Roblox Corporation (RBLX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

And we brought this to brands, too. Fenty launched an exclusive Lip gloss on Roblox, and we didn't stop there. We had Travis Kelce running Roots and Girl Garden. And we brought Jurassic World and their dinosaurs to the homepage of Roblox. And just the other weekend, we had Lady Gaga bring Mayhem to the platform. Culture is happening on Roblox, and you're the ones making it. So we're excited to keep building the tools that help you create this win, win, win and keep building the future with you. We hope you'll join us tomorrow to learn more at the Science of game discovery and mastering monetization breakout sessions. Thank you.

Thank you, everybody. Please welcome Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Market Expansion, Jerret West.

How's everybody doing this morning? Is doing this morning? Give me a little bit of juice. I need to level up here. It's amazing to see you all. Thanks for being here. And I love this conference. I love walking around like at the happy hour last night. And I was thinking about why that is, why this place is so special. And it's because when I look out at everyone out here, I see an idea. I see an idea that you believed in so passionately that you decided to turn it into a creation. And you decided to put that creation on Roblox for which we are incredibly grateful. That's incredibly rare in the entertainment space to have that kind of passion fuel a platform. And then I think about a little bit further and you made an incredibly smart financial decision as well. Roblox is platform. This platform has been growing at about 8x faster than the video game industry. It's been that way for quite some time. So I ask myself, how is it? Why is that the case? And I keep coming back to one specific thing. Out of all the platforms that are out there in the entertainment space, I just don't think there's a single one that is as closely connected to the creator community as the Roblox platform is. Our growth is connected. We scale together. The platform supports your creations and ideas and your creations make Roblox better for everybody that's playing out there. It's a wonderful virtuous cycle. So I'm going to spend the next couple of minutes talking purely about things where we can enjoy mutual success, where we can grow together and share some ideas on how we could do that. Roblox initially started as a U.S.-centric product, obviously. It's grown to the exact opposite. 80% of our daily active users are playing from outside of the United States at this point. So it's incredibly important for us to figure out how we break down those barriers together, one of which is language. And our vision here is for language translation, automatic translation to occur in real time across voice, text and image. In order for us to get there, we need you to participate, and we're off to a really good start. About 85% of our top experiences today are using automatic translation. This is one of those things. When you're creating something new, hit the toggle in the Creator hub and turn that on. If you've got a long-tail game that's not sitting in that top 100, hit the toggle in the creator hub and turn those games on because that long tail helps us get there faster. With the way that we are scaling and growing right now around the world, automatic translation and that notion of seamless communication, no matter what language you are speaking is more important than ever. So let's start there with automatic translation. The other part of this is making affordability accessible to everyone everywhere. And again, this is rooted in our origins of being a U.S.-centric product. Oftentimes, that would establish the global pricing. That reference pricing isn't great for a lot of places around the world. So it's imperative for us to be able to come up with regional pricing. We've got an option here to do that. And it automatically in real time gives you pricing preferences or suggestions that you can take or leave for anywhere around the world. All you have to do is turn this on the Creator hub as well. And the vision here is to make great gameplay accessible for everyone around the world no matter where you are or where you're playing from. Okay. So the third piece here is just talking about the 138,000 servers that are online and ready to roll right now. They have specifically been built for moments like August 23 when 45 million players showed up at the exact same time to play a couple of games. Shout out to the infrastructure team for standing that up. I'm not sure that would have been the case 5 years ago, but it does just kind of indicate the astounding progress that we've made on the infrastructure side. Pretty incredible. Now is the point where we get to give them a heart attack because the call to action here is for you to do more of those, bigger. We need them. We need them to fuel our conversations. And there's one big reason why I think about this as a marketer. Those are the moments that lock in core memories for all of our players around the world. Those are the things that they talk about. Those are the things that become things that are talked about across the Internet. And we need to turn that into cultural fuel. In turn, -- we also need to have the infrastructure to be able to amplify all of those ideas and creations for you. That's why we've spent the better part of the year focusing on building out the Roblox marketing engine. And simply put, this is really all of the infrastructure or areas where we can do our best work to amplify all of your stories and turn your creations into those cultural moments. We started the basics with social media. So we focused a lot on increasing engagement and increasing our follower count around the world. We're up to 48 million followers on our handles. That drives about 70 million impressions and 4 million engagements a month for you all, specifically focused on boosting your content, boosting your game handles or bringing new players into the Roblox platform. So making tremendous progress here. We are road mapped out to get to 100 million followers. We need your help in doing that. We need that crosstalk across your handles and you sharing with us what content is going to be big so we can turn them into great stories on social media. Perhaps the inverse of this is thinking about these long-form stories. There are many times where we need to talk about elements of the Roblox platform and ideas shaping that platform. But more importantly, we've got moments where we want to share your creator stories. It's amazing to talk to you all one-on-one. We want to take those opportunities and turn them into podcast moments where we tell a little bit more of a creator story and we tell a little bit more of a content story. Today, we've got 3 million listeners already on our Roblox podcast network. We're going to be adding a whole bunch of new formats, and we're going to be reaching out to you all to help us tell those stories in the coming months.

