Roblox Corporation (RBLX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Wow. Welcome. Welcome. This is the first year I can almost not see all the way to the back. So welcome. So this second is the highlight of my year. We do it all for this second to be together with you. So thank you for coming. I say it every year, this is arguably the epicenter of the world's creative energy at this moment in time. There is no other gathering anywhere in the world with as much creativity. And our creative community just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Of course, we have creators, developers, artists, producers. We have influencers now. We have educational developers, we have brand partners, we have all kinds of people joining our creative community. And this expansion of our platform is really all about communication and connection. So we have so much cool stuff today. The show is amazing. We're going to give you hints of what's to come. But before we do that, I just want to take one second while we're all here to start with one big question, and it really is the big question, why are we here and like there's a lot of obvious answers, right? Of course, we're here to build businesses. We're here to learn about Roblox. We're here to connect with friends, some of which have been 15-year friends. But beneath it, I think there's something really much deeper, more important kind of like something really human actually, and I'd like to take a step back because I mean we've been watching the news and the headlines for the last 10 years, social media. The world is getting more polarized or less happy. We're more anxious. And of course, while we recognize that promise of technology, of course, there's risk. But there's something very special about this community and the platform we're building and I'm filled with immense optimism because what we're building here is really a platform for communication and connection. And in this room, we understand that technology doesn't have to make things worse. Through our creativity, we can bring people together, we can spark conversations, we can help people connect and find the good in each other, and we're just getting started. So that's really why I think we're here. We're here to reimagine how people come together. And we've been doing it for 20 years. Like we know what we're doing, and we're going to keep doing it. So that's why we're here. We're really building a new way for people to come together. And now with that, we've had these deep thoughts so let's jump into the show, okay? So first off, where are we, 65 million DAUs like, Oh my goodness. And you've been -- some of you were here at the very first BLOXcon, this has been growing every single year, every single year for over 16 years. And what you've seen as we've grown every single year over the next -- the last 15 years, is that we've increased our hours a lot and going to ask for the next slide here. So as we continue to grow, we've also got incredible engagement on our platform. Do any of you remember being at the very first BLOXcon where we set the target at 400 million hours. And I think we were doing 5 million or 10 million hours at that time. We're doing 5 billion hours now. So it's about literally 1,000 times that and the engagement, of course, on our platform is incredible. I believe we have one of the highest engagements for any social platform, 2.3 hours per day average for every DAU on our platform. And the amount of content is absolutely amazing. So we had over 15 million experiences visited in 2022, which is just absolutely incredible. It's a testament to the creators on our platform and there's such a broad variety of experiences that are supporting what people are starting to do on Roblox. So of course, we have games, but we also have educational experience. So for example, we've talked about visiting the pyramids and how we're going to ultimately allow people not just to visit the pyramids in a history lesson. But I think more and more in the last year or two, we started thinking we won't just visit the pyramids, we'll see a really good AI-supported ancient Egyptian when we go to the pyramid. So there's a lot of good stuff to come here. Of course, entertainment is growing on our platform. More and more groups like Blackpink are really going to be performing all of the time. And we're going to see new forms of entertainment. For example, we know that ultimately, media that we view as movie or TV is going to become interactive, immersive, we're going to be able to watch our favorite characters from anywhere. And I -- this is a fortune prediction from Dave, we are going to see shows like the Hunger Games on platforms like Roblox that are interactive that take several days and you'll be able to follow your favorite stars. So let's talk about growth. And let's start with around the world. The opportunity on our platform is so huge. U.S. and Canada alone, 14 million daily active users but one thing that we've talked about for a long time for some of you that have been with us for a long time, we really inside the company, don't talk about aging up anymore. We are aged up right now. You'll hear some more stats, 13 and up is growing 33% year-on-year in our platform right now. International is growing twice as fast. And I want to just highlight a few countries that really show off our systemic way of thinking. Let's first fly over to Japan. So actually met some people, some creators from Japan last night and Japan literally in the last year went viral. It's because of our systemic approach, it's because of better search and discovery. We've really upped the translation quality on the platform. Performance, quality, all of that. Popular -- we are starting to see really great experiences created in Japan. One is Escape Running Head by manato48. And we have some Japanese creators in the audience. And this is a playbook that we're going to take around the world. Let's quickly look at some numbers from Japan. Year-on-year growth in Japan, both as far as ours, over 100% daily active user growth, 100% our growth and a lot of people say Japan is one of the top gaming places in the world. Year-on-year Roblox spent in Japan, 144% year-on-year, which is absolutely amazing. So the market keeps expanding. And it's not just Japan. Let's take a look at Brazil and India as well. So Brazil really interesting, right, because Brazil was one of our very first markets. It's a huge mature market. It's nearly half the size of the United States and Brazil grew 38% last year. India, 1 billion people, just interviewed someone from India yesterday. India growing close to 1 million daily actives, 40% year-on-year. So we have a huge opportunity in really every country around the world, and it's feasible to imagine our 1 billion daily active user goal purely through international. But the growth isn't just driven by us. It's driven by our amazing dev community. And I want to vision -- just take a peek at this amazing creator ecosystem we're going. So let's just zoom into our creator ecosystem. And first, really exciting that we're going to share this stat that the average bookings of our top 10 creators in the last six months through 2022, I believe it was through June was $27 million, which is really amazing for the platform. And those creators have grown 50% in their bookings over the last 3 years. But as we dig deeper, our top 100 developers are making nearly $1 million a year, and that's grown 2.2x. And if we go all the way down to developer #1000 right now, we talked about it 2 or 3 years ago. We would like to get developer #1000 to north of $30,000 a year, we're at $60,000 a year, and that's 4x since 2020. And it creates an amazing opportunity on our platform. One other awesome thing right now, there are over 20,000 creators on Roblox making north of $750 a year, 20,000 of them that is less than 1,000 of our 20 million creators, but it's still an amazing stat. So let's jump to our vision, really 1 billion people daily. We're getting really closer to this vision from when we had about 1 million and then 50 million. And we talk about how we keep growing internationally, all ages broadening economic opportunity and of course, growing the way people use our platform. Today, we're going to dive really with a lot of focus into 3 major innovation areas that are driving frequency on our platform. And we actually believe even in our core, the place where we got started, USA 9- through 16-year-old players there's an amazing opportunity to grow there as well. So the first thing we're going to talk about is personalized and expressive avatars. We're going to talk about a vibrant social graph, which really includes getting everyone connected to Roblox friends and real-life friends and finally, immersive 3D communication. So let's get started with Avatars. Okay. 2006, the Roblox classic avatar we know and love. For a long time, this was -- this powered Roblox, our vision for Roblox though, and you all know it is any avatar that we want to identify with. And I keep saying whether it's Roblox classic, it's a realistic soldier, it's a realistic fashion model, it's cartoony, or it's human, we really want to cover the whole ecosystem. We took small steps with Rthro and Anthro avatars. And then over the last 6 to 12 months, we've introduced voice chat, camera syncing, facial animation, lip syncing, better clothing, layered clothing, which is a huge technical accomplishment. But this is just the start. And I want to share a very Roblox way of thinking about this, which is more and more things that have traditionally been us doing it, we really want our creator community to do that. And what you're going to see over the next 6 to 12 months, is first getting into anyone can create. So UGC system is going to open to every single person on the platform, and it's going to open to everything. Avatars, heads, face, all of that. We are going to do this in a much more sophisticated way than those of you that remember T-shirts, okay? And so trust us in that we now have the knowledge to build a very vibrant, robust economy that nears a real-world economy. So stay tuned as we start to roll this out on not just Avatars but on cars, on trucks, on trees, on all of really every asset. This is a vision since the start of Roblox and that is really everyone should be a creator. All 66 million of our DAUs should be creating some of the patterns that we've seen in some of the very early Roblox tycoon games everywhere. Cars, avatars clothing, everything. We talked about it last year. We had a -- we used Project Runway as an example. We're getting close to that. If you're making a fashion game. The clothing that your users will be able to create an experience will become persistent. And when we talk about supporting creation everywhere, we're talking about your experiences can allow users to edit 3D meshes, edit textures, save those persistently and save those safely. So hang on for that. Finally, on our Avatar system, arguably a little overdue because we prioritized other things. You see more and more super high-quality movement system stuff, more and more starting to be driven by AI really and starting to jump into real-world actions like picking things up. And then finally, the vision is, ultimately, if you want photorealistic avatars, we want to support that. Not everyone is going to choose a photorealistic Avatar. And if you want to support AI-driven creation rather than manual editing for your avatars, we're going to support that. So let's do a little mockup of what you're going to be seeing in the next year on Roblox. So this is me, this is your experience, I'm in your experience, let's get started. I'm going to build an Avatar in your experience. But the first thing I'm going to do is you're going to have access to images on the phone. So I'm going to upload a selfie, all right. I uploaded my Selfie. I'm going to say, "I'd like to be an astronaut", text prompt driven by ML, driven maybe by style clues of your experience. So they have -- okay? So this -- let's put a helmet on as well. This is going to be your style, okay? If you have a style, this is going to be an astronaut in the style of your experience, not generic. Now of course, I'm at RDC. So I want to look cooler, so I want to be like a biker instead. So let's put that in. I'll turn into a biker really quickly. And now finally, maybe because we're in the virtual world, I want to look a little more buff and a little more cartoony so let's buff me up automatically and make me more cartoony. There we go. Okay, that's better. Okay. Cool. And then finally, you've seen a path for really AI-driven Avatar creation. Traditional Avatar creation is sliders, knobs, buttons, modifiers. Of course, we will support that as well. So let's do some traditional modification, manipulate the cage and let's save my avatar. So chaching we're done, and that's my new Avatar. So you're going to see all of this rolling out. We're deeply hard at work on this. This is a really Roblox key philosophy. Sometimes we do stuff and then we figure out it would be better if you did it. And really, the ultimate long-term goal is all avatars come from your experiences. So hang on. Next up, natural movement. Like I said, lots of work going on. Finally, we're going to have Crouch. Finally, we're going to have better swimming. Finally, we'll start really dialing in with ML-driven motion as well as key frame motion on the platform as well. And also on top of all this, we're starting to dive into more generic verbs, picking stuff up, how to open doors and making that cross Roblox. Okay, next step. We talked about awesome avatars, vibrant social graph is super important for us. We know our metrics support that when we have 17.3 million friendships made on the platform every day, we can see the retention going up. And so we've been hard at work on a lot of things making it easier to find friends. We've really been hard at work on letting people connect to their real-world friends as well. I want to show you a demo of something that's really coming. And the application of this, one application of this is when we build Roblox office, and we have all 2,000 plus of us, it's impossible to remember all of our user names, we need to use real names. And we're going to be rolling out support of real names on Roblox free from the contact importer or you'll be able to modify this. This will initially be 17 up over time, 13 and up. We're going to do this very, very carefully but it really changes the way the product feels when I go to a company meeting and I can recognize everyone. I probably recognize 50 user names, but I recognize several hundred real person names. The other thing we're going to do is make it really easy to share image and video, not just with your OS-level screen capture, not just with Roblox-level screen capture. But with your triggered API calls to in an opt-in case, do a screen capture or a video. And then these captures, of course, are going to be shareable and also, of course, users going to have a collection of these snapshots. Think of in the real world, we go to Disney World and we get a shot at the bottom of the roller coaster ride. If you have an experience with a roller coaster ride, I welcome you to automatically take a screenshot at the bottom of the roller coaster or maybe a quick video and let a user who opts-in -- really collect that. Okay. Finally, you've heard this vision from us a lot. And maybe some of you remember it from last year, which is if we step back from gaming and we step way outside the box, what's the future of human communication? Where is this going from all of our efforts to stay connected? Telegraph, phone system, SMS texting over the last 3 years video, we really believe, ultimately, this all goes to 3D real-time simulation. There's so many benefits as we know, of feeling we're in the same space, our ability to eye-track, our ability for things to sound real that more and more, we believe 3D simulation will just emerge as a natural superset of video and audio. So we are really focusing on a lot of platform level functionality that you can all add to your experience. Let's take a look on voice, for example. On voice, we right now have -- really 12% of our 13 and up using voice. We've got about 2 million voice players worldwide. That's going up by 30%. We ultimately know everyone on Roblox will have the option of using text or voice as they see fit. So we showed you a little demo -- I don't know if you remember this, where Kiran and Mahesh came out last year, and we showed you an example of a demo, but we want to show you the evolution of this demo. And we're really going to show you a platform that is going to show off a collection of API calls that will be open sourced for you to use as well and we're going to make this platform open source. So I want to invite Garima Sinha on stage with me, and we're going to give you a little demo of something we call Roblox Connect.

