During the 10th annual Roblox Developers Conference (RDC 2024) in San Jose, the gaming platform announced it is opening to global currencies in addition to its own Robux, which generates billions in virtual transactions each year. Starting later this year, a small test bed of developers will be able to charge real money for games that charge fees, with a program expected to open “to all eligible creators by mid-2025.” The massively multiplayer online platform that lets users build online game worlds also discussed a project to develop its own AI foundation model to power generative 3D creation on the platform.

Roblox clearly wants to cash in on the creator economy by becoming more competitive with other social outlets. The 20-year-old company is rolling out revenue sharing of up to 70 percent for desktop experiences that charge $50 or more for games.

“Game creators can now more easily sell to users without dealing with an intermediary virtual currency,” writes CNBC, explaining that the San Mateo, California-based company has “ambitious plans to facilitate 10 percent of all global gaming content sales through the Roblox platform and reach 300 million daily active users.”

In a lengthy RDC newsroom recap, Roblox claims 79.5 million daily active users globally as of June 30, 2024.

“For a game that costs $50, the creator will pocket 70 percent of the earnings,” while “those that cost $30 and $10 will lead to payouts of 60 percent and 50 percent, respectively,” CNBC reports, noting that Roblox users will be able to pay for games in local currencies using computers, with a plan to expand payments through mobile devices in the future.

TechCrunch writes that Roblox is also partnering with Shopify “to allow creators to sell physical merchandise directly within their experiences,” another pilot program set to roll out later this year “with select creators, brands and e-commerce partners.”

While Roblox was built on user-generated content, the drive behind the monetization push is to bring traditional game developers to the platform in greater numbers, TechCrunch says, adding that the AI model the company is developing “will be open source and multimodal and allow creators to generate 3D content using text, video and prompts.”

Roblox Chief Product Officer Manuel Bronstein told TechCrunch that because of gaming’s real-time motion requirements 3D is the company’s big AI focus at a time when there is a mainstream push to develop AI video.

MIT Technology Review goes into detail about the Roblox approach to AI, emphasizing how it will allow users to quickly create and experiment.

Related:
Roblox Announces AI Tool for Generating 3D Game Worlds from Text, Ars Technica, 9/9/24
Roblox Courts Marketers with Branded Virtual Experience, Ad Age, 9/5/24