But more importantly, we've got moments where we want to share your creator stories. It's amazing to talk to you all one-on-one. We want to take those opportunities and turn them into podcast moments where we tell a little bit more of a creator story and we tell a little bit more of a content story. Today, we've got 3 million listeners already on our Roblox podcast network. We're going to be adding a whole bunch of new formats, and we're going to be reaching out to you all to help us tell those stories in the coming months. All right. Another part of this engine has been about building the top of the funnel. We are up to about 420,000 retail locations in 45 countries with Roblox [ pegs ]. It's been a tremendous amount of work to build out that experience and presence. And in addition to that, we've also built out a relationship with all of our digital platforms, store platforms around the world. That's reaching about 2 billion impressions a month as well. So the next couple of months is going to be about building the clock speed of turning and chasing heat around the content that you all are generating. So look out for us to be able to pull those ideas and experiences into our retail and also into our digital store platforms. Another area that I want to tell you about, and this is one that you can literally walk out those doors if you're interested and visit the advertising creators' booth. We have a strategy around paid ads. You just heard a lot about our advertising technology and branded advertisers technology. That has created for us an amazing targeting technology, an amazing ad tech stack and it's great, great data store around how people are behaving on Roblox. What we want to do is enable that so you can build out paid media programs and media plans that run targeted external ads for your games. So we'd like to drive on and off-platform new users to your experiences using the same advertising technology. Like I said, if you're interested in that, go hit the advertising for creators booth, they'll be able to tell you all about it. All right. Last part of the engine here is probably the most important. And I want to recognize a lot of the people whose names or handles are on the slide here. They're in the room with us today, but these are our influencers, and we're lucky to have an incredible community of influencers. Some of you have been with us for years, and your creativity continues to shape Roblox. So thanks for the content you're creating, the energy you bring and in many instances, the feedback that you share. You've been a vital part of Roblox success. And I hope that influencer and creator have an opportunity to meet increasingly at events like this. Just to underscore how much reach and cultural relevance this drives for us. And again, I'll emphasize the fact that most of these videos that we're talking about, the video views here are really talking about your experiences and content. We crossed over the 1 trillion video view threshold on YouTube. You can count on 2 hands the number of brands that have reached that threshold. And we're accelerating about 1.2 billion video views a day on YouTube and TikTok currently. Talking with our partners over at TikTok, they've told us that about 20% share of voice, 1 in 5 videos on TikTok this summer have been Roblox conversations, mostly about your experiences and content. So exciting stuff. We've got an apparatus here to amplify your stories, and that's really what we have built this for. And we amplify the engine by building really fun fuel for it. And I'm going to share a couple of things that we've observed that drive big conversation that you all can hopefully draft off of on your handles or you can partner with us to build out even bigger. One is nostalgia. Roblox is 19 years old. We've got a big one coming up 20 years next year, but 19 years old and has nearly 2 decades of memories inside jokes. I mean it's no longer a platform. It's a part of our lived experience, part of our story. I'll use one example for this, and that's when we brought back the oof sound. It's almost primal for a lot of our users, our players. 95 million views on Instagram and TikTok for oof. Same thing for Cheezburger. We had to cut one. I went with oof. Meme generation is another area where you can explore and think about a little bit further. Don't be afraid here. It has to be authentic. It has to be super timely. But if you pull it off, bringing in real life or digital memes into the Xbox world and vice versa, super powerful. We're an entertainment platform. This is where you have a little bit more license than a traditional brand or a traditional experience. to play with. Take, for example, Aura Farming Kid. Yes, I'm not sure why he's a Canadian Rockies Lumberjack in that video, but 22 million views on TikTok and Instagram. So trends could start anywhere, but you can ride them with creative here and timely updates. The most important piece here, though, is your creator updates. Can't emphasize this enough, have a point with your creator updates, have a pitch angle, have a hook, have something that brings it back to life. Work with us so we can amplify those things. And you'll get real magic to continue to extend the life. Example being Style Showdown. That was March. This beta dropped, fresh format, daily play, good hook angle. If you ship a great update, we'll help turn it into a cultural catalyst like this. And we want to create more of these moments that we can flywheel and keep the life cycle of your experience going beyond just launch month. All right. Let's flip the page and talk a little bit more about how we are leveraging huge events, how we are creating them because we're going to be expanding our playbook in this space as well. We've got some classics here with our live ops events, right? So far this year, we've run 2 events. One was The Hunt: Mega Edition, which was wildly successful, super fun, right? And The Hatch, that happened. And I'll tell you what, though, collectively across the both, they both achieved what they were meant to do. 346 million hub views across the two, 87 million players participating, doing a great job of engaging, helping people with discovery and drive people to your experiences even if they're under recognized out of the game. But I've got something here for you that I want to tell you about, and that's our third event. It's a brand-new concept called The Takeover. And it is a coopetition in a brand-new place called Tagtown, you're going to have the ability to bring and build crews and you defend the neighborhood against other crews that are built and doing everything that they can to build a bigger network of neighborhoods, if you will. This is an incredibly unique art concept, as you can see. It launches on September 12, so mark your calendars. I'm really excited about this one because I think it's going to add to our Live-Ops roster. This is going to be a really, really fun one. All right. So like I mentioned, it's coopetition. This is one that brings people together around that co-op gameplay and competitive spirit. We're also expanding our roster around things that merge the joy of immersive play on the Roblox platform. Of course, I'm talking about music here and concerts. Sophie Tucker, LEV, Kpop Demon Hunters all have been on our platform within the past months. And now we're leveling up and creating an experience called The Block. It's our new persistent event space, and we're partnering with creators across the community to bring these exciting events to life. So we've got one coming up on Saturday tomorrow. BSlick is going to be performing in real life at the RIA's after party, and then he's going to be in The Block performing for our Roblox users that aren't going to be like us at the RIA's. In addition to that, next week, we have aespa coming to The Block. Yes, they're going to be showcasing their virtual item collaborations with 4 creators. And this is really just the beginning. We're going to be bringing more artists and more events to The Block in the coming months. So really excited about that. Lastly here, we can't forget about the final for The Hunt: Mega Edition. And that really lit the way for something that we think we can take advantage of in 2026 and lean into, and that's esports and competitive gameplay. As you saw, our engine is growing by leaps and bounds. It looks incredible. And we're going to lean into esports. So stay tuned for this, start thinking about leaderboards, tournaments and game modes right now for your games because we're going to be looking a little bit harder at this. All right. So that's my time. And I want to say we are just -- we want to be your biggest champion. We're here to spotlight your creations and help them shine across the world. And if I say one more thing about RDC, I just want to encourage you all to do everything you can to step back over the next 48 hours and look around. You are building -- you are building with friends, sometimes family, you are building something that you're passionate about. We're in a space that's growing exponentially. It makes me think of that classic quote from that old sage, Andy Bernard in The Office saying, "I wish I could look and have the ability to see the good old days while I'm living them because that's really what you all are in right now, and I hope you take advantage of it. I look forward to meeting you over the next couple of days and have a fantastic RDC.

Please welcome back David Baszucki.

Okay. All right. It's almost lunch time, a couple of caveats. This afternoon is even more technical, more engineering, more product, and more scale than you saw this morning. So stay tuned. It's -- we have a huge afternoon lined up for you. For those of you at your first RDC, tradition time, every year, we've been doing top 10 predictions. We've already done one cycle. We're going to do another cycle. So let's do what we do every year. Let's bring up the predictions we made last year, and I'll give you an update. First prediction. Fortune 500 company will use a Roblox experience as part of a recruiting process. Well, I will highlight that we're using Roblox as part of our recruiting process. Now I know there's a lot of investors in the audience, so we don't want to make any forward-looking statements, but I'm very optimistic about this one, and it might be Roblox. Next up, a school will integrate a full K-12 curriculum. For those of you that are watching, we introduced a full educational discovery sort. People making educational experiences are getting more and more visibility. I'm still super optimistic about this one. The next one, let's up this to 18 plus. Okay. So this one is controversial, but here's what I want to share with you. We've seen mail system, we've seen text system. We've seen voice system, we've seen video system. 3D immersion is inevitable. It's going to be a communication platform. And I'll flip this in reverse. We see this as a corporate responsibility to usher this technology in with safety and civility. So with 18 plus ID verified people on our platform, we are optimistic about this. Next one. Roblox employees, more time using Roblox for meetings than with video. It's early. I still think we can do this one, so I'm going to keep a thumbs up on that one. Next one. So I'm pretty optimistic this is already happening, and we're going to go and measure this. I talked to a lot of parents with the nudges, with our safety and civility systems. I actually had a Roblox employee come to me whose young child, I think, was saying, not bad stuff, just edgy stuff. And for some reason, they got a 1-day ban and it created a discussion. So very optimistic that when we measure this, we'll be increasing the civility of people. So I'm thumbs up on that one. Number five, let's take a look. Already happening. We already have creators. So this one should actually be done. Let's go -- oh, updated slide. Cool. Roblox will be a frequent communication channel for my family. I'm hoping we'll see, okay, my kids are a little like they've seen a lot of Roblox over 20 years. So this one will hope on. So we're going to kind of put a little warning on that one. Number three, so go out in the lobby. I think it's already clear. Roblox is going to be a place for fashion design. I'm very optimistic. I'm hoping with some of the things we've seen with fashion on Roblox, it's really only early, so thumbs up there. Number two, absolutely, we're talking to people right now, building large festivals. We all know we need 3D simulcast technology. And when we have that, we'll be able to go live out to millions. So -- and the concurrency numbers of this actually look pretty small now, right? 1 million, like that's small potatoes now. And then finally, for those of you that track M&A, for those of you that track the value of studios, for those of you that track the value of Roblox and what we're trying to do, I absolutely believe we're going to see a $1 billion studio by the time we finish this 5 years. So thank you all. Really appreciate it. We have a huge afternoon this afternoon and really appreciate your creativity. Thank you.