Hi, everyone. Really excited to be here. I'm going to plug in my phone so we can get started. See, I'm about to give you a call on your Android phone and it's actually going to work similarly on any platform like iOS or Desktop. You can just call your friends.

So confirming, I just got an operating-system level call, correct? iOS, Android, any device?

Right.

Awesome. Thank you. How are you? All right.

Good, how are you?

It's good to see you. Like, it's a real pleasure.

It's good to see you. This is so exciting.

Okay. I'm going to drag around the new selfie view, which is awesome, looks great. Hey, how is this -- I might have hung up when you called me. Sorry about that.

I'm going to give you another call because calls do disconnect.

Call me. I think when I dragged the selfie-view, I hung up. So call me back. So I want to show -- I'm going to set that -- so operating system-level access through phone calls?

Yes.

Okay. High five. New selfie view. Awesome.

And now we drag it.

Draggable selfie-view. Awesome. So how are we doing this stuff, Garima?

We have this amazing way we've integrated Gyro mode so you can really move your camera around and it still renders your surroundings the same way.

Okay. Does everyone get access to the camera gyro?

Yes.

Okay. Awesome.

And one other fun thing that I think a lot of people in audience care about is these mic and camera controls on top of your head, they're going to go away and become a really amazing streamlined experience control menu that actually you all can try in studio better today if you want to. So that's really exciting. And one more fun thing. I know, Dave, you talked a lot about how people have communicated for years and how -- where communication is heading. And we really believe the future is where people can feel like they're together. They can hang out with each other. They can do things with each other. And so on this, there's actually 3 communication modes. There is picture-in-picture, which you see us using right now, there is free play and there is cinematic.

Awesome.

And if I switch to cinematic.

Okay. I'm coming with you. Cool.

You see that we feel we are together.

Okay. So what's really exciting about this is I feel I'm in the same space with you and I can go back and forth from more of a traditional selfie view to being with you in this place together. Looks like you're roasting some marshmallows.

Okay. There's one other fun thing I wanted to share here, which is we have multiple locations. So people can actually choose to be in different spaces, we have a few here. I'm going to take us to a dock.

Awesome. I'll go follow you. I'll just say, okay, cool. Nice. Great to be here with you. Can we go swimming? I guess I want for the demo.

It really feels like vacation, doesn't it?

And you still got your marshmallow. That's cool.

The marshmallows goes where we go.

You must really like that marshmallow?

I do. I need to read it. I'm hungry.

Okay. Awesome. Okay. So highlighting, open source camera gyro exposed calling on every device, PC, Mac as well?

Mac, IOS, Android. Yes.

Okay. Awesome. Cool.

I'm going to try this one more time.

Okay. Going back to selfie-view maybe?

And one exciting thing is it works seamlessly between different modes. So like you can see Dave is in cinematic mode, I am in picture-in-picture, but the camera moves such that I can still see his face.

I love it. Okay. Awesome. And when is this going to be available, Garima?

It's going to be out in a few months, hopefully November. It's going to be fully open source when we launch it. So you all can start integrating. You can integrate with your current experiences or you can integrate into new communication forward experiences. It's really up to you how you want to use it.

Okay. Super awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you, Garima. Okay. So you're getting a little look. So what we want to do is we want to support -- of course, the traditional Roblox pattern, join your friend, but more and more support spontaneous joins as well, a little more spontaneous, get notified. If you've opted in, if your friends real spontaneous, literally a Roblox call and on any device anywhere. So in addition to Connect, I want to share you one other thing about our growth that many people don't realize on our platform. And that is 17 through 24. It's the fastest-growing demographic on Roblox, superfast, 36% year-on-year and I want to show you one other slide, and that is the size of this market is starting to get considerable. There's 27 million people over 17 on Roblox. It's growing very rapidly. So it's powered by all of the experiences that you are creating. I want to do a little whirlwind tour of 5 different experiences that are finally showing off the -- so first off -- several years ago, we said we're doing 17 plus, we did it. And of course, drinks on tap from [ Diepolder Club ]. Next up, we've talked a lot about improving the quality of our engine. I want to highlight something from MAXIMILLIAN Studios are just super high quality taking advantage of the latest rendering on Roblox. And this is a real testament to the vision of increasing the fidelity of our planned work. I think there's an old quote somewhere "This is Roblox like this is Roblox." And so really psyched about that. We're starting to see -- so thank you, MAXIMILLIAN Studios. We're starting to see more crossover between fun and entertainment. I don't want to highlight something Goldie Blox's Maker High, which is combining learning chemistry with an escape room type concept, which really, I think, has a huge potential to merge consumer and education. Next off, I want to show something from Filament Games in partnership with The Museum of Science from Boston. We've all seen Mission to Mars, literally millions of young people using Roblox to learn STEM, and also, of course, using Roblox side by side to connect and socialize and have fun. And then more and more, this vision of beauty, a fashion of creation starting to have a natural home on Roblox is really starting to come true with NARS Sweet Rush from Supersocial. And we do ultimately believe there's a huge opportunity here and that more and more clothing fashion will first show up on Roblox, maybe even before it shows up in the physical world. So there's so much to do beyond play here as far as learning as far as social. The next slide I want to talk about is platform expansion. And we have -- for many of you that have heard us speak about this, we said, look, 3D immersive multiplayer in the cloud, physically simulated stuff should work everywhere, should work on a phone, should work on a tablet, a PC, of course, a console and of course, in VR, very, very immersive. So happy to share that, of course, we've announced Meta Quest. And just a quick update on that. In the first 5 days of Meta Quest, 1 million installs. So a couple of highlights. Hard to find in-beta 1 million installs. And on a testament to the engineers and our platform view on this, there's over 50,000 experiences that are ready right now on Meta Quest. The work we've done on performance for Meta Quest, some of it is VR-specific, but some of it touches the whole platform. Android is faster because of some of the work we did this. So Meta Quest production launching to everyone this month, which we're really psyched about. And then finally, on platform expansion. One other thing that we'd like to share with you that we've kind of been working on in the background. Roblox available on PlayStation next month. Who was wondering what was under that? Was anyone? Come on, like we saw that. Okay. So Tsitsi Kolawole and [indiscernible] are both going to come out with me. We're going to show you a live 3-way demo, I'm on phone. Tsitsi is going to be on PlayStation. Ty is going to be on VR. So come on out, welcome. All right.

Thanks, Dave. And as Dave already mentioned, Roblox is finally on PlayStation. We're going to take you on a demo experience. Dave will be on his mobile device, Ty will be on his Meta Quest and I will be on PlayStation. Take it away, Ty.

Hey, everyone. Thank you, Tsitsi. Yes, I am on a Quest device. And we are in an experience called TWICE Square built by the developer Karta for the incredibly popular K-pop band, TWICE. Yes. It's super cool. So I think the best thing to do here is the roller coaster. So Dave, do you want to come join me on the rollercoaster?

Hey, I'm going to follow you, Ty, where are we going? And how is the VR working over there?

Yes, the VR is working great. As you mentioned, we've done a ton of work on performance. Hey Tsitsi, do you want to join us too or?

You go on ahead. I'll explore the pier, I'll catch up later.

Are you sure you want to ride a roller coaster on the main stage of RDC?

I do.

Be careful. Okay. I'm going to wait for the next coaster.

All right. Yes, looks like we just missed a coaster -- Oh, right here. Yes, let's hop on board. I'm in.

I'll see if I can get in or not.

This is what we get -- I'm in. Let's switch over to my screen, and I'll show you guys riding the roller coaster in VR in first person.

Okay.

And I will try not to throw up on stage.

Oh my gosh, Ty, I'm looking at what you're experiencing, like hang on.

Oh, here we are.

Okay.

You guys have to try this in headset. It is so immersive, it's so trippy. And you can see the performance that we've done. We support application space work, which doubles your frame rate without any work from the developer. We're cresting at the top. Oh my God, here we go.

Like how is your stomach right now? For me, I'm in pretty good shape.

I'm good. But I'm going to keep on riding. Let's see what Tsitsi is doing. Tsitsi, let's switch to Tsitsi's screen.

Yes, I'm over here. So I've been exploring the pier, and I have to say the performance on this device is absolutely amazing. As you can see, there's a lot of fidelity in the graphics. If you see the lighting in the environment, it's absolutely stunning. It really does bring your creations to life. What do you think, Dave?

I'm going to look up from my mobile screen at your place, Oh my god. So that it looks absolutely amazing. I'm going to hop out with Ty and we're going to come find you.

Come follow me.

All right, come and join me. I think one other thing that's super awesome on PlayStation is I have the ability to add my PlayStation friends as my Roblox friends. And so this really opens up the potential, right, for cross-play, Dave, we can join in on mobile. There you are. Hey, Ty.

Good to see you.

There you are. Come, we're exploring the pier. So yes, as we're doing this cross-play experience, you can join in on the mobile device, Ty can join in on his Meta Quest, and I can enjoy the experience and the comfort of my living room on the console, it truly is a next-level experience.

Okay. Awesome. So Ty, Tsitsi, I want to thank you for all the hard work because I know you've been working on this.

Thanks, Dave.

Thanks, Dave.

Thanks a lot. And I want to highlight -- so both Meta Quest and PlayStation, so many teams across is the whole company. And it's -- this is what has been one of the stickiest on scheduled projects we've ever done. It's been a glimmer in our eye for the last year. The whole company has gotten in on this. And stay tuned because there are more platforms to come. So let's go through today, just a highlight. Of course, desktop, of course, mobile, of course, tablet, console VR. For those of you that want to grab me off stage, I can give you a little hint, there's that obviously one or two other platforms. So stay tuned. Okay. Finally, on the Roblox virtual economy, I'm about to hand it over to Manuel. We know we're trying to build the largest virtual economy in the world to support you and really distribute as much of the Robux coming into Roblox to all of you to power our creation. I want to highlight, in the last 12 months ended June, over $680 million distributed to this community, and we want to make this number as big as we can. So thank you all. I'm going to be back in a little while. But next up is Manuel, and he's going to share more about the economy. So thank you.

Please welcome Roblox Chief Product Officer, Manuel Bronstein.

