Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki announced that 70 player-created games have crossed a billion plays on the Roblox platform, which has grown to 58.8 million daily users.
Back in 2019, Roblox had 10 titles with more than a billion plays. Baszucki said 2022 was a great year for Roblox.
Top titles included Livetopia, which recently partnered with Mariah Carey for a holiday experience, and viral thrillers like DOORS and Evade.
Roblox said that 5.8 million experiences got published (15,900 per day) with 15.8 million experiences actively visited over the course of the year.
More than 8,000 experiences garnered over a million unique user sessions, hundreds reached over 100 million unique sessions, with new experiences like Evade (1.4 billion-plus visits to date) created in 2022 finding millions of users in weeks!
At least 20 experiences attracted over 1 billion visits just in 2022. The top five most visited experiences of 2022 were: 1) Brookhaven, 2) Blox Fruits, 3) BedWars, 4) Tower of Hell, 5) Pet Simulator X!.
And the top five grossing experience of 2022 were: 1) Adopt Me!, 2) Pet Simulator X!, 3) Blox Fruits, 4) Welcome to Bloxburg, 5) BedWars.
“We are optimistically driving our vision to reimagine the way people come together, and we’re realizing it by enabling deeper forms of expression, communication, and immersion,” he said. The investments we are making to expand the engagement of Roblox across geographies and age groups are paying off.”
He said the community grew by 23% this year to more than [58.8] million daily global users. Those users spent over 49.3 billion hours on Roblox to play blocky games and connect. Today, more than half of the people on Roblox are 13 and older.
And Roblox has drawn developers like Hello Neighbor universe creator TinyBuild, Twin Atlas studio, and Embracer Group, which brought Welcome to Bloxburg into Roblox via Coffee Stain Studios.
Beefchoplets and Osterdog talked about crossing a billion plays for their Evade experience.
“Roblox has become such an integral part of our lives, and our work on Evade has been vital in defining our perspectives as developers,” they said. “The crossing of one billion play sessions for Evade represents a monumental achievement, as well as validation that our creativity, hard work, and passion for the Roblox platform and its users has paid off. The immense growth of the horror genre on the platform, of which Evade has contributed towards, has paved the way for dozens of opportunities, allowed us to meet so many people, and formed around it a passionate community that we are so grateful for. We aspire to continue creating notable games on this amazing platform.”
Enabling self-expression and connection
Baszucki said the company’s milestones for the year included the launch of layered clothing as a way to let people express themselves and their identity creatively. This feature enables clothing and accessories to fit any avatar body type. Items like shirts, dresses, sweaters, jackets, and pants are now worn in layers and copy the way apparel fits and drapes on individuals in the real world.
“This provides our community with the power to create never-before-seen clothing and accessory types,” Baszucki said. “Since launch, we have seen over 115 million people own a layered clothing item.”
On average, 2.1 billion in-experience chat messages and 111.3 million platform chat messages were sent daily.
Roblox also expanded the quality and immersion of social interactions on Roblox. Now, people verified as ages 13 and older can use audio chat with their voice to speak aloud with one another. This functionality is built to mimic in-person conversations, and is based on avatars’ proximity to each other – meaning a user might whisper to a friend nearby or raise their voice to carry across the room. Almost a million Roblox experiences have already enabled voice communications.
And 1.8 billion total avatar items were sold on the platform in 2022, and 80.4 million avatar items were created by the community.
At the end of the year, Roblox rolled out contact importer, a safe and secure way for people to find and connect with real-life friends. Contact importer uses the same contact names saved on a user’s device, so they can quickly recognize their friends on the Roblox platform. Roblox also released friend recommendations, so people ages 13 and older can easily review and add friends directly. These two features are important steps in making it easier for people to connect while continuing to uphold the privacy and safety of the community.
Expanding creator opportunities
Other updates focused on accelerating accessibility on Roblox.
“We’re building tools so anyone from new creators to big development studios can bring their creations to fruition,” Baszucki said.