Please enjoy lunch. We'll see you back here for the creator keynote. [Break]

Please welcome Roblox Senior Vice President of Engineering, Nick Tornow.

Hello, RDC. It's so great to be back here with all of you. My name is Nick Tornow, and I lead our creator and engine groups here at Roblox. And I tell you all year, every year, this is the event I look forward to the most. And I know what you're thinking. But no, it's not because of the [ swag ]. So the [ swag ] is very good. It's because the energy, the collaboration and the pure creativity in this room is higher than anywhere else in the planet. This is what is happening. And it's this which fuels everything we do at Roblox. So welcome to the Roblox Developers Conference. This is our time to connect, to learn and to celebrate everything you all have accomplished over the last year. It's going to be an incredible couple of days. Now we have a lot of exciting announcements to share with you. We're going to geek out a little bit. But before we look forward, I want to take a moment to look back at everything we've accomplished together over the last 12 months because what a year it's been. The last 12 months have been a year of explosive growth, and it's been driven by your creativity and your dedication. Let's consider our platform growth. Our global community is more engaged than ever before. And we recently hit a new milestone of 111.8 million daily active users across the platform, which is a growth rate of over 41% year-over-year. Now when numbers get this big, sometimes it's helpful to try to put them in perspective by comparing to something else. And I want to call out the most recent Super Bowl had 127 million viewers. So this past quarter, together, we averaged approximately a Super Bowl on Roblox every single day. Yes. It's incredible. And these users are diving deeper and deeper into your experiences than ever before. Now there's a lot of ways to look at this. One way to see that is in the last year, we've seen more than 390 billion visits to experiences. Now this is up 41% year-over-year. And if you do the math, this represents about 12,000 visits per second, which, as I understand it, is about the rate at which people all over the earth enjoy Coca-Cola beverages. It's also incidentally approximately the rate at which Roblox creators ask for emissive map support from our engine. Now another way to look at this is in the last quarter, players spent a whopping 27.4 billion hours in your experiences. This is a 58% increase year-over-year. And it represents an average concurrent count of about 12 million users. Now if you recall earlier from David's opening keynote, this is about where we were at the beginning of the year. This is about the peak Roblox had ever achieved at the beginning of the year. We're actually about 11 million. So that -- what was our peak at the beginning of the year is now our average for the last quarter. So users are playing more. They're exploring more and they're staying longer. Now all of this is due to your hard work. You've been so productive this last year keeping content fresh and keeping users engaged. We see this everywhere we look. But just one example is that every day, 26% of the top 1,000 experiences are updated or published. And you've been busy building on each other's work. We see this with the creator store. You've inserted more than 1.2 billion models into your experiences, and you've installed more than 500,000 plug-ins since the last RDC. And I want to give a big shout out to all of our plug-in creators out there for accelerating creation across the entire community. Thank you. All right. Now as the platform expands, so do the earning opportunities for all creators. Earlier, David shared that creators over the last year have earned over $1 billion. Our creator ecosystem includes many hobbyists. And of the millions of creators monetizing on Roblox, over 29,000 are part of our DevEx program, with the median creator earning $1,440. But looking a little deeper at those numbers. In the last 12 months, the average revenue for a top 1,000 developer was $980,000, so nearly $1 million. For a top 100 developer, that average was $7 million. And for a top 10 developer, the average was $38.5 million. Now these numbers sort of speak for themselves, but I want to call particular attention while we see growth across the board, and you can see the growth numbers up on the screen. We see a growth rate for the top 1,000 of 2.9x over the last 5 years, which is higher than the growth rate of 2.8x for the top 100 and higher than the growth rate of 2.2x for the top 10. This means we're becoming a broader and deeper platform, and this is a trend we plan to continue. Building further on this, we also launched Creator Rewards earlier this summer. And it's early days, but we now have more creators earning for engagement than ever before. And here's just a couple of stats. We're seeing an increase of 171% number of creators earning with Creator Rewards relative to the prior engagement-based payout system. And on top of this, we're seeing of those creators who are earning more than 5 Roblox through the EBP program, 73% of them are earning more with the Creator Rewards program. So more creators are earning and all the creators are also earning more. So this broad-based growth is what we like to see. More and more people are able to build thriving businesses on this platform. Now underlying the strength are stable experiences continuing to drive growth. And here's another amazing stat. There are over 160 experiences on Roblox that have reached the 1 billion visits milestone. Now in this past year, 50 new experiences have joined this exclusive club, which is a growth rate increase of more than 50% relative to the prior year. But here's another thing to be very excited about. Beyond this core strength of stable experiences, which we know and love, this is not a static platform. In fact, it's a platform that is increasingly dynamic, and it increasingly powers breakout hits. If we look just at experiences created in the last year, we see more than 2,000 of them have already hit 5 million visits. We see more than 1,000 of them have already hit 10 million visits. And amazingly, we see that 60 of them have already hit 100 million visits. This is within 1 year of that experience ID being set. So this means there is not a fixed set of leaders on this platform. New entrants have explosive growth potential. There's more experiences bursting onto the scene, but also core strength in established content, which is really the best of both worlds. Now each time a new hit experience comes on to the platform, Roblox grows. And as the platform grows, this helps everyone else. We know this because the average user on Roblox plays 21 experiences per month. So players new to the platform might join for one experience, but they stay around to play many other experiences, benefiting the community as a whole. You can think of Roblox like a big tent, where each breakthrough experience adds a new tent pole, raising the canopy and inviting more users and creators to come in. And we're just getting started. You heard this morning about our audacious goal to become 10% of the global gaming market. Now to get there, new tent pole experiences will emerge. New genres will emerge. And new genres push the boundaries of technology and game design, redefining our platform and breakthrough this ripple across the ecosystem. So let's take a look at how things are going at the genre level. For this next section, I'd like to invite Greg Hartrell, our product lead for creator content to the stage. Welcome, Greg.

Thank you, Nick. All right. I think we'll start with talking about shooters as a genre. Shooters hours played are up more than 100% year-over-year. Top shooters like Rivals and Gunfight Arena deliver the joy of a precision shot to secure the win. But they've done this by building their own server side hit registration systems. They've optimized their games performance to perform well on a Roblox game engine and made these games playable on more devices supporting different input types to reach a wider audience.

Now I love these 2, but I feel like I've seen some new ones break through recently as well.

It's absolutely true. So it's worth calling out weird gun game. It subverted this genre in really unique ways, building a part-by-part crafting system where you can assemble almost any kind of weapon. It's a pretty compelling game loop. You build some -- any kind of weapon you want, you jump into a match to test it. And then you get to see if you're kind of brand of weird wins.

So I really wondered, Greg, and maybe you can help me out, are these weird guns actually effective?

Well, sometimes weirdness is a strategy. I made a gun, for example, when you shot that made a loud hawking sound every time you shot.

A honk. Yes. So how does that help?

It's actually not very helpful. It turns out that your enemies know where you are all the time. But when you do this, your opponents know that they're getting killed by somebody with a honking weapon, and that's a psychological victory.

I see, its very deep. I have many questions, but I think we need to move on.

Okay.

How are some of our more traditional genres today?

We've got some really impressive growth in simulation, for example, in the last year. The genre evolved with the explosive growth of Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot. They've smashed concurrency records in their own ways, but they've each done some interesting ways of reaching new heights, adding mechanics that encourage and reward compound social expression and executing on these epic live events such as the admin wars that we saw only a couple of weeks ago. And I have to confess, I don't know what Torrtuginni Dragonfrutini is, but it makes me hungry.

Don't eat the memes.