All right. Good morning, RDC. So wonderful to be here. And if you pay close attention to this slide, you might find your avatar in there, but it's actually better to see you all in real life. So I'm super excited to be here, and I want to start by sharing a heartfelt thank you. You're all the reason we're here. You are the driving force that motivates all of the work that we're putting to this platform, we call Roblox. And it's been a monumental 12 months with tremendous user growth, engagement and monetization. And it has been driven by all the work that you have done, creating new experiences, updating your existing experiences, creating avatars and avatar items and of course, the videos that actually promote all this content. And before I go into the numbers, I want to illustrate the last 12 months of Roblox through the lens of your creations. We know you work incredibly hard to the live millions of users, and so you have. So you showed us what's possible on the platform through experiences like front lines. Blox Fruits became a massive global success and especially in markets like Brazil and Vietnam, users couldn't get enough of it. You brought the world together and formed competitions like RB battles, and you gave people a voice in experiences like MIC UP. Immersive Avatar shopping became a thing, a really, really big thing in experiences like catalog avatar creator. And you saw it, we expanded that audience and we open up creation for 17 plus and you gave us Drinks On Tap. And let's, of course, not forget about some of the classics. There are so many like ultimate paintball, work at a pizza place, natural disaster survival and so many more. Your passion and creativity never cease to amaze us, and I can't wait to see what you create in the next year. Thank you very much. So now let's go into the numbers. I want to highlight some of the meaningful milestones we all crossed together in the last year. In 2022, collectively, all of your experiences got 210 billion visits. That's a huge number. And more interestingly, it was growing 28% year-over-year. We also had users coming to your experiences and play and spend time with their friends for 454 billion hours. That's more than 2 billion days or 6 million years. It's pretty, pretty impressive. So now I want to go and take a closer look and some of the new experiences and some of the work that are gaining momentum in this year. 955 experiences crossed more than 5 million visits like Pet Trading Card and [ Su ] World Tycoon. We have also 542 experiences, crossing more than 10 million visits like Tower Merge Simulator and Resistance Tycoon and 30 experiences across more than 100 million visits like Cart Ride Around Nothing and Steep Steps. Yes. It's hard to believe, and it's very impressive that these experiences were just created in the last 12 months. But of course, if we take a look back, if we look 3 years back in time, until June of this year, we had more than 55 experiences crossing 1 billion visits on the platform. That deserve a round of applause, come on. And 5 of those experiences as of June of this year, had crossed more than 10 billion visits, experiences like Brookhaven, Adopt Me, Turf Hell, Blox Fruits and Midcity, you're all showing amazing staying powers, and I want to congratulate you all. Congrats. So we continue to invest in our discovery system in support of this growth. For example, we're now serving more than 11 billion experience impressions every day and that's helping connect users with more than 7 million experiences, and these numbers keep growing quarter-over-quarter. And I want to show you an example of what we're calling discovery velocity. Take a look at this. Early in June, Rainbow Friends released an update called Chapter 2. A day later, the algorithm picked it up through Friends activity. And you can see in the graph, that small first bump. That information feed into our systems and more recommendations were gathered by Rainbow Friends, and you can see the second biggest bump in terms of impressions. We're working really, really hard to accelerate these systems so that when you create something new or when you update your experiences, it can get picked up and put in front of many users. But I know you have a lot of questions about search and discovery. We have had many listening sessions. And in those, we have heard what you're looking for in a discovery system. And what we're doing is we're formulating a set of principles that are going to guide our product road map, and I want to share those principles with you. The first one is predictability. We know it's important for you to not have any surprises. So we're overhauling the way in which we do experimentation so that we minimize the number of surprises as we learn and iterate. The second one is transparency. I know you want to better understand how these systems make decisions on what they recommend. And the third one is agency to give you control or give you the ability to influence the outcomes. This is going to be a multiyear journey and effort for us, but we're committing to develop the system using these principles and we will communicate often as we make this progress. On the transparency front, I just want to share with you how we think about the role of search and discovery. We want to match users with experiences they will love and experiences they will value. Experiences that will increase their happiness and satisfaction. If we do this, we all win together because more users will want to come to the platform more often, invite their friends over and spend more time in your experiences. So how do we do that? Well, we use a large number of signals to actually fare whether users are going to be happy and engaged with the experiences that we present in front of them. We look at engagement, we look at retention, we look at social activity, we look at safety, freshness, demographic, monetization and many more. And we keep looking for more and more signals that can actually make this recommendation system better. And the goal at the end of the day, as I mentioned, is to match users with experiences that we love. We've been iterating and we improved the models with state-of-the-art machine learning. And this is helping our system bring more diverse, fresh and newer experiences in front of users. And you can see the result, new experiences are finding more success on the platform with 34% of the top 1,000 engaging experiences having been created in 2022. We're also working on search and improving search through international and semantic understanding. And the idea here is that through different languages, we can actually make the results of search more precise. In this example, we're searching for cooking competitions in Japanese. And the results were really, really good. And what we saw in Japan when we did that is that we had a great improvement that led to more places from search, 15% more. And we're taking those learnings and apply them globally so that we can have that same result in every language. Now I know many of you love analytics. This is another place where we try to bring transparency to you. And we're making a lot of investments. Hopefully, you're already familiar with our engagement, monetization and retention dashboards. And they help you actually understand how your experience is performing and how can you improve the work that you're doing? This year, we released the real time stats on our reporting that helps you monitor the performance of your experience. You don't have to trust me when I say this is valuable. You can read what your colleagues are already writing about it. They're using it every day to monitor the performance of their experiences. We also released the audience breakdown dashboard. With this one, you can see users in your experience by age, gender, country and language. And this actually helps you inform feature development, what content to bring, how to market this experience and help you make better decisions. Well, I'm very excited about the next Dashboard that we're going to put in your hands. It's called the Insights dashboard. And this is a new dashboard that we're going to be releasing this month where you're going to be able to see very important stats, real-time information about how your experience is performing relative to the peer set, where your engagement is good relative to experiences that look like yours. Where you're monetizing as well and then it's going to point you to places where you can get information on how to improve your experience to achieve those goals. This is going to be super useful, and I can't wait for you to guys have it in their hands. And later this year, in Q4, we're going to be releasing the Avatar marketplace analytics. This is going to help all the content creators to understand their sales and revenue on the creator marketplace, on the Avatar marketplace and help you make decisions about what you create and about what you sell. We also know it's very important for you to have agency. And one of the ways we want to give your agency is to help you give you the means to reach out to your audience and connect with them and bring them back to your experiences. This year, we released player invite prompts, and we're already sending more than 30 million invites through notifications for people to come back into your experiences. Early in 2024, we're going to be releasing personalized notification. This is going to be an API that is going to help you send relevant, timely and personalized alerts based on social activity, based on events. And hopefully, that will help you bring your users back into your experience. And we're developing more and more tools to help you increase your engagement. Now as we continue to work on building a great user base and increasing the time that people are spending on the platform, we care as much about developing opportunities for you to grow your business and to monetize your experiences. We're always looking for ways to share more with the community and to support the growth of creators of all types, whether you're an experienced creator whether you're an avatar creator or whether you're an assets and tool creator. And our economy has kept evolving. Let's take a look over time, 2012, we introduce game passes. 2013, the developer exchange program and paid access. 2014, we expanded our offering with developer products. 2019 was the year that we introduced a UGC program. And 2020 engagement-based payouts. These investments has resulted in great earnings for all of you in the community. As Dave pointed out, we shared $680 million in the last 12 months. But if you look back, since 2018, all the way to June of this year, we have shared more than $2 billion back with the community, but we don't plan to stop there. We have a lot of interesting and exciting work going on in 2023 for the economy. And I'm sure you're going to make great use of it. So let me start by talking about the UGC program. In the last 12 months, 2 billion paid marketplace transactions. And out of those, 766 million were for 3D items. That's a 35% increase year-over-year. But we didn't stop there. Earlier this year, we launched Limited, bringing real-world economic principles like scarcity to drive demand that drive the resale and trading market. And as always, you surprised us and you embraced it, and we've seen more than 2.5 million items sold. But what's more important is that those items are reselling 80% of those items are reselling at a higher price than the original price that were created at. That's showing that scarcity, drive demand and drive pricing. And this is going to be a very powerful tool for us to use as we continue to grow. Now let's take a moment to celebrate the creator of some of the best-selling items last year. There are some very, very cool hair styles. I may need some of those in real life. But I really, really want to congratulate you all. You keep creating amazing content and the communities loving it. So congratulations to all of you. Now we knew our user-generated content program wouldn't be complete without user-generated avatar, bodies and heads. Roblox doesn't feel and believe that we should have a single avatar style. We have always looked for self-expression and creativity to shine on the platform. We want to offer users near infinite choices so that they can find an avatar that represents who they are or who they want to be. We open up the program and we started seeing what you're creating. And of course, you continue to delight us. Super, super cool stuff, and this is just a small sample. The heads that I'm seeing in the marketplace, the bodies that I'm seeing in the marketplace, it's just amazing. And all of these bodies are using -- and heads are using our latest technology R15, layered clothing, dynamic heads. The reason we want that is because we want avatars to be expressive so that people can use them for communication and when they engage in connecting experiences like the ones you saw and others demoed today. I'm incredibly excited to see what you all keep creating because I imagine a future when we look at the avatars on Roblox, and there's no one single style. There's like breadth of avatars across the place and people can find something that really they feel connected to. Now Dave mentioned this, and I'm incredibly excited about this one. There was one more step in our creating vision that we needed to develop -- deliver on. And that is to make it possible for anyone to create and sell on the marketplace and on Roblox. This is a monumental step, but it's one that we don't take lightly. We started talking to the community, and we heard your feedback. And we know that as we invite everyone to create on the platform, we want to build a system with accountability to drive safety and stability. We also want to create a very scalable marketplace, supporting high-quality supporting healthy prices. And lastly, we want to make sure that we -- the marketplace as a whole becomes very healthy helping you support and manage your IP as you create this content. I'm incredibly excited about releasing and starting to roll this out in the coming months. This is going to open up opportunity on the platform for anyone. And as we continue to improve our creation tools, I can imagine a world where everybody, every single person, all of those daily active users also become creators on the platform, and that's going to be huge. Now let me talk a little bit about immersive ads. We have been working together to define what advertising looks like in 3D immersive experiences. This is completely novel. Creators and advertisers are seeing a ton of value as we are putting this content and these experiences and these portals out there. In July of 2023, developers outside of the top 100 who publish a portal started making on average 14% of their earnings from ads. And this is just the beginning. I want to take one example. Let's look at Avatar Outfit Creator which launched in 2022. This experience primarily monetized through affiliate fees and engagement-based payout. In May of 2023, they decided to bring Immersive Ads into their experience. And by July of this year -- of that same year, they were seeing 27 -- more than 27% of their earnings coming from advertising. But what's more important and what's critical is that they beat these through portals and they didn't see any drops in engagement or in users. Our goal is to continue to build these systems in a way that makes advertising a great value for those who want to market and advertise on the platform, but also we want them to become a meaningful source of revenue for all of you. Okay. We've made material investments in advertising and marketplace. And we're always on the lookout for something new, for something that is going to help you build your business. And I'm incredibly excited to announce a new capability that we've been working on that we're going to release later this year. Later this year, you're all going to have the ability to sell recurring subscriptions within your experiences. It's going to be huge. With these subscriptions, you're going to be in control. You're going to be able to decide what do you want to offer inside of that subscription, what benefits. You're going to be able to select price points and you're going to be able to promote these subscriptions to all of your users. I'm expecting your most engaged and loyal fans will want to become subscribers, and they're going to generate a monthly revenue and a mostly predictable revenue for all of you. So this is going to be huge. You're going to have it in your hands later this year, and I can wait to see what you create. Okay. So we show improvements in support of Avatar Creators and Experience Creators. But there's one group of creators that is very, very important for ecosystem. I'm talking about the talented creators of assets and tools in the greater marketplace. These are the creators of models, images, [ meshes ] , plug-ins, audio and more. They make creation on Roblox more approachable, especially for novices, but also more powerful for all of us in the platform. Can I get a round of applause for our devoted creators of assets and tools? I want to share a stat with you, nearly 60% of developers on the platform are using assets and tools from the creator marketplace created by this community. So with that in mind, today, we have a huge announcement for them. By the first half of next year, we will be passing 100% of net proceeds, that's minus taxes and fees, on the Creator Marketplace to those who have created assets and tools for all of you to use. This is the highest revenue share in the market today and something we're very, very eager to invest in. We are very confident that by doing this, we're going to have an amazing flywheel where people are going to be using these assets and tools creating better experiences that attract more users to the platform. And I can't wait to release the program early next year. We're going to share more details as the day approaches. All right. So there you have it. We're really committed to listening and to creating a thriving ecosystem that supports creators of all types as you grow both your audience and your business on Roblox. I really can't wait to be here standing next year, looking at everything you have created with these tools. We are going to be accomplishing a lot of things together. Have an amazing RDC. Thank you very much.

Please welcome Roblox Chief Technology Officer, Daniel Sturman.

