something that we'll see in the future.

Awesome.

Okay. And I think we have time for one more question, so here we go. One version of interoperability could be the ability for non-Roblox experiences or games to be able to port seamlessly to a Roblox experience. Would it be plausible to envision a future where Roblox can automatically emulate a game built elsewhere to a Roblox experience?

So I'll chime on this one, then, Dan, I don't know if you want to go anymore. So there are -- there's actually really beauty in that a lot of our creators already build emulations of other things on Roblox all the way to the point where there's such a big fan presence for what Roblox was like 16 years ago that, rather than resurrecting that code from 16 years ago, they've built a Roblox 2006 simulator, and it feels exactly like it did. And you can go through various other types of things like this. So I don't know, Dan, if you want to riff anything from that.

Yes. I think I'll get something Matt just mentioned, which is with the open cloud work that I think Antoni was talking about the ability to build custom developer tools really do open up the ability to build almost like translation layers from anything to Roblox in a way we probably can't imagine. Part of the reason we're opening that up is we want the same sort of creativity to hit kind of our tooling that hit our experiences and the items available in the marketplace and so on. So I would kind of say the sky is the limit. It's hard to be specific about translating from something to us without knowing what that something is, but I think there's a lot of possibility in there.

And more and more, what we would call, whether you call it metaverse content or immersive content, from our point of view is going to have physical properties, material properties, embedded code, a lot more similarity to the real world. So there may be cases where legacy content is not at that high fidelity format. It's meshes and textures, and we would have to automatically more and more turn it into our physically-based format. So anyways, with that, I think that's the last question. So I'm going to stand up and thank everyone. So thank you, shareholders, and everyone out there. Thank you, executive team. Thank you, Roblox community. Thank you, shareholders and investors. We appreciate all of your support. It's been a wonderful day. Thank you. All right.