Really fruits in the name, Nick, it's edible. Okay. But if we're talking about food, we are talking about another genre. We're talking about survival. And this is where we've seen survival explode, and we saw the gripping and strategic challenges of 99 Nights in the Forest, pushing the genre forward. Very impressive. It innovates by seamlessly innovating with survival crafting, a little bit of tower defense, some open world exploration, and it features procedural map generation and AI path finding and behaviors for its NPCs, not to mention the struggle with a Demonic Deer with boundary issues.

Yes. I know all about deer struggles. We have one that comes into our yard and eats our flowers, then it goes to our window and just kind of stairs at us.

That sounds kind of terrifying, Nick. Maybe the deer is looking at its reflection.

No, I'm pretty sure it's the psychological victory thing you were just talking about.

We got to fear the deer, Nick, fear the dear.

All right. Let's shift our focus to our road map. Our partnership with you all is built on trust, and trust is built on transparency. Right now, we're going to do a live retrospective of our Creator Roadmap. We need to look at what we said we'd do and what we actually did. We're here today to hold ourselves to account. So we launched our Creator Roadmap in 2023, and we update it every quarter to give you visibility and build confidence that we're doing the right things for everyone in this community. And since our last RDC, we've shipped more than 102 items on our road map, but the details are an important part of showing what kind of job we're doing. So let's take a look. Here's our report card, wins and misses altogether.

While it's great to get 102 items out to the community, let's focus on a couple of stats. First, let's look at our on-time delivery rate, which is 53% in this last year. That's down from 59% the year prior. The on-time delivery rate was impacted. We had a strategic shift in midyear into what we call engineering excellence. This is higher quality, more stable code everywhere. This focus did yield critical wins for us. We now sit on significant increases in studio stability and of course, the record-breaking platform concurrency we've all seen. But this quality bar does mean that we've had to delay releases. An example of this was last week's glTF export, where we needed to spend more time making it more reliable, ensuring a compatibility with a lot of our back-end systems. And we just firmly believe that this is our way going forward. Prioritizing stability is one of the best ways we think we can respect this community.

Yes. Another observation, it looks like we delayed about 31% of the items on our road map versus 25% last year.

Yes, that's right. And look, we just have to apologize for that. There's an enormous number of opportunities everywhere and new things, as you can imagine, are emerging as we grow. And that said, this coming up year, we really need to focus on doing fewer things with higher consistency, and we're always going to prefer to deliver higher quality features instead of rushing them and giving you all transparency along the way.

So that's right. We're going to keep iterating. Please continue to provide feedback on what you see us doing and what you see us not doing, and we'll continuously work to improve. All right. That's enough review. Let's get on to the good stuff, starting with our vision to enable the creation of anything anywhere by anyone. We're well on our way, and our strategy forward rests on 4 pillars. Number one, we're committed to providing a stable, high-performance, universally accessible foundation for all of our creators and our users. Number two, creator productivity. We're enhancing your efficiency with superior tools for avatars, animation, seamless iteration and asset management. Number three, we're going to provide you with better tools and insights to grow. We're giving you data and AI-powered tools to make more informed decisions, iterate effectively in production and reach a global audience. And number four, a powerful engine. We have an amazing engine, and we are evolving it to support more complex and expressive content at a massive scale, unlocking the next generation of experiences. Together, these pillars will make this platform, which is already the most powerful and flexible platform to create on even better. And we have tons of great updates on each one. I'm excited to show you what we're building, starting with inviting up Josh Anon and Taylor Russ to talk about our rocksolid platform.

Hi. I'm Josh Anon, a product manager on the Engine team.

And I'm Taylor, an engineering lead on the engine team.

One of Roblox' unique value propositions is that you write your experience once, and we make sure it runs well on millions of devices worldwide from high-end gaming PCs to low-end budget phones. This lets you spend your time creating instead of thinking about things like GPU drivers. Now there's a lot that goes into delivering this. Let's look at how we're doing. First, stability. Stability means not crashing. Our goal is to never crash. In the past year, we have significantly improved our stability. We're seeing a 66% improvement in play time per crash for iOS users. Android users have seen a 26% improvement. One of the key ways we're doing this is by continuing to invest in how we manage memory. In the past year, we've built an entirely new memory management system internally that's rolled out almost everywhere globally. Now what's extra impressive is that this system takes experiences that used to be unplayable and crash immediately on low-end devices, and it makes them very stable and playable like you see in this video. On Android alone, based on some of our early testing, we think the system could deliver an additional 356 million hours of annualized play time. That's a pretty big deal, and you all get it transparently for free. Stability doesn't just matter when you're playing, it matters when you're building. We've been spending a lot of time working on studio stability as well. Since last year, we've improved studio hours for failure by 90%. Hopefully, some of you noticed the difference. Go ahead. [ A couple of you].

Stability goes hand-in-hand with raw performance, and we're seeing great strides here, too. Our goal is to build systems where you fall into a pit of success and we take care of performance for you, ensuring your content runs fast everywhere. We're seeing some incredible improvements with our cloud-based LOD system that Dave talked about during the keynote. And we'll go into more detail when we discuss the future of the engine, but we wanted to highlight 2 other improvements to share with you all. We continue to comb through our code and work on perf and push on it wherever we can. As we worked on the new LOD system, we found that mesh loading was capped per frame. We uncapped it. We saw crazy gains in performance, especially on higher-end machines. In many experiences, we saw load times cut in half or more. You all receive the improvement automatically without having to republish. Performance isn't just about the client. We pay close attention to our server frame rate as well. And we call this heartbeat. We target ensuring that our servers run at 60 hertz globally. Late last year, we started looking closely at the deep internals of how our engine interacts with the Linux kernel the server runs with. We found an opportunity with virtual memory to physical memory mapping to use something called Transparent HugePages, and that improves that mapping efficiency. We deployed THP over the course of a month, and it had a huge impact. You can see the impact in this chart, where in 1 day, we went from a PO5 heartbeat below 45 to regularly above 50. And for our PO5 users, we're not consistently hitting 60 hertz yet. We still have work to do, but this is big progress. And of course, this all happened transparently. You did nothing, Roblox got faster and all your experiences benefited.

Next up, platform reliability. On Roblox, we take care of the server stuff for you. This year, as we've broken industry records, we've had teams working harder than ever to make sure our servers are reliable and that you can focus on growing record-setting content, not managing services. Since last year, we continued to improve the uptime of Roblox itself. Our uptime was 99.972%. Our improvements saved over 12 million engagement hours. We'll keep pushing to 4 9s and then 5 9s. So we operate data centers around the world, including our new Brazil data center. And internally, we forecast growth in supply and demand and make sure we can deliver enough compute. But recently, we've seen record concurrent users, which required more compute power than we had in our entire global grid. I call this our holy moly -- sorry. We actually had a weekend earlier this year where we ran out of compute for a few minutes. Rather than throwing up an air saying Roblox is full and stopping people from playing, we worked around the clock so that within a few weeks, we could use third-party cloud services to run our servers too so that we wouldn't run out of capacity again. Your perspective, things just work invisibly. Roblox could handle record-setting demand, no problem. A few weeks ago, we had over 45 million concurrent players, which this investment let us handle. I don't think anybody else could do that. It's pretty cool.