So good to see all of you here. So while I have the distinct pleasure of taking you through now is a lot of the deep tech we've been building over the past year and some of the cool stuff we have queued up for the next year. I'm going to build on what Manuel and Dave took you through and show you some of the insights of some of those key pieces work. But then there's a lot of really cool stuff in our engine and platform, I'm going to tell you about as well. So with that, I want to start with one of the key announcements that we just made, talk to you a bit about that. And that is, of course, the fact that we're going to launch on PlayStation next month. And with that, of course, we're going to be moving Meta Quest from beta to full production later this month. So it's 2 new platforms. Now what's equally exciting from my point of view is how we did this, that we've rebuilt our technology to position us incredibly well to launch new platforms in the future. So it's not just about these 2. It's about all things we can do going forward. I want to talk to you a little bit on how we did that. So it used to be, we'd have a code base on every platform. So we started on Windows and then we had Mac with OSX, and that was a different code base and changes, went from there, of course, to iOS and to Android, each of these requiring a different code base and then finally, Xbox. And as we're going through this, I think this effort started probably 5 years ago for us, realized this wasn't going to scale. You can't keep building platforms and expecting to maintain them all and move all the new features each time you have them on each one because we get the 20 platforms, imagine the craziness there, right? So how we approach this? We thought where can we find a platform that allows us to build our code once and run it anywhere. We thought about it and thought about it, oh, yes, we know one of those. It's Roblox, right? So we are now building what we call the universal app exactly how you guys build your experiences. We build most of what we do in Luau and we run it on our game engine. We have this idea of a C++ game engine that compiles in a pretty straightforward way onto any platform, but then we have these platform abstractions. And that's the key effort in supporting new platform, but they're well defined, and they're limited. Things like voice calling that we just enabled for Roblox Connect. But then everything else we do, think of the Avatar Editor, the marketplace, the homepage, that's all Luau code. So that can just directly follow as soon as we do this porting. It also has the other big advantage that these platform abstractions, in some cases, make a lot of sense for the whole community use. So again, like voice calling. So when we build these out, we can just expose them to you to use through your experience code as well. It all works out really well. The result is that we end up with now 7 platforms, and we can keep growing. Now there's one catch in all of this. There's a little bit of a difference between a phone and a console. On a phone, we have a small screen, it's all touch, UX. And then if you think about something like Xbox, you have this big screen, it's away from the user using a game pad. So we had to account for that. We can't have one user experience fits all. But we've made this move where we said we're not going to build this in our code like, well, if it's an iPhone, do this, if it's Xbox to the other. But instead we said, let's have these characteristics. We'll have the idea of a small screen, a big screen, a game pad, a touch control and that allow us to mix and match and also allows us to really position ourselves for the future. So this gets us to 7 different platforms today. Android and iOS, Mac OS, Windows OS, Xbox, Meta Quest and, of course, PlayStation. And by the way, as an aside here, it was a straightforward port for us to get earlier this year, this running on native Mac hardware as well. But then now we're looking at the future, and we're seeing a possible explosion in devices with VR and AR, and we feel very well prepared to take us wherever that journey goes. Next, I want to take you through some of the cool tech behind our avatars. You saw a lot from Dave and then Manuel about avatars, and it's all about choice and flexibility. You can see here, I have 4 avatars that I tend to use on the platform, and they're all somewhat different, depends on the mood I'm in. And that's the choice we want every user on the platform to have. But the question is, how do we get there? How do we enable all this tech to happen? And it starts with how do we enable you as a creator community to bring all sorts of cool avatars to the platform for our users to use? So I'm going to walk you through kind of the steps and some of the innovations we've made here just in the past year and some things that are coming as well. So you could be in Blender, you can build a body, right? And there's a step here I'm going to skip and come back to you, but you can try it out with say some clothing, but now you want to bring into Roblox. And in the past, when you did that, you didn't quite know how things were going to perform. So you can save this file and you can import it. And by the way, now we support gLTF yet another standard for us to be able to load things with. It uploads into Roblox. And now you can bring it directly into an Avatar preview, right? And here, you can try out facial expressions, you can try out layered clothing, you can try out accessories, all within this previewer, so you know this creation actually works. You can even try out emotes as you can see here. Now what was the step I skipped? Hidden in that very quick video was the fact that you have to worry about skinning and you have to worry about caging and you have to worry about segmentation, a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with the actual image you're creating or the avatar creating, but how they work on Roblox. And so I'm really excited to announce that over the course of next year, we're going to be deploying ML tools that take care of all of that for you. You're not going to have to worry about how you make a whole face be rigged or how a body moves. That's all going to be done by the ML under the covers, making this process so much faster. I'd be remiss, though, if I forgot about accessories. Each different Avatar looks slightly different. You want to get those accessories to look perfectly awesome on -- with your Avatar. So we're building an API. This API will allow you to move, scale and rotate Avatars -- accessories on your Avatar. Starting with that, so you can bring this directly in your experiences, and of course, we're going to eventually load this into Avatar Editor as well. Now one of the coolest things we shipped this year was facial expression on Avatars. And I want to give you some idea of how that actually works. This is just so cool from a deep tech point of view. So what we do is we use the camera on the device so we capture a video, but we're not shipping that video anywhere. Instead, we have an ML algorithm running on each and every device that infers over 50 different points on the face and how they're moving. That is what we transmit up to Roblox' cloud, and that's what comes back down every device and then can be translated on to any dynamic head on the platform. So this is really cool for a few reasons. First, we're not sending video everywhere. Sending video everywhere is incredibly expensive, will chew through CPUs, will chew bandwidth, it's just not efficient. Secondly, we're not sending video anywhere and from a privacy point of view, that's awesome. Your pictures, the users' photos are not moving up to Roblox as we do this. But then there's a third advantage, which is because we're using an ML algorithm, we can tune that algorithm based on device. On lower-end devices, we can tweak that algorithm down, so it uses less battery, but you still get reasonably good facial expression. We can even ship a custom-made lower-end mL model when necessary to really be efficient. And then on the higher-end devices, it can run at a higher speed and have higher fidelity. So it allows us to really respect each of our users and optimize for power and CPU without giving up functionality in the platform that only high-end devices get this capability. So yes, I'll pause there, right? We want to take this next level though. So this is something that's coming this year, where we're going beyond the head, and we're starting to talk about the entire upper body. So now think of the expressiveness you'll get off a camera with this. You can see here, it captures arm movement, shoulder movement, how you turn your body as well as your head. Of course, totally controllable by users. They can turn this off if they want it, independent of facial expression, they get all the control. But I'm really excited to pair this, for example, Roblox Connect and the expressiveness you'd see when you do that. And then I want to touch one more thing on how we've thought about Roblox Connect. It's not too often we build an experience, and we really wanted to respect all of you as we built it. And Dave mentioned this, it's entirely open sourced. And with that, it means every API we're using is now a platform API. There are no secret APIs in any of this. So here are some examples, the ability to toggle selfie view on and off, open or close your phone book to see a caller list. Where do you move to when a call is completed, maybe you have a special place in your experience that's a phone booth. These sorts of APIs, we're opening all of them and what we're hoping for, we're expecting is you're going to take these concepts, combine it with spatial voice, combine it with avatar expression and do things we never dreamed of in your experiences. We're really looking forward to that. So I've walked us through some of the tech behind some of the announcements you heard already. But I know what you're all really here for. You're here because you want to hear what are we doing to the engine of the platform that just make your experiences sync even more than they already do, make it easier to build those. So I'm going to take you through some of the cool stuff we're doing in the engine of the platform and some of the new features you can expect to use in your experiences right away. I wanted a shout out for Voldex and Driving Empire for this awesome video -- this awesome car here. I thought it was appropriate. We're talking about fidelity and performance, right? And also, congratulate them, they've been nominated for Roblox Innovation Award for most immersive experience. Good luck on that. So anyway, we have done a bunch of cool stuff in the engine this year. In fact, so much so sometimes to me, it just feels like we're flying. [Presentation]