In 2022, the community visited more than 15 million experiences on the platform, and developers and creators published more than 15,000 experiences every single day. To support this creation flywheel, the company updated Roblox Studio, the free development software for building and publishing 3D content. Roblox Studio now has a refreshed look and new features — like support for high-resolution displays and redesigned icons for better navigation — that allow creators to customize better.
In July 2022, Roblox rolled out a number of advancements to the material system to enhance the visual quality of the full library of existing materials and make them look and feel even more realistic than before. Materials on Roblox are akin to materials in the real world. (They’re not just blocky anymore).
They’re used to not only define the surface appearance of a 3D object but also its physical properties, which in turn influences how the object behaves. Our material system will help our creators more easily realize their aesthetic vision.
“We’ve also added several new features to Roblox Cloud, our developer ecosystem, to streamline experience development and enhance productivity,” Baszucki said.
At the end of the year, Roblox began rolling out the new Creator Hub, a resource that brings all of the online tools and documentation for developers into a unified platform.
Evolving the virtual economy
In 2022, Roblox’s economy team achieved a milestone: more than 90% of items published in the marketplace are now made by creators, getting Roblox closer to the point where all content within Roblox is fully user-generated.
“We’re continuing to improve user discovery in marketplace, so people can find items they want in a way that will redefine the user journey,” Baszucki said. “We envision a future where select items are offered on a limited basis, and other items are more widely available, so people can find a breadth of items they love.”
And in September, at the Roblox Developers Conference ever, the company announced immersive ads. This 3D advertising experience is designed to give brands and developers alike the ability to reach their audiences in new ways.
Investing in safety and civility
As the Roblox community continues to grow, Roblox is focused on ensuring a safe and civil environment for users, Baszucki said.
“Over the last year, we increased our investments in AI and machine learning for autonomously detecting and preventing attempts by bad actors to engage in harmful communications or upload harmful content,” he said.
Roblox saw continued to improve sophistication in content and chat moderation efforts, he said, with help from natural language processing models. The company’s systems can now not just flag prohibited language but understand context and act accordingly. In 2022, Roblox used these models to power automated moderation features in English, as well as in Spanish, German, Portuguese and more, and it will continue to roll them out globally in 2023.
“Thanks to our investments around AI and machine learning, we’ve been able to safely channel more of our first-line moderation to automated systems,” he said. “Roblox has made meaningful improvements to the time to action on content identified as problematic. The upshot: while speed in moderation has long been a strength for Roblox, we’re now even faster and more accurate.”
Creating opportunities for brands
Making Roblox safe for kids also makes it safe for brands.
Brands of all types, from Alo Yoga and Spotify to the NFL, continued to use Roblox to connect and engage with millions of people, Baszucki said. Every day, Roblox makes entirely new online connections possible by giving companies the ability to create exciting activations and virtual products. There were over 100 brand activations launched in 2022.
Roblox created a 2022 Metaverse Fashion Trends report, published in collaboration with the Parsons School of Design. The report dives into the new trends and opportunities in digital fashion, and how apparel in the virtual world can inspire people to express themselves in new ways on Roblox.
“We also continued to focus on supporting educational developers, providers, and educators in bringing high-quality content to the platform across a broad range of subjects, grade levels, and experience genres,” Baszucki said. “We made progress in the education category by partnering with our first Roblox Community Fund recipient, the Museum of Science, Boston, on the launch of their Mission: Mars experience on the platform.”
As companies continue to establish themselves on Roblox with the help of the community, the opportunities for creators increase, he said.
Investing in people
In the spirit of collaboration driving innovation, Roblox held its first all-employee in-person Roblox Week at its San Mateo, California headquarters in July. Teams gathered for a week of activities. And at the end of the year, Roblox returned to an in-person Hack Week, with more than 225 teams pursuing self-directed projects that pushed boundaries and accelerated the future of our platform.
Finally, Baszucki noted the company ranked third on Fast Company’s Top 100 Workplaces for Innovators in 2022.
“Looking ahead, I’m excited to see how creativity and invention continue to fuel growth at Roblox. At every level, we’re seeing new opportunities to connect a billion people with optimism and civility,” Baszucki said.
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Author: Dean Takahashi
Source: Venturebeat