That's for our infrastructure team. Finally, let's talk about friction, and let's start with everyone's favorite source of friction, bugs. We've made addressing your dev forum issues a company-wide priority. Since January, we've closed more than 4,100 bugs, which is about as twice as many as we had closed last year by this time, and there's still 3 months left in the year. A major source of friction for players isn't just bugs, though. It's cheating. People who make -- who cheat make playing together less fun. We are making it our mission to end cheating on Roblox. A few years ago, we took a step forward in Windows with Hyperion anti-cheat technology, and we're continuing to improve that technology. This year, we're focused on Android as well. But we've also made a major change in how we handle cheating on the platform. Historically, whenever we detected a cheater, we'd make a note and run a periodic manual band wave. Now we have an automated system that runs 24/7 so that if we detect cheating, you will automatically receive progressive consequences going from a warning all the way to a permanent ban. Our goal is to reform people and get them playing fairly, which is why we have these progressive actions. Hopefully, everyone here has only felt the benefits and not experienced any of those consequences. Since April, we've seen an 84% reduction in playtime exposure to cheaters, thanks to this system. We'll continue to invest in securing Roblox by both securing Roblox itself and by giving you tools like Server Authority. Come to the competitive games breakout talk tomorrow. We're proud of results that we've achieved this year, and we hope that you appreciate them. And we look forward to sharing more with you next year. We're going to hand it off to Oren and Eric next to talk to you about creator productivity.

Hi, I'm Eric Yip, Engineering Lead for Roblox Studio. And today, we're thrilled to share with you our latest update to boost your productivity.

And hi, I'm Oren Jacob, Engineering Lead for Avatar. We're powering up you across 4 areas in our talk today, cutting out busy work so you can innovate faster and helping you scale your team's impact. Let's start with Avatars and animation. To improve the quality of Avatars with Avatar Auto Setup, back in March, we were running at about a 47% success rate. Today, that's at 90% -- this lets you focus on creative intent and bringing your models to life. And you can leave things like rigging, skinning, caging for layer clothing and positioning for R15, attach points for accessories and other stuff to us. Let's roll the video. On the creator side?

On the creator side here is a builder in blender, you're focusing on your vision, unique model with custom pants and shirts and hair and shoes. Avatar Auto Setup then takes over. The heavy lifting is done in the background and the complex conversion process is effortless. And there you have it. As you cycle through the results, you can preview them immediately, a full Roblox-ready avatar. So come by the studio booth to check out the latest and see Avatar Auto setup for yourself. Now let's take a look at animation. We're making big strides in Avatar animation technology today, introducing the adaptive animation format. This supports retargeting of animations across all types of humanoid rigs from R6 to R15 to complex custom bone-based characters across the board. You can author and preserve contact-rich interactions across scenes and across characters. With the adaptive animation format, animations can be created once and they'll run on all avatars that Roblox supports today and that Roblox will support tomorrow.

Yes. There we go. Today, animation blending is rather limited. It takes about 1,000 lines of Luau's scripting and a Luau scriptor to make it all work. Let's roll the video. Soon, we'll be releasing the animation graph editor, an API and studio tooling that will enable next-level character animation quality and scripting, making scripting optional to deliver on that. So studio tooling will support both visual compositing and the button of composed animations as well. This will allow all animators to create rich lifelike animations with no code.

All right. Let's jump into how studio is going to work better with your favorite tools. We know many of you prefer your own code editors. This is why last year, we released an early preview for sync, and now we're rolling out another update, folder- level syncing. Let's see this in action. Select a data model location that you want to sync from, then a folder that you want to sync it to and just like that, you can manage your entire code base from your favorite editor, create, rename and [delease] scripts, all with studio perfectly in sync. All right. We're excited for this one. So this is coming soon in beta, and it's going to be GA by the end of this year. All right, we also know that when you're working with tools like Blender, you often need to move your 3D models out of studio. And historically, you use OBJ for that, but it's limited, right? Single meshes, basic texture, you're looking for more. This is why we've launched GLTF exports for the assets that you have permissions for. Now on the left, the avatar is showing multiple meshes, proper rigging and skidding intact. And on the right, 2 helmets, the OBJ looks flat, while the GLTF version shows the full PVR details with the look that you intended. This is already launched, so give it a shot, and you can always come by the studio booths to give us any feedback. Now that you exported it, getting those models back in the studio should be easy. This is why we're introducing model [Re-important] Studio. So I know the name speaks for itself, but you know what, let's have a demo. We had a house that we imported from Blender, but we want to add some rocks to it. Now the [Re-important] Studio is just one click, no dialogues. All right? We're going to tweak some of these rock colors. And just for fun, we're going to attach this boat. Back in Blender, we're going to update this one wood in dock a little bit. And now I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut for the [reimport]. And look, everything is intact, including that boat. The magic here is that the reimport is non-disruptive, meaning your properties and constraints stay intact, keeping you in the creative flow. This is coming soon as a beta, but you can also come by a booth to check it out today.

All right. Let's get into how to improve and organize your data at scale. More creators are using more assets this year. 50% of top creators by time spent have more than 2,300 assets and the top 5 have more than 30,000 assets each, double what we had last year. To help you manage your assets at scale, we launched our beta for our revamped asset manager, so you can easily find your assets with powerful search, sort and filtering. You can search all your assets in your users and group's accounts with partial or exact matches. You can also find your models by searching using descriptive words as well. Next, to help you organize your assets, we'll be launching user creator folders next year. Over the past year, we rolled out several improvements to asset privacy and our sharing system. Let's go to the video. You can now share models, images, meshes and even animations with your connections and your groups. Next, by the end of the year, we're also launching the beta, enabling you to make your newly created meshes and images private, helping you control the usage of your assets and prevent asset leaks, not that has ever happened to us awkward. We also heard your feedback that you need better tools to manage different versions of your work. This is why we're revamping the place version history View in Studio. You'll soon be able to mark specific milestones in place version history as you iterate over placed versions and be able to easily find and navigate across them. Let's look at the video. So you can leave a note on a version so that you can document important details for yourself or your team. You can check out who and your team contributed to changes made in each version. And if you need to find a specific version, you can easily search by contributor, text or date or filter for published or manually save versions. These improvements are all coming by the end of the year. And speaking of versioning, we also know that a lack of versioning for assets slows down your iterative workflow and causes too much inventory clutter. So next year, we'll be extending versioning to meshes, and images and improving version control for animations as well. Your player data is crucial. And this past year, we launched the Data Storage Manager, a powerful solution for your game tester ops and community management teams and members to view and understand exactly how your player data is being stored. So let's go straight to the demo. Say you launched a coin collecting mini game and you want to see if your game is properly saving your players' coin count. Your game tester can open up the Data Storage Manager, validate the proper data structure, search for themselves and then play the game and monitor in real time how their player data is being updated. After your game is launched, your ops numbers can keep track of your -- how large your data store has grown across how many data stores themselves and how many keys. And when your players come to your community manager with issues, perhaps data corruption that led to players losing all their coins, your community manager can easily search for that player, verify their history with versions and proceed to rectify the scenario right there. In the near future we'll be adding deletion workflows as well as many other capabilities. You can come to the cloud services booth to chat with the team and learn more about that right after this event.