Pretty cool stuff. And for those, we just got this into Studio beta, I think, just a few weeks ago and we'll be launching over the course of the year. The thing to note there, in case you're not familiar with this, none of that was [ lower ] code making that behavior happen. That was all just the physics of the interaction between wind, lift and drag in the engine. Yes, we're pretty excited about it, too. And as you can see the example here, that can be airplanes that are flying around or, for example, here leads floating in the wind. But we're not stopping with just global wind and lift and drag. Over the course of the next year, we're going to take those same concepts and bring them to other fluids in the universe, notably water, hydrodynamics. And then going beyond the global wind concept, we're going to have prescribed wind, like a wind tunnel in some part of your experience or let's say, a windy cavern in a Western type experience. So you can control wind in different parts of your universe. And of course, with that then, the behavior and how aerodynamics interact. So really exciting to get all of this into your hands over the course of the next year. Now you saw global wind and how leaves blow in the wind. Wouldn't it also be cool to have grass blowing in the wind too, right? So our engineers have been working on it. And even though some say watching grass grow can be incredibly boring, I've been eager to inspect their progress really closely. Yes. And by the way, in case you can't bring up the video, this is right. We are going to be enabling you to control the height and density of grass in your experience. This is something you've all been asking for. We're so happy to deliver it. As you can see on this one, I've really gotten to the reads. Now more seriously, this is how that's going to look like. And this is going to be available in the next month or so. You can see the grass flow in the wind. You can see size changing. This is initially going to be a non-scriptable property in Roblox Studio. And over time, I'll open it up as an open API that you can control. So I know this is a big deal for a lot of you. The number of times I walked around this event and heard people talk to me about grass height and control over that. I'm so excited to finally be getting this out to you. Now I've shown you a bunch of really cool graphics stuff. But an equally important part of any experience is what does it sound like? So I want to talk a little bit about what we're doing in audio. And that is we're launching a new audio API soon. And it's going to take a concept of having emitters and listeners to be able to wire together and do all sorts of cool things. I'll give you a quick -- take a listen here, more to hear than to see. It's fully spatial. So as you move around in your world, it's integrated with spatial voice. You see that microphone picks up from the other speaker. You can start thinking of doing things like [indiscernible] walkie-talkies all sorts of things are possible and you'll have a fulsome season effects that you can put on any of the sound like a guitar pedal or DSP effect. There'll also be customizable sound flows. So a place where you don't want spatial, you want just direct connections for nonspatial communication, you'll be able to do that too. So really excited about how this is going to bring all these experiences even more to life. We're not going to stop with audio though. We've also been working on video. So I'm excited to say coming soon, we will have short-form video available on the platform for all creators who are 13 and over and ID verified. It's going to be limited to 30 seconds. Yes, 30-second videos up to 3 uploads a month. Of course, we have a rigorous safety embedding process behind all of this. And as we all get more comfortable with this on the platform, we'll open it up and be able to have less restrictions. But we have a few cool ideas of things you can do. You can do things like tutorials with this, you can do cut scenes. How far does that play, right? Even just background detail. In fact, the Roblox Career Center, which is something we built to do recruiting at Roblox, uses these videos extensively. So this is all going to be coming to you. We're really excited about it, and I hope -- I expect you'll find all sorts of amazing ways to use video on the platform. So I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about lighting. We've been on a lighting journey for a few years, and we've continued to make some incredible progress. Our high-end lighting for high-end devices continues to be awesome. You can see here the incredible shadows, light reflection, specular highlights off the floor. I kind of wonder what the specular highlights off my head would look like, right? But really just incredible. And it's in the past, been available on Mac and PC and consoles and then iPhone. I'm really excited we're going to be bringing this to high-end Android devices as well. The challenge, of course, is when you go to a midrange or a modest device, you get this lighting, which by no means is bad. We love it, but it's not as great as that future lighting model we had before with the box lighting here. So we really want to address that. And what's going to be coming soon is a new lighting model for low-end and modest end devices that looks much more like this. You get much more of the shadows. You don't quite get everything in the high-end lighting, but that's what we're driving for. And here, just so you can see, these are the 2 side by side. You can see a little bit more effect in the high-end lighting, but just I think that the new future [ Voxel ] model looks really, really slick. What do you guys think? So you'll see a general theme here. We want to make sure everything works great on high-end devices, but then really well on any device. That's a big part of what your users need and what we promise you as a platform. So you don't have to modify for that. But I, therefore, again, one of the biggest things we've been doing that we think really enables devices everywhere and performance, which is streaming. So we've worked really hard on streaming, and we made some big improvements this year. Just to give you a quick example of this experience loading, loads in 4 seconds with streaming versus over 30 without it, big difference. In general, we made so many improvements this year on streaming. We feel it can be deployed much more widely. All the templates have it on by default for new experiences that you can, of course, turn it off. We've seen results like 25% to 30% average reduction in out-of-memory crashes on devices, 25% to 30% average reduction in join times across devices. So it really makes a difference for users, particularly if they don't have a great network connection or if they're on a lower end device. We've made a number of improvements, though, and a lot of those have centered about partnering with you. This idea that you could give us hints about your experience so we could all do streaming better. So I have here kind of a mockup of kind of what the computer is seeing when we do streaming. In the blue, that's like the proximate area. That's where everything automatically gets loaded. But then we have this pink area, where we have a lot of flexibility, and that's kind of the rest of your world. And in the past, that could just kind of load or it might not load and that might work for your experience or might not. But if you enable a level of detail, LOD, we've put a lot of effort in making those LOD models, very low res versions of everything, looks faster and look much more realistic. So it makes the whole experience better and feel like you've loaded it quickly. We've also, like I said, some of these hints and controls. So if you're worried about pauses, even in that blue area up there, you can set pause outside loaded area, and by doing that, it means, hey, unless I'm physically interacting with the device, the item, let's just -- let's just go without pausing. You can do things like there's a railroad up there or a street road up there, you can make things persistent. So you say, look, this always has to be streamed in. I know my experience. I'm always going to need it, never stream it out. And you can even do things like the model that's in the green box up there, make things [ atomic ]. You say either load at all or don't, it really cuts back on how many wait for child calls you got to make when you're working with streaming. So we're pretty excited what's going and we're going to continue to work on this until it works for all your experiences. Now that brings me in general to the concept of scale. And scale is something we're always working on. Hopefully, you don't see any of it. You shouldn't have to worry about it, but I want to give you an update on where we're at. Two years ago, we were at like 37,000 servers. We've grown that now to 135,000 servers in our Roblox Cloud, supporting your experiences of all the users who come to them, right? That's a lot of growth. That's 4 -- that's about a 4x growth in servers over just the past 2 years. And it's not just servers or growing, but bandwidth has almost doubled over the same time period as well. So we're really continuing to make sure there's always the capacity to run your experiences and run them well so that you don't have to worry about that. But another big thing we've been focused on is reliability. No one's more bummed than we are when Roblox is down. We hear frustration from you guys as well. And we made some really big improvements over the past year. So just comparing the first 6 months of 2022 to the first 6 months of 2023, we used to be at 98.9% available. This year, it was 99.6% available. That's a 65% reduction in downtime, which is just to put that in terms so you can understand better, about 125 million engagement hours each month that we're not losing. We're not done yet though. Our goal for this time next year is to be at three 9s available that's 99.9% and our long-term goal for the platform is four 9s availability. That's 99.99% available. To put that in terms, you can probably understand that's less than 1 hour of downtime a year. That's what we're aiming for. It takes us a good time to get there. So how are we getting there? There's a lot of hard engineering there, and I want to walk you through some of the really cool stuff we're doing on the back end to make this work. So we used to just have a single data center in Chicago, a big monolith as we called it. We didn't want to be in that situation. We built 2 years ago a new data center in Ashburn that we can manually fall over to if the worst happens in Chicago. But this year, we've been focused on this really cool concept we call cells, cellular data centers. This is where we take each of these data centers and we kind of break them into autonomous units that fail independently, and we can stripe all our back-end services across cells. I'm really excited that our top 20 services by capacity are already on cells, and we're working on the rest. And then over the course of '24, our focus shifts to what we're calling active data centers. This is where we have multiple data centers in different parts of the country, all working together. So if we lose one or part of one, we can failover to the others seamlessly with no manual intervention. Now all that can sound kind of complex. And I think the best point of all of this is you actually don't need to worry about any of it. You build experiences the way you've always built experiences and these reliability improvements are just going on in the background. And that is very different than folks who are building custom back ends on other platforms and having to spend a lot of time building this availability into their systems as they get to scale. Okay. So now I do want to talk about safety and stability. This is just so, so important to the platform, at least to me. You guys all agree like safety is what separates us, right, from like the chaos that is the rest of the internet, right? So we've been working hard on this on 2 fronts. First, as you'll see, we've been pushing the envelope on what the leading-edge tech in the world is around how to make environment safe and civil. But also, we started a new set of efforts around how do we partner better with you. So that we can have tools that enable us to work together on moderation, safety, stability within an experience. It's something I've heard from a lot of you that you want to be able to do. So I'm going to take you through some of that. But first, since we were just talking about liability, I have to say it's not too often when a team comes to me and say, hey, we've broken everything I actually smile. But that's what we did this year with what we did with exploits. We broke all the exploit on Windows with the rollout of our new Hyperion technology. I heard so much from many of you last year that you just needed us to fix this problem that you weren't able to build competitive games that the exploiters were all over your experiences that this was not okay. We put a lot of effort in, and Hyperion was the launch of that, and we're really pleased of the impact that's had on Windows. Like I said, it broke all the existing exploits, it dramatically reduced the amount of cheating we have reported. It basically made chatbots on Windows extinct, really big impact here, but we know that's not enough. However, we've got some great quotes around this from our community of exploiters, right? Things like -- I'll just read some of these to you. A sad year for exploiters or my favorite here was, it's already been multiple hours without me exploiting. I just can't go outside and touch grass. I've come too far. I can't go back now, right? They sound pretty bumped out. I can't really feel too bad for them. We're not stopping there, though. Of course, exploitors are going to move to other platforms. Over the next few months, we're going to roll out Hyperion on the Microsoft Store app. And we're starting to take on Android as the next big platform for this, starting to move those capabilities over detecting modified binaries, obscuring security code within the app. We think we have a good beat on this. My commitment to you is we're not going to stop until you're not thinking about exploiters at all. You're just thinking about how to build the next killer competitive game on the platform. There's another area that's come up this year that we're also very focused on. I want to give you an update on, and that's DDoS. So this year, we made some big progress rolling out a technology called [ UDMUX ] that protects all of our game servers from broad-based high-power denial of service attacks on the platform. We've -- and that's about 75% rolled out. At this point, we expect to soon be at 100%. We also rolled out a new API called a Fair Resource Sharing API. What that does, it avoids more individualized DDoS attacks where someone can make very expensive API calls over and over and over again, thereby slowing experience down. That's about 50% rolled out. You can kind of think of this as like a bouncer at a party that keeps any given client from eating up all the server snacks in the experience, right? So we're not going to stop there though. The folks are trying to do this. They continue to innovate and so are we. Our teams are actively at work. In fact, there were changes rolling out yesterday, probably even this morning, a little bit risky, to continue to push on this DDoS issue. And my commitment again to you is we're not going to stop until these guys are a thing of the past. I also want to spend some time on the other category of safe things we're doing, which is around how do we work together. And we've started to roll out some APIs around that. The first I want to talk about is the -- is verified API. This allows you in your experience to understand if a user is either phone or ID verified. You can see here a great experience from sketchy laboratories called Boxing Beta, and they kind of use that to highlight this checkmark. Yes, right? It's run for Boxing Beta. We're going beyond that, though to building a banning API that'll be rolling out later this year. A lot of you told me how much work you have to build from scratch to build your own banning systems in your experiences. So we're going to give you an API that makes that straightforward to do. But again, right -- it gets better though. If it's better because, first of all, we can then take those signals. We see the same users being banned in a bunch of experiences that gives us a lot of useful information. And then even better is as we expand this API, we'll be able to integrate our own alt account detection into this API. So if you ban, someone, when they come back, or better put, they're not coming back, right? And then we're starting to do things now that we have age guidelines on experience, we understand different experiences they want to dial in how they treat age somewhat differently. So if you think about a 17-plus experience, you may want to really relax the text filter from the default in a 17-plus experience. You know everyone in there is 17 or older. So we're going to give you APIs to be to do that as well. And this is the first of, I think, many, as we give you a lot more customization over the safety and the nature of your own experiences. Now we're talking about text, but one of our biggest launches this year was around voice. Voice poses some really, let's say, interesting moderation challenges. That's right. And it's something we started working on earlier this year to realize we had to do something that had never been done before. It's a fun discussion that I have with an engineering team we say, we need to build something like this and they go, it can't be done. I say we need to build something like this back and forth. Well, we did build it, and I'm really proud of the team on this. I'm going to give you a quick demo. Now just so you know, I know you're all really sensitive. So we really kind of tuned up the gain on the filters, filtering here. The beeping you hear also wouldn't occur in a real experience. It's there to protect your ears. But it gives you an idea of what this is all about and how we're doing voice moderation. [Presentation]

Yes. So the first experimental rollout of this technology is going to be in English. And what we're going to do is we will detect inappropriate behavior, and it's not just swearing. We look for swearing, we look for dating, we look for our usual categories of policy misalignment. We're going to pop up this reminder or nudge to users and remind them that they can't talk like this on the platform. As we get more confidence in this AI, we will, of course, be able to take more direct action. But I'm really excited about this. So no one in the world, as far as we know, has deployed voice moderation at scale. And this AI doesn't just use the words, which is kind of the best state of the art. It listens to the tone of voice, which we know makes such a difference in vocal communications. So excited is coming and something we're able to deliver to you. And now the last thing I want to talk about, a lot of this has enabled the voice moderation through advances in artificial intelligence. And we've been focused on that, in particular, around generative AIs. And we think generative tools are going to empower all of you to go so much faster and take so much of the daily grind out of what you have to do and enable you to focus on your creativity. So earlier this year, we launched materials generation and we launched coding assist. In case you, you haven't seen it, I just want to show you what that looks like. So here, we're modifying the card just with English prompts and we're building some really sick materials with that would take forever to build. These are not out of any catalog. They're being generated on the fly. You can also through text, English text, start to get behavior, like here, how headlights should work on the car, enabling that without any direct coding. And you go beyond that to talk about the world as well, so maybe change in the weather in experience, again, just with a set of English prompts and having that translated just in a code. This is just the start of where we're going with Generative AI. And the last thing I want to touch on is something we're calling Roblox Assistant. Now Nick and Tian are going to be up here later, and I don't want to steal all their thunder, but I want to give you a taste of what it looks like when you add a conversational AI to Roblox Studio. Take a look at this. [Presentation]

I hope you all are as excited by the deliveries this year as I am and especially about where we're going with this platform. I really want to thank you so much for being here, and thank you for all that you do on Roblox.

Please welcome back David Baszucki.

Okay. I just want to -- okay, we're almost -- we're getting close. For those of you that have been here before, you may be thinking there's one more thing we're going to touch on. But before we do that, I just want to highlight what Dan said about stability on our platform. It really is the foundation of everything we do. And when Roblox was small and there were 4 of us, within a month of launching all 4 of us were acting as moderators on the platform. So we have a lot of empathy for how important this is and look at where it's brought us, right, this most amazingly civil platform. We have a really amazing vision for this, whether it's safety and civility around private, one-on-one conversations, whether it's safety and civility about big outdoor spaces, what you're going to see from us is a very flexible, adaptable safety and civility structure that handles all of this. A quick highlight on 3 directions we're going. The first is, we want each of you to be able to instill the policies of your own experience. And that means in addition to Roblox-wide policy, I sometimes talk about if I was making a Mermaid experience, I might say no one can make fun of Mermaids, okay? And we would allow you to make that part of your policy in written text. The second is, just as we talked about Avatars and having you create them more and more and also like our analytics tools, we want you to help manage your community if you want to. That includes customer service, that includes moderation. So you're going to be making that available to you. And then the more ML we have and ultimately, ML as a Service, ML is something that can support safety, we want you to be able to tap into that to build and run your community. Okay. So it's been an amazing morning, but we have one last thing. We've got to do here. And it seems like 20 years ago, but it was only 5 years ago where we came up with the idea, we're going to make 5-year predictions and we were going to make them so ridiculously ambitious that each one of them at the time seemed impossible. 5 years is up. So let's do a quick scorecard of those 5-year predictions, 58%, okay, which I'm pretty proud of. And it includes a 100-person company on Roblox. I heard last night there is a 200-person company on Roblox. So [indiscernible] It seemed ridiculous to imagine a developer making $50 million a year. We shared some of that. That has happened and many more things. So 58% actually feels just about right. It's aggressive. We hit about 6 out of 10, and it's a very special RDC because it's time for new predictions, okay? These predictions are all supported by you, you have been powering these predictions. And the creative community on Roblox has been the engine that's driven these. So knowing now the power of our creative community we can supercharge our next 5-year predictions. Okay. Here they are. Are any of you -- do any of you remember Dave Lederman? Okay. Number 10, a Fortune 500 company will use a Roblox experience as part of their recruiting process, okay? This is mind-blowing because it goes to the notion that Roblox is a utility platform. We're introducing [ Ooh Ahh ] introducing ways for companies to log in. We're introducing ways for educational institutions to log in. So this really stretches the platform nature that one product can do this. Next up, a school to integrate a full K through 12 curriculum with Roblox including language classes and virtual field trips, and we'll see this in 5 years. We have already seen the start of the K-12 curriculum start to roll out. The better we get at voice, the better we get at automatic language processing, that view that a school in the United States might have a partner school in Argentina and they can go hang out there using voice translation. We're pretty sure this is going to happen. Number 8. Now there's a lot of caveats here. So like let's not go crazy, okay? So notice double caveat, 17-plus verified with PhotoID in 17-plus experience, but we do believe there's enormous population where traditional ways of meeting are scary, awkward. And ultimately, we think 3D simulated meeting -- I'm not going to use the D word, but subsequently real-life relationships is going to happen, okay? And we're going to build a platform to support that. Number 7. In 5 years inside Roblox, we will spend more time doing meetings in Roblox then with video on Mondays and Fridays when we're not in the office. We're already prototyping this. I already do some of my meetings with Roblox, Avatar animation and video. By that time, of course, we'll have interactive whiteboards. By that time, of course, we will have screen sharing. And by that time, meetings of 5 or 6 people are going to seem infinitely more connected than 5 panels on my screen, body language, audio, eye tracking, what everyone is doing. Number 6. We'll share a universal civility metric, kind of like [ Gallup ] or something like this, and we're going to see that with the gentle nudges we do on our platform rather than a dystopian falloff in general, the people on our platform show increase civility. And I think this is going to be huge for our platform. It's going to power us in many, many ways to be a 1 billion daily active user platform. This will be the foundation that we rest on. Number 5. A hint to the future in addition to all of the amazing economic things and stuff we've shared with you, in 5 years, some of the creators on platform will make more money with physical good merchandise than virtual good merchandise sold through your experience. And when we think about it, it's absolutely obvious, right? We can think of many experiences, many vendors where 3D immersive physical shopping experience just makes sense. It's kind of like, of course, it has to happen. Okay. So leading up to #4, there's 4 -- I have a family, there's 4 Baszucki, they're so burned out on Roblox, right? They've been watching this for 20 years. They're very cynical. But in 5 years, through the quality of things like the communication apps you build and Roblox Connect and Voice, I'm going to predict organically our family is using Roblox as a frequent communication channel. And this could be very difficult, but I'm pretty sure it's going to happen. Okay. Number 3. This one seems almost too easy based on what I've seen in the last week. And this is the notion that we're going to see a top fashion designer emerge digital first and then physical. We're going to see an amazingly creative famous worldwide fashion designer, got their start on a platform, Roblox amazing creativity and then the physical world mirrors that. Okay. And then we're going to hold on #1 because I'm going to build on that one. But let's -- first off, you already saw today, you saw not just face tracking, but body tracking. Of course, we love recorded concerts. Of course, we love mo-cap suits, but we really love is the spontaneity of putting your phone on a music stand, performing live to millions of people. And our prediction is that in 5 years, we'll see a live performance with a million people with really camera tracked animation in real life. Okay. And then finally, we -- based on what we've seen, and this is a little bit of an aggressive one, but I do see all the signs that this is going to happen as we have this confluence of connection, economy, amazing creators all coming together with brands. Our prediction is in 5 years, we'll see a Roblox Creator valued at $1 billion, okay? So that is my top prediction. It's crazy -- it's going to happen. So thank you all. Awesome. Now the difficult thing about doing this live with all of you, these are etched in stone. So we are fully committed. These can never change. We will be here over the next 4 years, and we will see you in 2028 for the review of this, I'm shooting for 60% to 70% here. Okay. So finally, in closing, we're just getting started at the highest level together. We're doing something very big, and that is we're reimagining how people come together to play, to learn, to work, to communicate. And in coming together we're so optimistic because bringing people together supports communication and dialogue. So we are all a part of it. It's literally a great time to be alive, and I'm so glad to be doing it with all of you. So thank you so much, and we'll see you after lunch.

Please welcome Roblox Vice President of Engineering, Creator, Nick Tornow and Vice President of Product Creator, Tian Lim.

Hello, RDC. I'm Nick and I lead Engineering for the Creator Group.

And I am Tian, and I lead product for the Creator Group.

The Creator group is all about helping you, our creators, succeed and thrive on the platform. We work across all the other groups at Roblox to champion for and optimize for your needs. Earlier this year, we introduced ourselves in Dev forum, but we thought that now that we're here in person, we could do a little more.

A lot more. So if any of these logos or products look familiar to you, we may have had a little hand in building some of these. We may not look at, but we've actually been around a few blocks helping creators across apps, games, movies, TV, social media. My first job was on the Nintendo GameCube, and I was one of the first platforms devs, yes -- platform devs, and I was working on the floor, and I was working closely with all the developers. I had long hair back then. I was contributing code to classics like [ Metro Aide ] and Resident Evil. It was pretty epic.

Wait, you had longer hair?

You are asking me this now at RDC?

I just want to see it.

You guys want to see it? Okay. There you go. It is there.

Very impressive, very handsome. I've been around the block too. As an early employee at Zynga, I helped ship games like CityVille and help build our internal platform for building games. I've always been fascinated by the potential for technology to help connect people together. And at Twitter after that, I saw firsthand how technology can help people share their story and learn and grow together. But I think I can safely say that we've never quite encountered a community quite like you. You were also passionate, creative, vocal, yes? But most importantly, and more than any other place that we've ever been, this is a real community. You can feel it in the air here at RDC and it's this community that's going to power Roblox to achieve its vision. If we're going to connect 1 billion people with optimism and stability, it's only going to happen with your creativity and help.

We're going to connect a billion people with optimism and civility. It's only going to happen if we can model that aspiration right here in this room, and it's only going to happen if we enable you to enable anyone to create anything anywhere.

All right. We've decided to structure our talk today on a hierarchy of needs. It's based loosely on Maslow's hierarchy but instead of air, water, food and shelter, we're going to be talking about things that really matter to you.

I think those things matter to them too.

No, that's a good point. Fair enough. Our Creators hierarchy of needs starts with the foundational things like a platform that secure performance, stable and reliable. That means you need to fix bugs, drive latencies down and optimize our engine and infrastructure, so it can scale as your games too on our platform. Next, it's about making sure that you can work the way you want to work. We're making our platform much more flexible. So you can work with your favorite tools, and we have some big news to share later on in this presentation. Finally, we want to accelerate creation. Roblox is already arguably the easiest place in the world to get your ideas into reality to share with the world. But we think we can go way further, whether you're a novice or a pro, we've got some mind-blowing tools for you, so excited.

Now all of this is only going to be possible, if we have the right relationship, it's a 2-way street. We need each other for all of this. So that means we need two-way transparency, accountability, regular communication and mutual empathy. Because in the end, we just want creation to be fun and inspiring.

So let's start at the base of the pyramid. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we've heard from you all is that we need to improve our core.

Now we talk a lot about our amazing vision, but the reality is we actually probably spend most of our energy right here at the foundations of the platform. So let's start with the things that matter to you on a day-to-day basis, like bugs. So we've recently revamped our DevForum bug process. So every budget file now has an owner. In April of this year, only 45% of bugs had an owner, but now 98% of them do. Now it doesn't mean that they're all going to get fixed, but at least you know someone is looking at it and you have a much higher chance of seeing some clearer resolution. We're also working on opening up the bug reporting process to more of the communities to watch out for that.

The broader theme here is we want you to be able to enter and study, an upflow stake as you're using Studio and our tool chain. Bugs are part of that, but we've also started tracking a new stat called uninterrupted studio session time. Last year, this was easily 30 hours, and now we're up to 80 hours. This means you can work for a week set of time without experiencing a crashing studio. This is stuff we don't talk about a lot because it's small. It's a bunch of little things, but we spend a ton of energy here, and I'm glad that you're seeing it. We're also working on hangs. Another thing we've seen is that when your network is flaky at home or maybe your computer goes to sleep and wakes back up. We have this kind of annoying reconnect flow. It's now the case that will auto reconnect. And this can get you back into the creative mode immediately. We've been improving scripting latencies. Scripting latencies down 22%. The seems there any type of key along it take to show up on the screen. That's the P50. And the P99 is down by more than 48%, and we're going to keep going. We've also added support for Apple Silicon for those of you who use these devices. We're seeing much more stability and higher performance on those devices. We know there's a lot more to do on all of these fronts, and we want to continue to hear from you. Please let us know what's slowing you down?

Speaking about slowing down. Let's talk about moderation for a second. It's how we want to try to ensure a safe and civil experience for our users, but we've learned that it can be a big part of your experience on the platform as well. So first, I thought I would give you a sense of the magnitude of the challenge here because you all and your users are incredibly prolific. So every single day, you are uploading 2.5 million assets. Your users are sending 3 billion messages, creating 0.5 million hours of voice chat and generating 2 million pieces of feedback every day. That's a lot of stuff. And I'm not even counting the experiences that you are publishing and updating. So by the way, I'm pretty sure this is true that the number of experiences uploaded or published every single day on Roblox is bigger then the total number of asset games uploaded to the Apple store and the Google store combined. That's a huge number. So you can imagine how hard it is to moderate this ecosystem, but we know how irritating it can be if we get it wrong. So an example I saw recently, Nick, what would you call this asset?

I call that Nick Bishop 123.

Bad news, Nick. I'm pretty sure you would get rejected because up until recently, we actually blocked the string bishop because it could have been a name like the Android and that classic movie Aliens. Wow, nobody got that one. But was anyone irritated by the fact that the Bishop is next to the rook. Anyone? So anyway, we have revised our text filters and dramatically reduced the number of assets being flagged and the number of incorrect bands as a result. So hopefully, you're feeling the temperature come down there. We've still got a lot of work to do here, and we'll continue to tune.

So that's just 1 example. And we've been working on improving moderation across the board. Our goal is to have 100% accurate moderation for you, and we're on a journey to make it happen. This starts with amazing machine learning automation, so you can get instantaneous and accurate answers on moderation. In the rare cases, it goes to a human moderator, we're improving things there, too, with improved training for our moderators, dual reviews before anything results in a consequence. In the rare cases or something does lead to a consequence, we're improving our appeals process. So it's clear to you why something has been rejected and how you can appeal that decision.

So we've been pushing these efforts on your behalf and have seen material drops at the rate at which creation see consequences and the severity of those consequences. Now part of building a rock-solid platform is helping keep your experiences secure. We know you don't want to be keeping API keys and other secrets in code, but we haven't really given you that many options.

Until now, we're working on something we're calling the Secret store. It's a safe place for you to securely store your secrets, which could be like API keys, you can sort them separated from your code. It's easy to use. You set your secrets and Creator hub or through our Open Cloud APIs and then you can refer to them and code with a reference key, and this will be available later this year.

Quickly continuing on the theme of improving your quality of life. We recently rolled out the new Creator home page. It pulls together all your critical assets, key insights and product announcements. So it's your one-stop shop, birds eye view into how all your creations are doing.

Finding things in the Creator marketplace has also historically been really hard. I remember at RDC last year, several of you came to me saying, Nick, why is it so hard to find audio assets in music on the marketplace? Since then, we've deployed Semantic search across the creative marketplace. And you can see an example of this. On the left here, when you search for Brick House with smoke coming out of the chimney, used to receive no results because no one ever aimed at name that asset that literal strength. With Semantic search, we actually grok. We understand what these assets are. And now when we search for the same string, you get back all these wonderful creations that you all have made. And we're seeing this for audio too. We're seeing more insertions into your experiences. It's making them richer and there's much more to come here.

Now before we continue up this pyramid, let's take a little detour to discuss how we get to the top. And that's about the relationship you have with Roblox. So your relationship with Roblox might be 6 years old, like mine or 16, 17 years to some of you, that is a long time. And those kinds of relationships evolve, but the way they stay strong is with transparency, accountability, communication and mutual empathy.

We're trying to keep up our end of the bargain. It's why we started the road map to give you more visibility and insight into what we're doing, and why we've been advocating internally to make sure that your needs and points of view are being heard across the whole company.

The thing we ask from you is just to seem good intent. There's a lot of historical stuff that you have a lot more context on than we do. There are probably things we'll be talking about that you'll be wondering why is Roblox quiet on all these things that have been bugging me for years. We want to make sure Roblox is not quiet. So if we are being quite on something, there's probably a reasonable reason behind it. We're always trying to do things the right way, the principled way that's forwards and backwards compatible, sometimes doing things the right way, involves navigating really complex legal or regulatory things, that makes things hard to talk about.

That said, we never want you to stop speaking your minds. Let us know, if you think we're on the wrong path. But again, please assume good intent. We're co-building this platform together. And that doesn't mean we're always going to agree on everything all the time. But that's okay. What's important is that we share our points of view with respect. We listen to each other and we really try to understand each other. And so all we ask of you is that you trust that we're headed in the same direction, striving for the same goals. Okay. Let's get back to transparency and accountability.

So as Nick said, it kind of starts with some road map. It's a living document. We're going to keep posting periodic updates and hosting AMAs every now and then. I think we're up next month for an AMA, hope I didn't surprise you with that. But stay tuned. The road map will be updated and you'll be seeing some new updates from today and maybe a few other surprises.