All right. Let's talk about collaboration with your teammate and even with AI on your side. Whether you're working solo or on a team, fast feedback moves projects forward. With comments in Studio, you can collaborate directly in your workspace. Let's see it in action. For instance, pin an object like this car and leave a comment, have a task for a friend, tag them directly, then quickly filter. When you're done, resolve comments and capture your decisions. This is live today, but we're just getting started. Soon, we're going to be adding support for deep linking, so you can get to those comments even faster. Now we also know that as your team grows, control becomes critical. This means a need for safer permission and more oversight. So we're enhancing creator groups. On the left, we've added experience level permission, so you can grant access to one experience and not your entire portfolio. And on the other side, we've also enhanced the activity tracker for you to audit actions in real time. And coming soon, we're adding support for even more events like revenue payout to help your team scale even faster. We've also been hard at work with Assistant, and today is a big leap. Assistant will soon speak MCP. This is the protocol to let your tools talk to one another. Let's see a demo with Figma. On the left side is a leaderboard that we drew in Figma. And on the right side, Studio is connected to the Figma Dev Mode, MCP server. And I've just asked Assistant to import this leaderboard into my place. And there it is, fully built with a working scroll bar. But the magic with Assistant is iteration, so let's spice it up with some emoji icons, see what happens. And there you go. So I want to say that Figma is just one example. Soon, Assistant MCP will connect with the entire ecosystem of MCP servers. So this is coming soon at the beta. I invite you all to come by a studio booth today to check this out. And so thank you very much. Next up, I would like to hand it off to Peter Yang and Kyle Spence for tools and insights.

All right. Hey, everyone. I'm Peter, and I'm a Product Manager at Creator Services.

And I'm Kyle, an Engineering Manager on Creator Services.

And today, we're excited to show you all the amazing tools and insights we're building to help all of you grow your games faster. So let's start with analytics. We've been shipping nonstop this year, including retention cohorts, insights, external link tracking and even avatar analytics. And today, I'm proud to share that over 93% of our top 1,000 creators are using analytics every month to make better decisions.

And for the 7% of you that aren't using it, give it a try and let Peter know if there's anything that you can improve.

Thanks, Kyle.

There's always room for improvement. Now one of the areas that we're really improving is insights to help you separate the signal from the noise with your metrics. And recently, we shipped new insight reports that highlight the most important metrics and actions for you to focus on.

We've also updated these reports of player feedback summaries to give you real-time feedback on what players love and want improved about your game.

And we believe that this combination of metrics and player feedback will give you a more complete picture of the right actions to take to grow your game faster. Now picture this Kyle, we just launched a new game, and I got to admit, I'm feeling a little bit nervous. I really want to get metrics and player feedback, but I'm worried that our retention KPIs might not be good enough for the discovery algorithm.

Well, Peter, I'm actually not nervous at all. And that's because we're launching -- we're going to launch experience betas later this year to let all of you test and improve your game before it reaches a wider audience. In beta, you control who can play your game. You might share it on social or in your community or you might run a sponsored ads to reach a targeted audience. So Peter, let's focus on improving our games retention before opening it up for search and discovery.

That sounds like a good plan. And speaking of retention, one of the most powerful ways to engage our players is to use events. And this summer, we added new APIs to let you invite players to your events from inside the experience. And overall, we're just seeing a lot of excitement and many of you using events to build excitement for your games. In fact, every month, we see 4.6 billion event RSVPs on the platform. All right, Kyle. Now I'm really excited about this next feature. Do you want to talk about it?

Sure. I'm sure many of you have felt this pain. You just shipped a new update in your game and all of a sudden, you start seeing error rates spike and players complaining about issues. Today, your only option to fix this problem is to rush to deploy a new update, and that means kicking all of your players and restarting all of your game servers. With configs, you can wrap every update in the config flag. You now have an on-off switch that will let you disable the new content or feature without having to redeploy or restart your servers.

But that's not all. You can also use configs to update in-game values in real time. I'm not sure if Brad from Adopt Me! is in the audience. But for example, let's say Adopt Me! wants to update their starter pack. This cracked egg isn't really all that is cracked up to be. And this royal egg is way more impressive than [posh] right? So if I want to update my starter pack, all I have to do is wrap it in a starter pack config. So configures are coming later this year, but I'm even more excited about this next feature.

We're also excited to announce experimentation or A/B testing to let you test new features in your game as well as your matchmaking configuration. Experiments let you measure with confidence whether that change you made actually improved your metrics. So let's say you want to test a new onboarding dungeon to see if it will improve retention. You can run an experiment that shows half of your users is a new dungeon while the other half get your current one. A few weeks later, you see that users who received the new onboarding dungeon had over 37% increase in [D1] retention. Peter, what do you say? Should we ship this?

Well, Kyle, nothing makes product managers happier than seeing that be a significant lift. And the only thing that will make me happier is launching config and experimentation to all of you later this year. So be sure to join our analytics session tomorrow, where we're going to have real top studios walk through real examples of using analytics and experimentation to grow their games.

Earlier today, Jared spoke about some of the impressive growth we're seeing globally in every region. So let's talk about one of the biggest opportunities in growing your games. The international market continues to expand. Just last year, we launched chat translation. And since then, we've done over 400 billion translations. There are 11 billion translations from the content on the platform, and we've expanded to supporting 17 languages for automatic translation with our newest addition to Airvic this year. And using our translation and localization features is a no-brainer to reach Robots' global audience. In fact, in a recent test, we saw that games that had all the translations on saw an average of almost 1% increase in playtime with over a 4% increase from Chinese, Japanese and Korean-speaking players who joined the game for the first time. Now you might think that 1% is a small number, but compounded over weeks and months, that could lead to huge playtime lift for your game. So don't miss the opportunity to make your games accessible to a global audience. And if you have manual translations already, don't worry, we will always prioritize those over your auto translations.

In Dave's keynote, you saw a live demo showing Dave and Kiran interacting with an MPC. Let's dig into the details and show you how you can leverage the new audio, voice and natural language features in your experiences. First, let's set up an MPC who can dynamically speak audio with the new text to speech system. First, we set up audio emitter and audio speech instances and then wire them together. Then we choose a voice and set some text to play a speech. There are a bunch of parameters we can play with. Let's mess with the voice and pitch. [Presentation]

I don't know, Kyle, I think that robots is a little bit too high pitch man. I think you got to make some more robotic.

You know what, we can. Let's make this a more robotic sounding voice. Let's just add a sound modifier and change that to our text to speech and audio emitter. This all uses the existing audio APIs so you can create the exact voice that you want. [Presentation]

That sounds a lot better. But how can I talk to this robot as a player?

Yes, good idea. Let's also set up using player voice, so we can interact with the MPC using the new speech-to-text system. We can add audio device input and audio text to speech instances and wire them together. Let's also add a script that listens to the text change property and add a function to make the robot jump. Using what we made, we can command a robot to jump, super cool. But he still jumps when we tell them not to. Let's fix this. And while we're at it, let's give the robot a personality so we can more naturally talk to and command it around, leveraging the text-generation APIs. So using the text-generation API and some smart prompting, we can make our MPC feel more alive. Let's name it the Build Battle 5000 and tell about the apocalyptic world it's in. So Peter, when you ask our robot what his name is? [Presentation]

It's pretty cool.

Yes.

Okay. Let's finally hook up our bot to smartly respond to us and handle voice commands. With some more prompting, now the MPC will try to correctly follow the commands based on anything we say. So now he jumps when I tell them to jump, and he doesn't when I tell them not to. [Presentation]

Okay. But we talked about translations earlier. So what if I don't speak in English? I only speak German. Can the robot still understand me?

Yes. Sure. We can make this work. I'm sure your users speak many different languages. To quickly show this in action, let's just add a command to our MPC so I can translate what we can say. We can do this by using the real-time translation open cloud API. You just call out the language that your player is in and what language you want the content translated to. So now when we ask our MPC how to say, hello, how are you in German? [Presentation]

Close enough. I can ask your questions, give it natural language commands and the MPC is able to do it all. We're excited to see everything you all build with these new features. Text-to-speech is launching soon with the increased limits that you've been asking for. And if you want to use it even more, you'll be able to pay for extended access later this year. Finally, next year, we will launch the ability for you all to create and bring your own voices, so you can use that dynamic speech generation in the exact way that you want.