So we're always looking for new ways to engage with you, but we also want to help you all engage with one another. You all have amazing learnings, amazing knowledge and we want to make it easier for you to share those learnings with one another to learn from each other. This is why we relaunched Creator Events. It's a way for you to learn from each other by watching live virtual events and an opportunity to host virtual events yourself.

So as part of Creator Events in July of this year, we put on an event called Roblox Connect. It's a global Creator Conference driven by you, the community. This year, you all hosted 29 online workshops in 9 different languages, with live translation support. It covered topics from design, development, accessibility. Most of those workshops were not in English. And as a result, over 12,000 Creators participated. That's amazing. That's 10x the size of this room, and you all made that happen. Thank you so much.

Tian. I just thought of something. Didn't we just name that video calling app connect?

Yes. Let me fix the slide real quick, and let's move on. All right.

Okay. How else can we make it easier for you all to help each other? How about those docs you've been complaining about and itching to fix? Just last week, we opened Search Docs. All of our docs now have a little edit button. You tap it and you enter into GitHub and you can submit or poll request. This is a way for you all to share tidbits of knowledge, gems information you picked up through the Roblox School of hard knocks. And over the first 24 hours of this open sourcing docs, we've seen over 50 poll requests come in. So thank you for those who have already been contributing and please keep it coming.

I actually took a quick look at those poll requests, and I was really impressed. It wasn't just the grammar police. It was actual real useful helpful stuff in there, all due respect to the grammar police, I'm probably one of them. All right. Let's get back to walking up this pyramid. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we've heard from you is that you want to work the way you want to. You want to use your favorite tools for the job, whether that's scripting, modeling or avatar creation. We've got you covered.

Now about 3 months ago, we made it so anyone could make their own applications. This enables external websites and other pieces of software to log in with your Roblox identity. As of last week, we've seen more than 2,000 OAuth apps created for the platform. And now some of you might be wondering why you might care. Well, let's talk about that. As many of you already know, glTF has become one of the most popular 3D objects in the world. Back in June, we launched support for glTF in studio, particularly around meshes and PBR textures. And just earlier this week, we extended that support to rig models, skinning and animation. With these updates, you can now import pretty much anything on the planet into Roblox. You can populate your worlds with the most fantastic things you can imagine.

We also know a lot of you like to use blenders to create your assets and to design IDEs. So we recently launched an open source blender add-on. We can provide your Roblox credentials to blender, and we'll be able to link your blender meshes and models and update them automatically in studio. And we open source this because it's a pretty obvious use of open cloud, and we want you to surprise us with even more innovative applications. Now Manuel already showed a slide of some of the wonderful Avatar that you've been submitting. But Nick and I thought we should put our own version of that up there as well and pick up some of our favorites. So I'm being honest. This snail just speaks to me. Thank you, whoever made that. And Nick, I'm pretty sure that teddy bear is your avatar.

Yes. I'm just a big teddy bear. That's me on the inside.

Anyway, we're super excited about what you're all going to make. I think I'd like to see generally in your little more gender inclusion, some diversity and some realistic avatars. Now maybe that sounds weird coming from a snail and a teddy bear, but we switched things up quite a bit.

All right. Changing gears, do you all have any idea what the heck these icons on the screen mean? It means we're going to support experience ownership transfer. One of the amazing things about Roblox is you never know in an experience you're just tinkering on and doing in your spare time is going to take off and you're going to need a whole group of people working on it. And we also know we've never really provided you a way to transfer that experience to group. We're in early testing with a manual process for this. It's surprisingly complicated, and they won't get into it. But we hope in 2024, you can self-serve transfer experiences from user contributes.

That's huge. So we're also working to make it easier for you to collaborate in real time. So here, you can see what your team is -- we hope towards early 2024, you'll be able to see more of what your team is doing in both 3D and in script. So what you're seeing in this animation is someone flying to a user, another team member, whether they're in 3D or in script land and -- with the new activity history feature coming in soon, you'll have better situational awareness about what your team is doing or has recently done.

Okay, Tian. This is a big one. One thing you all have been asking about is supporting external scripting tools and version control systems. It even came up during Dan and Manuel's AMA in June. And Dan committed to giving you all update at RDC.

Okay, Nick, let's already see what's going on.

The moment has come. We're thrilled to announce that you will soon be able to edit and update your Roblox files in your favorite code editor, and integrate with your version control system. Here, you can see how you can move back and forth between scripting within visual studio.code and studio. This is possible because Open Cloud will be giving you the ability to update scripts. And this is not the end state. We expect Open Cloud will be able to update any aspects of your experience.

So that's Open Cloud is going to open up a bunch of powerful use cases. Now a really simple one that we thought of was updating what items you might be selling and an experience shop by changing a few rows in the spreadsheet. Here's an example where I've got my [indiscernible] portions in my portion shop. And on the right, the Creator is just updating rows in a blue sheet, taking update, injecting the new script and it shows up in the screen.

All right. Let's keep marching up this pyramid. And now we're going to switch gears to some of the more innovative parts of what we've been working on. We want to help you get your ideas into reality faster. And one of the major ways we see this happening is the use of generative AI. Creators will use solutions to craft and realize their ideas faster than ever before. Tian already gave you a little preview. We saw our thunder a little bit.

Totally.

So we're going to give you a little preview of what we've been working on, and we have more to show.

So we have been seeing all the clever and unique ways that you've already been using AI to assist the Creator process. So the Creators are off path anybody here. Creator AI out for Creator where you can easily equip yourselves with an AI-generated wardrobe like Pirate Zombie or surfer -- ice cream surfer.

Ice cream surfer, that's a great one.

I like it too. And the Creators of front lines have been using Gen AI to prototype new art styles and new concepts and PBR surface materials, and you're going to be seeing some of the results of that in their next big update.

So earlier this year, we've already rolled out a couple of generative AI features with Code Assist and material generator. And we've been seeing the people who use these tools are more productive, compared to our previous auto complete solution, those who use Code Assist are inserting twice as much code into their experiences. That means they're getting double the amount of generated code, their experiences are getting richer. We're improving the quality of our suggestions, but we're already up to a 28% acceptance rate on those generated pieces of code.

It's pretty high.

It's going to get better and better. And lastly, we see the same thing with material generator. We've seen more than a 50% increase in the percentage or the number of users -- number of users using material variance within the beta compared with those not in the beta. And I feel like I've already seen this on Roblox just as a player, our experiences are getting so much more vibrant.

Lot shinier. Now Dan says that, but we're excited to announce that in a couple of months, we're going to be rolling out Assistant. Assistant is a conversational AI that will empower you to find answers, explain, debug and iterate on code and even build whole experiences more easily.

Before we get into all the cool stuff, we want to really directly address some key concerns we're hearing from you. What data will we use to train our models? And will it be opt in or opt out by design. We want to be extremely clear. Roblox will not use any of your experience data without your permission. Currently, we're only training our AI models using publicly available data from places like the Creator marketplace. We will have a program which will allow you to contribute data to help improve our AI models, which will benefit the whole community, but it will be completely voluntary.

So as Nick said, we're using publicly available data right now, but we know it's just a little larger data set. We can build much more powerful models and tools. So there are 2 data sets we're going to be talking about here. 1 is for Roblox, 1 is for public training. The first is what will affect this community the most. It will affect the quality of Code Assist and all the other tools -- assistant tools that we build. The second, the public helps the entire world get better at answering Roblox, coding questions or generating robots codes. So you can imagine future generations of ChatGPT or Llama being trained on this data set and doing a much better job with Roblox. So we're rolling out a voluntary opt-in program that allows you to contribute some of your scripts to either 1 or both of these data sets. We're going to be sure to anonymize any sense of information like API keys. And actually, our processing won't even take anything that looks remotely unique. We're mainly interested in code snippets that lots of people are actually using. So as a result, your secret sauce is always going to be safe. So again, it's completely voluntary. You can still use our AI tools even if you don't participate, but if you do, you'll get access to the best models that we have.

All right. We hope that's really clear to you all, and there's documentation and details on all of this on our website that you can learn more. But now let's shift to what these models will actually get you. And let's talk about learning, whether you're brand new to Roblox or a seasoned veteran, our vision is that, well Assistant will help you get to your answers faster. Here, we see an example of a Creator looking to improve the retention on their experience. They ask the assistant and they get back a detailed list of things to consider and maybe steps to take to improve retention. These results are tailored to that user based upon what they've asked for and based upon the situation they're in.

So you used to work at [ Ziggo ]. Is that a pretty good list there?

I think it's something we would consider, Yes.

That's pretty good then. So we launched Code Assist back in March, but we were wondering how else can we help? And the team thought don't you just love reviewing someone else's code?

Not yours.

Yes, but I'm still out of practice. But luckily, now Assistant can do it for you. So here in this animation, what you're seeing is the Creator going over to the script, wondering who wrote this and what does it do, highlighting the script and asking the assistant, please explain this to me. And what you see the Assistant quite robustly explaining in plain English what the code does. And while it was at it, it discovered, "Hey, wait a second. There's probably a bug in here. Would you like me to fix it for you. "

It's not surprising.

Kick me, while I'm down. It's pretty cool. So here's another take on the theme. It's more general debugging case. So in this case, the Creator knows that something is wrong. As they ask the Assistant, why is my animation not playing? The system looks through the code and quickly finds a potential culprit, suggests a fix and shows you exactly what it did.

And as you've already seen from Dan, Assistant can do all of this, but also help you iteratively generate entire scenes by harnessing assets from your personal inventory and those in the Creator marketplace. Here, you can see a Creator interacting with Assistant. And in addition to the work that Dan showed, let's actually build this into a full game. So here, we'll start with a little bit of a camp fire. Let's have a game about collecting firewood. That's where we have some trees, but we're going to want different types of trees. All right. What else do we need for our game?

I think we need an adversary, right? Every good game means an enemy. And so I've got a pretty cold bear right here. Yes, it's not so scary because it's on texture, right? But you all like material generator, just wait until you see what we've got next. We have coming soon retexturing or 3D objects from a tech front. So here you see an untextured bear and the Creator asks it to make it look a little more realistic. Boom. But what if it was more fantasy.

How can I get some of that armor for my teddy bear avatar.

Glad you asked because that is a fantastic reason for you and everybody here to go to Step's live demo tomorrow. We're actually going to be demoing this live. It's pretty amazing stuff.

All right. But how about if you've already got an experience that's a live? How can Assistant help you? Well, we all know that you were running live operations for your games. You got to keep it fresh, keep people coming back. Let's see, it's September, October is coming up, Halloween. How about if we could add some Halloween theming to this experience we already have. Well, we need to be a little scarier. That's pretty good. I think we need some crops or something. How about -- yes, let's make it a graveyard, cool. Some charcoal lanterns, what else could we do? How about like a crypt and maybe we'll get some skeletons off the marketplace.

I don't know, if I've shipped that, but it's pretty cool. And I can't wait to see what you all find ways to use it. So we've been talking about all these things we want you to be able to do, but how do you extend these superpowers to your users? We believe in the future of creation of anything, anywhere by any one because creation is fun, it's powerful, it's inspiring, it's empowering. And we're super excited that many of you have embraced that ethos with amazing building experiences that spark our users creativity like build-a-boat for Treasurer or [ ILEC's ]. We're really excited to where you all take this, and I honestly believe that one of you out there is going to build a better studio than us. Most recently, we've been excited to see this new experience called World Lab from Supersocial coming soon. They have built some pretty amazing in experience, no code building tools. These are the kinds of things that just might help start that next level of richness for inexperience creation. It's pretty cool. But while Creators have been -- you've been able to allow building these things, there have always been kind of trapped within the walls of that 1 experience.

Until now. For the first time ever in August, we made it so you could publish packages from inexperience and save them to your inventory. You can see here how a user can customize the paint color of this car. And then take it out into their inventory. But this is just the beginning.

So that car you just saw, it's now a platform package. If I inspect that car, I'll be able to see which experience built it. And we think that all this creation of accessories, packages, avatars, experiences, those all now become your next calling cards. Let's take Avatars and accessories. You already have a sense of how important they're becoming. You saw that from the announcement of Robots Connect and how prominently users are going to see their avatars and we're really excited to see where you take them. We want you to be able to build experiences that let users build avatars, accessories and items, and then take them across the platform. Each platform item created in your experience is your calling card. It will be easy for people to examine your avatar -- of the people's avatars and figure out where that supercool share came from and jump directly to that experience. So here's an example where in the future, the user is browsing marketplace, spot something they like, finds out where it can be acquired and is teleported to that experience. So all of a sudden, making super cool avatars, accessories and packages became a great way to market your experiences and your creativity.