Our speech-to-text beta is also launching later this year. And of course, our text-generation API is available, and we're always working to improve it to make it more safe and reliable across all content maturity experiences. Okay. So that's it for us today. And now I'd like to welcome Varun and George to talk about our powerful engine. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Peter. Hey, everyone. I'm Varun and I work on product and Engine.

And I'm George, I'm an Engineering Lead in Engine, and we're here to give you a quick update on everything we've been working on.

Both Dave and Nick touched on our audacious goal, getting to 10% of the gaming market. The only way we get there is by giving you complete freedom to bring your vision to life.

That's right. Whether it's blocky, photoreal or something in between, we want to make it all possible. Our job is to make sure you can achieve whatever you'd like.

If we break down what goes into making a great experience, it's about enabling you to build great content, allowing for expressive avatars so your players can viscerally engage with your content. And finally, powerful engine capabilities that bring both of these together.

As we dive into each of these pillars, keep in mind that the Roblox engine makes some promises to both players and creators. These 5 promises place unique constraints on the engine, requiring innovative solutions even for the simplest of features.

With that, let's dive into our first pillar, giving you the freedom to build great content on Roblox. We're going to start off with individual assets. Now as Dave mentioned this morning, we are completely revamping how assets are both prepared and rendered on Roblox. Let's start with how we prepare your assets after you upload them.

Meshes and textures are the majority of all the assets you upload. Every day, you collectively upload 1.2 million new meshes and 1.6 million new images on average. Once you've uploaded all those assets, we process them into multiple optimized formats at different levels of detail, perfect for each player's device.

Okay, George, let's play a quick game. Let me ask you a question. This is an example of an optimized mesh that we generate today. Can you tell me what this is?

It's a chair, Varun. We covered it in a hearsal.

That's fair. But wouldn't it be great if this actually looked like a chair though? This optimization used to happen exactly once in studio when you first uploaded the asset, which means we had no way of improving it after the fact.

We've been working on upgrading this entire pipeline so we can continuously improve and optimize these asset representations. These are some of the new results we've been getting with our new improved simplification algorithm. So now your chairs will actually look like chairs at multiple levels of detail.

Finally, George. Okay. Now let's focus on how we render your assets on players' devices. This time, let's use textures as an example. Harmony is carefully coordinating things. So your players are always getting the best quality experience that their device can support. The colors you're seeing on screen here represent different texture resolutions that are loaded into memory. Now on the left, you can see that previously, the system is naively loading up every single texture representation at the highest quality, even if the GPU might never even need it. And on the right, you can see Harmony is now smartly streaming in exactly the texture representations that it needs. Now more importantly, it can also stream out the representations it doesn't need. And in the middle, you'll notice that all of this is imperceptible to the player because Harmony is smartly making these decisions based on the importance of each object in your scene.

When the engine uses texture memory more carefully, that means your player gets higher quality exactly where it matters, and you have much more headroom to achieve your creative vision. More importantly, this also eliminates massive memory strikes that usually occur when a game first launches. This is one of the leading causes of crashes on lower-end devices. This is a complex scene from [indiscernible] one of my favorite showcase experiences on Roblox. Without Harmony, this scene requires loading roughly 3x more texture memory than with Harmony.

This new asset pipeline is launching later this year for both meshes and textures. So keep an eye out for announcements in the dev forum.

But wait, that's not all. All this effort to scale down on low-end devices also means that we can scale up on devices that can handle it. So we're very excited to announce that 4K texture rendering is coming to Roblox later this year.

That's a big one, George. That's a big one. Okay. Now if you just had incredible mesh assets and even with 4K textures, you still would not have a very compelling experience like this one over here. Great content is not just about individual assets. You also need the freedom to build more detailed and expensive worlds for those assets to really shine. Let's take a look at some of the areas we've been investing in here to get even more freedom.

First, occlusion calling. Last year, we rolled out automatic occlusion calling, so the engine wouldn't waste resources, rendering things that you can't even see. For the next iteration, we're expanding the system so it can support terrain, avatars, particles and everything else that might be in your scene.

Now speaking of terrain, today, our terrain system is still capped in 2 key ways: scalability and quality. On the scalability front, the largest terrain you can fit in an experience on Roblox today is about 4 kilometers or about 16,000 spuds on each side. Our eventual goal is to remove that cap. But first, we have to optimize how terrain is stored and represented in the engine. With some of the improvements in the pipeline, we have already been able to push things to 16 kilometers on each side. That's an area more than twice the size of San Francisco running inside Roblox.

And also, as you can see here, on the quality front, we're also improving things. Materials and lighting on terrain are much higher quality and find details and shapes on your terrain are more accurately represented. Now even with more scalable and higher quality terrain, you still need a way to populate these worlds with a lot more detail.

To help with that, we introduced instant screening a few years ago. This allowed devices to dynamically stream in and out parts of your world as necessary. Now we've seen steady adoption of instant streaming, but there were still a few pain points that we needed to address.

Yes, we heard from you that instant streaming did not work well for your experiences all the time because the radius always followed the player. With the recently announced multiple streaming, you can now locations for scenarios like binoculars or when you needed to teleport players to different locations.

Next, while streaming unlocked the ability to showcase massive worlds, it was still miserably hard to author large worlds and test things out in studio. Here, you can see an early preview of instant streaming now enabled in studio. I can be fully productive in one part of the place without having to load up the entire map. And as I move through the place, I can see the instances stream in and out in the explorer as well as around me, allowing me to quickly jump back in and make an edit whenever or wherever I might need to be. This is the same map that Dave showed you this morning. Without this internal build of instant streaming working inside studio, it would have been nearly impossible to build that demo.

Finally, instant streaming always traded off visual fidelity for performance for objects that were streamed out. To address this, this morning, we introduced Slim. With Slim, we will now automatically generate a lightweight but high-quality representation of each model that's streamed out, perfect for low-end devices. Let's break down how this works using the same demo that Dave showed us earlier this morning.

Okay. So on the left is the original content as authored. A low-end Android device would immediately crash if it tried to render all of these triangles and instances at once. On the right, you can see the effect Slim has. Now the device only needs to render a fraction of the triangles that were originally authored, but the user gets exactly what the creator intended at the highest quality that their device can support.

If you've tried instant streaming, you might already be aware of model's LOD's limitations when it comes to visual fidelity. Here's a quick comparison of the same demo running with both model LOD and with Slim. For the same scene, Slim gives you much better visual quality for the comparable performance. We're excited to announce that model LOD will be replaced by Slim later this year. Our vision is to also bring Slim to Studio so we can improve your creation workflows as well. And you can sign up for early access preview of Slim today at the engine booth or on the Dev Forum online.

Okay. Now let's move on to the second pillar, Expressive Avatars. As Dave shared earlier today, we are pushing the boundaries of what avatars will look like and how personalized they can be on Roblox. Just like all other content, we want to give everyone on the platform complete freedom to express themselves. We expect to add increasing avatar complexity in the future, up to and even exceeding the quality that you're seeing here. Now I know what you guys are thinking. Done naively, this would come with an unacceptable resource tax on you, the creator. The more complexity we add and the more avatars join your experiences at once, it's going to be harder for you to express your vision. Instead, we need to ensure that avatars scale like everything else on the platform, adding negligible and predictable cost to your experiences. To get to this goal, we're investing in 3 areas. First, all the asset streaming efforts we talked about previously will support skinned avatar meshes and textures as well. Let's take a look at the difference texture streaming can make on an avatar. Here, we're going to simulate downloading all of this avatar's textures on a low bandwidth 128,000 connection. On the left, we have current behavior. And on the right, we have asset streaming enabled. Ready, this is going to go fast.

Let's go, 3, 2, 1 go.

Okay. With texture streaming, avatars are visible much faster and use less bandwidth. Players can feel like themselves almost immediately. And over time, their textures get crisper if their device can support it.

I think the other one just finished. Next, avatars in the distance will also be converted into the same lightweight composite models that we showed you earlier, but these Slim models will also support animations.

Finally, we're targeting specific use cases where avatars cause resource spikes when they have layered clothing on. Here, you can see a test environment with 420 avatars trying to equip a tool at the same time. This causes a resource spike, which in turn caused the tools to take a long time to equip.

That's no good.

Yes. So let's take a look at the same scene again with some of the improvements we're working on. Ready?

Again, 3, 2, 1.

There you go. So now the avatars have their tools equipped much faster. We're launching these improvements later this year.

Okay. Moving on to personalization now. Technologies like layered clothing, dynamic heads, accessories and in-experience creation have all unlocked brand-new ways for players to express themselves in Roblox, but we are continuing to push the boundaries here as well. We recently announced UGC emotes, so you can now create, publish and list emotes in the Avatar marketplace. We also recently launched support for physically based rendering for accessories. We had to be careful to make sure that these higher-quality accessories worked well across all devices and experiences.

And soon, we'll be expanding in-experience avatar creation to also include clothing and accessories. This means you can now allow players to customize these right within your experience. And when they're done, they can purchase and equip the item right there and then use them all across Roblox.

Okay. Now let's switch gears a bit and talk about engine capabilities. These are some of the new capabilities that unlock whole new functionality and give your experiences superpowers.

In May, we announced that acoustic simulation is available in Studio beta. When enabled, sounds reflect, then around corners and are included by the environment. Let's have a listen. When I'm inside the room, I can hear the sound reverberate off of the stone walls. And as I slowly walk outside, the sound type fracs around the corner and comes from the left As I move behind the building, the sounds become muffled just as you'd expect. Acoustic simulation will be available for live experiences by the end of the year, and we'll also be adding support for sound instances, so it works with all of your existing content.

That's awesome.

Make sure you visit the creating immersive audio workshop during lunch tomorrow to learn more.

Now let's talk about physics. Last year, we launched aerodynamic forces and engine, so you can take advantage of a whole new class of forces across your experiences. This year, we completely revamping herodynamics work, so parts can react realistically to buoyancy, lift and drag forces just like this hydrofoil. And yes, these propellers are really simulated.

All of the work that we put into realistically simulating fluid forces for aerodynamics last year will now be available for water this year. Okay. Let's talk about server authority now. One of the most difficult multiplayer experiences to build are competitive sports games. Due to the realities of network latency and bandwidth constraints, a soccer game like this one is incredibly difficult to get right on any platform. We're working hard to enable server authority natively in Roblox. So a whole new genre of seriously competitive games like this one will soon become possible.

Yes. Instead of each player's device deciding what happened, each client makes predictions, but only the server makes the final call. If you've tried racing game before, you might be familiar with the pit maneuver, which is notoriously difficult to achieve well in a multiplayer game. This is what usually happens.

That's no good, George.

I know.

I think we can do better than that.

So once Server Authority launches on Roblox, you'll soon be able to get this. Competitive social games like shooters, racing games and sports are such a good fit for the Roblox ecosystem that we can't wait to get this into your hands. So starting today, you can sign up for Server Authority early access preview by visiting the Dev Forum or seeing us at the engine booth. You should also stop by the creator [track] talk tomorrow to learn more about it.

Okay. Finally, let's talk about solid modeling. Over the last year, we've made a whole host of performance and scalability improvements to the inexperience solid modeling APIs like Union, Intersect and Union, Intersect and Subtract. This has enabled brand-new emergent possibilities like this car workshop where you can literally create your own tires from scratch using traditional manufacturing techniques. This was previously limited to primitive parts. But we've been working on adding support for meshes this year. So this means that you will soon be able to perform the same operations on fully textured meshes like the container and the [no]. And we're not stopping there. We're adding new APIs like Fracture and suite to help with some common scenarios that you always want. All of this is also available in an early access preview just like Slim and Server Authority today. So make sure you stop by the engine booth or visit the Dev forum post to sign up.

We touched on a lot today, asset streaming, slim and terrain improvements to unlock the content you build, avatar performance and personalizations to unlock more expressive avatars, and Server Authority, hydrodynamics, solid modeling and even acoustic simulation to unlock more gaming possibilities. What would you build with all this cool new tech?

George, the world is my oyster now. I want to build something like a competitive game with destruction that actually affects aerodynamics, all said in a vast and detailed open world, and everything with 4K text, obviously.

Okay. Well, I can't wait to play that. That's all the time we have today. Varun and I are so excited to meet all of you at the booths and at the other events.

But wait, we have one more little surprise for you before we pass it back to Nick. It's a video. Have a great RDC. [Presentation]

Wow, that was super cool. So now you've seen 3 things. One, you've seen how all these pillars come together. Two, you've seen that I may have been one of the people asking for emissive maps. And now that I'll be able to get my fix on Roblox, I think I can take this thing off awkwardly. And number three, you've seen how this platform is and will continue to expand the possibilities of creation for all of you over the coming months with a strong focus on core performance, amazing productivity enhancements so that you can build sophisticated experiences, more advanced tools for data analysis and experimentation and an increasingly powerful engine. I get excited just thinking about the potential ahead. And now as we bring this keynote to a close, I want to take a step back from all the features that we showed and reflect because beyond any single tool, what really matters is the strength and dynamism of this entire community. And as I reflected on the last year, I'm marveled at how the Roblox ecosystem has become even more dynamic and open where new talent and innovators have immense opportunity to break through. And we see this in our data. 28 of the top 100 experiences on our platform are new this year and 96% of top earning avatar items were created in just the last 12 months. This is not a static platform. It's the entrepreneurial dream in action where the right creation can shoot to the top. And our healthy ecosystem is no surprise when you see how we all collaborate with each other at community events on our forums and in our AMAs. The recent Community Run Inspire 2025 was a great example. It was a massive success with over 50,000 RSVPs and more than 57,000 viewers. The event featured more than 30 speakers and its game jam produced more than 400 new experiences. On our Dev Forum, we've seen more than 35,000 help and feedback posts since the last RDC. And our AMAs have pulled in more than 141,000 views with more than 150 questions answered. All of this makes it extremely clear that this is the greatest game creation community the world has ever seen. And a quick public service announcement. Right after this, we're going to have a 15-minute break. Then we're going to launch right into our safety Q&A. Afterwards, you can attend creator-led Lightning talks, featuring guest speakers from TikTok and YouTube with a meet and greet afterwards. And for the next 2 days, I really encourage you to stop by some of our booths. They're staffed by Roblox engineers, product managers and domain experts, give us your feedback and get hands-on technical advice. And lastly, tomorrow's schedule includes a networking event and dozens of sessions on a range of topics from performance to competitive design and intellectual property. And that wraps up our creator keynote. I want to thank all of you for your time, and I want to leave you with one final thought. The tools and features we've shared today are more than just code. They're the building blocks of the future, a future you will create. We provide the platform and you provide the passion, the creativity and the vision. You are the architects of the next generation of play, and the future is something we will build together. Let's go build it.