All right. So here's where it starts to get really crazy. So to add to that mind-bending thought that Tian just shared, all of the APIs that we just discussed around our AI assistance will be available to users on the platform. So now you, as Creators will be able to build experiences that integrate assistance and AI capabilities to allow your users to create the content that they've been dreaming of and take it out of the experience as a platform level item, across different experiences. So we're really excited to see what you all do with this. And ultimately, the goal is to empower creation everywhere. You'll be able to take whatever you created in one experience to another experience, imagine an experience where you design a fabric, and you take that fabric out. Imagine another experience where you bringing your fabric in and you design a coat using that fabric. Now you take that coat out. I know you go to an experience that lets you build a shop. And in that shop, you can put all the coats and other things that you built. And you can publish that as an experience. Now you're running your own store. You haven't even downloaded studio, you're just using different experiences to build an entire experience. You can even imagine taking that experience of that shop and putting it into a mall or some sort of larger cities.

It's a crazy web of creation. We think you're all going to be building on these foundational capabilities and helping to -- helping each other build, whether that's making experiences that make other kinds of creation easy or by providing full plug-ins or packages and creative marketplace to empower other Creators. And again, all of this creation, whether it's in Avatar, an accessory and experience of his attribution back to the building experiences, creating more opportunities for you.

So that's what we're doing. We're building this pyramid. It starts at the bottom with taking care of some basics of our core, goes up to making our tools more flexible so you can use the right tool for the job. And on top of that, there's this mind blowing universe of possibility.

We hope you have as much fun taking this platform in new and inspiring directions as we did in building it for you. We can't wait to see what you all come up with. Thanks for having us.

Wow, this is amazing. I just want to first acknowledge all of you. As I look around this room and I think about why we're all here today. I started working with Roblox over 10 years ago, and I've had the honor to meet and work with so many of you, and I have to tell you that I am constantly inspired by all of you. You are what makes Roblox, Roblox. We have the most amazing Creator community in the world through your ideas, innovations, creativities and perspectives. You are creating spaces for people to come together from all over the world, connect and communicate and have fun, while doing that. People can be their true selves on our platform through their avatar and express themselves through digital fashion and beauty and there's the opportunity in so many aspects that if you don't see it, you can create it. And that's pretty powerful. Putting creation in the hands of people all over the world with different backgrounds and perspective, sharing your creations enjoy with one another, democratizing industries, creating experiences that truly make a positive impact in people's lives. You are shaping the future for the better. Our community is growing. It's expanding. And when we say community, we're talking about all of you. Our amazing Avatar item Creators, we have over 2.3 million Avatar item Creators. Our incredible developers who have created over 15 million experiences on our platform, brand, talent and influencers in the room, you are also part of our growing community. There have been over 200 brand activations on Roblox with amazing year-over-year growth, and we're seeing tons of momentum and over 275 million views of Roblox content every single day on YouTube. We see this community of an amazing ecosystem of flywheel, all connected and help each other drive discoverability, innovation and amazing us exceeding what we ever thought was possible. And new opportunities are emerging as this new ecosystem is growing. Many of you have been creating your own experiences on Roblox for years, some over a decade, and creating successful businesses by creating your own content. Roblox has also become a medium for brands to connect and engage with people all over the world and they're creating experiences and avatar items with many of you here today. That brings us to a massive opportunity for both brands and Creators to collaborate together. We're seeing more and more Creators building experiences and businesses on our platform by creating for and with brands. Now why is this such an exciting time and opportunity to collaborate? Things are changing and how we connect online has evolved. 20 years ago, the web was born. We consume media, we red list, sent e-mails and visited brands websites. Then through social media, we started connecting with each other, sharing personal content at scale with our subscribers and our followers and they consumed content at any time. Then brands enter the conversation, and they added value and amplification. We are now seeing over 65 million people every single day coming to our platform and connecting and communicating together with their friends. So similar to a brand or first thing about creating their website and then their social media channel. This is a new medium for them to come together connect with people all over the world only instead of reading individually, watching videos or scrolling, Roblox offers an opportunity that is immersive and truly social with massive scale. And our global audience continues to grow as Roblox is becoming a platform for everyone. We envision 1 billion users a day coming to Roblox to connect and communicate while doing things they love. And that can include learning together, shopping, express ourselves through digital fashion and beauty, experience in entertainment and sports, discovering music and fandom. And already, we're seeing amazing experiences in all different genres being created by many of you today. So just like in the physical world, people want to connect and engage with their favorite brands and talent on Roblox. Brands became a big part of our community and why do brands want to be on Roblox, all of you. They want to learn from you, collaborate together, bring stories to life. You are the experts who have been created on Roblox for years, some over a decade. Your knowledge, creativity and ideas are invaluable. If you each take a moment to think about your favorite brands, artists, celebrity. Is there one you want to collaborate with? Well, guess what, chances are, they want to collaborate with you too. And many of you are already collaborating with brands and talent. Apeirophobia, Deepwoken, Frontlines, PEGI, Survive the Killer, integrated music from rock band Metallica and had over 20 million listening sessions. Again partner with Warner Bros to integrate Shazam into Strongman Simulator and helped drive 11 minutes on average session time. At it's peak after launch, Strongman Simulator doubled its average daily new users and increased retention. Badimo partnered with NASCAR to integrate into Jail breaks and have a great example of a long-term collaboration. They partnered in 2021 and built a fan contest were fan designs, skins, and developers integrated those cars into the experiences. Following the success, NASCAR the developer, teamed up again in 2023 and this time for our unique experience with a semi truck and Jailbreak and a cross-promotion between Jailbreak and the NASCAR speed hub. Month after the launch, NASCAR vehicles are still being traded and loved by our community. These collaborations are driving enormous impact for both brands and developers, and we're looking forward to seeing all the future collaborations. It's exciting to see our partners and our community come together to innovate. Harley class, supermodel and entrepreneur, collaborating with the community to empower Creators and bring access to fashion. Here is an example of how the physical and digital fashion worlds are colliding. [Presentation]

And having seeing this excited update across that really pushing in the Creator boundaries with new avatars and fashion. Brand, talent and Creators are coming together with a purpose. Ellen John came to Roblox and collaborated with developer Sawhorse, and over 20 avatar item Creators like Builder-boy, Rush, Lovespun, to create Beyond the Yellowbrick Road. What was so special is that this experience not only includes his amazing music, to iconic fashion, but a message for us all to express ourselves and be anybody that we want to be. And that is a millions of people all over the world come to Roblox for. This showcases creations made on Roblox in real life on stage at his U.S. tour at a last concert Dodger stadium, which, by the way, was one of the highest grossing tours of all time, giving bills ability to our amazing Creator community. How amazing is that? We have a special surprise that Elton wanted to be here today, but he wanted to send this message to you all. [Presentation]

There's also an amazing opportunity as on Roblox as we see fandom growing. On Roblox, it's not just about discovery of artists, but fan communities. Other platforms enable this in 1 of 3 ways: artists to fan engagement, fans to artists or fan to fan. But on Roblox, not only are all 3 enabled, but uniquely happening at scale. 200 of the most popular musicians in the world, we found tens of thousands of fan-made experiences and groups on our platform. They're creating immersive social experiences, having real-time interactions with each other and artists, encouraging community recognition. You may have seen in Dave's presentation, twice the K-Pop phenomenon came to Roblox this year working with developer Carta, and our fans not only have created deeper relationships with each other, but also with the group, sending over 35 million fan notes and this launched in March. When you collaborate with brands, here's what you can expect, they are keen to create meaningful connections and experiences. They want to work with you. They want to learn from you and they want to add value to the community. Alo Yoga, whose mission is to bring awareness globally to wellness, wanted to create space on Roblox that provided our communities a place to practice well-being. They worked with sawhorses, influencers and Avatar item Creators to bring the Alo Sanctuary to life. Through this experience, there were over 20 million medications in the first 4 months, and to date, nearly has over 93 million visits. There is a big opportunity to do something different, to story tell, to inspire, to create purpose-driven and meaningful experiences. And brands authentically believe in what you're creating together and they want to share that with the world. They're using their owned and paid marketing channels to promote and drive to experiences and digital fashion on Roblox with widespread media coverage and massive social reach. In addition to brands, influencers are a huge pillar of our content ecosystem. I have a vested interest in amplifying amazing compelling experiences. In June of this year, we saw an all-time high of 275 million views per day on Roblox content on YouTube. When an influencer like Flamingo, post a video on experience on Roblox, we see a daily active user spike, which means many of you also see a daily active user spike. This year, we recruited 50 new influencers into our program, supporting new languages like Japanese, and we're excited to continue to see this group expand. Today, collectively, we're seeing our community really engaging with brands. There are approximately 2.3 billion visits to branded experiences, around 2 million daily active users and brand experiences, and they are saying on average, nearly 12 minutes engaging in brand experiences and exploring together. But it's more than just numbers. Yes, we have massive scale and engagement on our platform, but something else is happening here. It's no longer about possibly reading or watching something or scrolling through images alone, whether you're playing a game, attending a concert, hanging out with friends or shopping for a new outfit, real 3D memories are being created together. Now when I was younger, I used to hang out at the mall. That's where I spent time with my friends after school or after work, that's where people like me would connect. 25% of all U.S. malls will be closed by 2025. Think about that. On Roblox, people are together, they hang out, they shop. And we believe that social shopping is a massive opportunity for this -- for our community. Many brands are already seeing more visits to the Roblox experiences than their websites. Shopping is already one of the main behaviors on our platform as well and it has been for the past decade. People search and purchase virtual items for their avatars daily, and there are 1.8 billion items sold in 2022. So we're excited to see what you all continue to create, including new experiences like shops, more to come here soon. Now as our community grows and more experiences are being created by Creators and brands, the more discovery becomes. Immersive ads allows members of the community to drive discovery and awareness for what they've created. Immersive ads are not just for brands, we also have seen many of our developers leverage the system to teleport people to their experiences and are seeing great results. Advertising here is still about the community, and it's designed to be additive, nonintrusive to our experiences. With some early advertisers, we saw in addition to driving discovery, many people joined with their friends organically. There was a 9% organic lift from portals through friends joining an teleporting and users returning to the experience. Additionally, some advertisers saw up to 20% of users were deeming digital items after they portaled. As the community expands and our ecosystem grows, opportunities for monetization continues to evolve, a great feature of Immersive ads is a debt tied to them. Developers insert ads and then they receive rev share of the ad revenue. We saw cumulative payouts increased 30% in June and as a result, saw a number of publishers increase by 50 and exciting to see these expanding opportunities with Immersive ads. We're going to keep supporting these opportunities. And as you saw in Nick and Tian's presentation, examples of all the ways we are constantly pushing beyond what we could have ever imagined, using new tech feedback from the community and each other to create amazing experiences and virtual items. So today, we're excited to share some really amazing experiences coming out of our Roblox community fund. These partnerships help demonstrate the promise of teaching and learning immersively on Roblox. Through the Community Fund, Roblox continues to invest in outstanding educational partners and developers to bring rich, compelling subject areas to life and interactive dynamic experiences. These partnerships help us demonstrate the promise of teaching and learning immersely on Roblox. Through the Community Fund, Roblox continues to adopt to an outstanding educational partners and developers to bring rich, compelling subject areas to life and interactive dynamic experiences. And I'm excited to share 3 new phenomenal experiences that are just about to launch, RoboCo Sports League from FIRST and Filament Games, CodeCombat Worlds from CodeCombat and Chemistry Lab Escape room by Wonder Works from the team [ Lava ] GoldieBlox. Game Fund is another way that we ensure we are supporting a diverse group of careers internationally. Those in the game fund have demonstrated how they are looking to build the next generation of experiences on Roblox. It's a commitment to build something unlike anything else that we've seen and take their experiences to the next level. Let's take a peek of what is coming. [Presentation]

This is such an exciting time. I also want to announce 3 new experiences that are alive on Roblox today. Playground Basketball, Eternal Heroes and [indiscernible]. Go check them out. It doesn't happen often where once a generational, there's a shift in how people connect and communicate with one another. And I'm so excited, first all, to see how we continue to innovate together and look forward to all of the amazing things that you're all going to create. I want to say congratulations, and thank you.