2022 was an important 12 months for Roblox. We’re optimistically driving our imaginative and prescient to reimagine the way in which individuals come collectively, and we’re realizing it by enabling deeper types of expression, communication, and immersion.
The investments we’re making to broaden the engagement of Roblox throughout geographies and age teams are paying off. Our neighborhood grew by 23% this 12 months to greater than 56 million every day international customers. And our customers spent over 49.3 billion hours coming collectively to create, play, discover, study, and join. At this time, greater than half of the individuals on Roblox are 13 and older, demonstrating our platform’s enchantment to a broad vary of audiences.
Innovation and enhancements throughout each side of Roblox performed a key position in driving our progress. Listed here are a few of our main accomplishments from 2022.
Enabling Self-Expression and Connection
With the launch of Layered Clothes, we continued to empower individuals to precise themselves and their identification creatively. This characteristic allows clothes and accessories to suit any avatar physique kind. Objects like shirts, clothes, sweaters, jackets, and pants are actually worn in layers and duplicate the way in which attire matches and drapes on people in the true world. This supplies our neighborhood with the ability to create never-before-seen clothes and accent sorts. Customers can combine and match an unimaginable vary of physique types and outfits, taking avatar customization potentialities to the subsequent stage. Since launch, we’ve got seen over 115 million individuals personal a layered clothes merchandise.
We additionally continued to broaden the standard and immersion of social interactions on Roblox. Now, individuals verified as ages 13 and older can use Chat with their voice to talk aloud with each other. This performance is constructed to imitate in-person conversations, and relies on avatars’ proximity to one another – which means you may whisper to a buddy close by or increase your voice to hold throughout the room. Nearly one million Roblox experiences have already enabled voice communications.
On the finish of the 12 months, we rolled out Contact Importer, a protected and safe means for individuals to seek out and join with real-life buddies. Contact Importer makes use of the identical contact names saved on a person’s gadget, to allow them to rapidly acknowledge their buddies on the Roblox platform. We additionally launched Buddy Suggestions, so individuals ages 13 and older can simply assessment and add buddies instantly. These two options are essential steps in making it simpler for individuals to attach whereas persevering with to uphold the privateness and security of our neighborhood.
Increasing Creator Alternatives
Different essential improvements have been centered on accelerating our imaginative and prescient of constructing creation accessible to everybody on Roblox. We’re constructing instruments so anybody from new creators to massive improvement studios can carry their creations to fruition.
In 2022, our neighborhood visited greater than 15 million experiences on the platform, and builders and creators printed greater than 15,000 experiences each single day. To help this creation flywheel, we made developments to Roblox Studio, our free improvement software program for constructing and publishing 3D content material. Roblox Studio now has a refreshed look and new options — like help for high-resolution shows and redesigned icons for higher navigation — that enable creators to customise their workspaces and collaborate with teammates seamlessly.
In July 2022, we rolled out quite a few developments to our materials system to boost the visible high quality of the complete library of current supplies and make them appear and feel much more reasonable than earlier than. Supplies on Roblox are akin to supplies in the true world. They’re used to not solely outline the floor look of a 3D object but in addition its bodily properties, which in flip influences how the thing behaves. Our materials system will assist our creators extra simply notice their aesthetic imaginative and prescient.
We’ve additionally added a number of new options to Roblox Cloud, our developer ecosystem, to streamline expertise improvement and improve productiveness. Builders can now entry all their Roblox sources through APIs that allow a wealthy ecosystem of instruments for bettering creator workflows and customization.
On the finish of the 12 months, we started rolling out our new Creator Hub, a useful resource that brings all of our on-line instruments and documentation for builders right into a unified platform. Creator Hub makes creation simpler, sooner, and extra streamlined by offering operational and administration help in a single place. The know-how we’re constructing for Creator Hub may even carry larger constancy and capabilities to developer creations.
Evolving our Digital Financial system
In 2022, our Financial system group achieved an essential milestone: greater than 90% of things printed in Market are actually made by creators, getting us even nearer to the purpose the place all content material inside Roblox is totally user-generated. We’re persevering with to enhance person discovery in Market, so individuals can discover gadgets they need in a means that may redefine the person journey. We envision a future the place choose gadgets are provided on a restricted foundation, and different gadgets are extra extensively out there, so individuals can discover a breadth of things they love.
This September, at our greatest Roblox Builders Convention ever, we introduced Immersive Adverts. This modern 3D promoting expertise is designed to provide manufacturers and builders alike the flexibility to succeed in their audiences in new methods.
Investing in Security and Civility
Because the Roblox neighborhood continues to develop, we’re deeply centered on making certain a protected and civil surroundings for our customers. During the last 12 months, we elevated our investments in AI and machine studying for autonomously detecting and stopping makes an attempt by unhealthy actors to interact in dangerous communications or add dangerous content material.
We continued to enhance sophistication in our content material and chat moderation efforts. Utilizing pure language processing fashions, we’ve developed our methods to not simply flag prohibited language however to grasp context and act accordingly. In 2022, we used these fashions to energy automated moderation options in English, in addition to in Spanish, German, Portuguese and extra, and we’ll proceed to roll them out globally in 2023.
Because of our investments round AI and machine studying, we’ve been capable of safely channel extra of our first-line moderation to automated methods. Roblox has made significant enhancements to the time to motion on content material recognized as problematic. The upshot: whereas pace moderately has lengthy been a power for Roblox, we’re now even sooner and extra correct.
Creating Alternatives for Manufacturers
Manufacturers of all sorts, from Alo Yoga and Spotify to the NFL, continued to make use of Roblox to attach and interact with thousands and thousands of individuals. Day by day, Roblox makes solely new on-line connections attainable by giving corporations the flexibility to create thrilling activations and digital merchandise. There have been over 100 model activations launched in 2022.
By giving individuals the instruments to precise themselves in any means they need, we’ve seen some wonderful creativity and attention-grabbing traits from the neighborhood. These have been captured in our 2022 Metaverse Trend Tendencies report, printed in collaboration with the Parsons Faculty of Design. The report dives into the brand new traits and alternatives in digital vogue, and the way attire within the digital world can encourage individuals to precise themselves in new methods on Roblox.
We additionally continued to give attention to supporting instructional builders, suppliers, and educators in bringing high-quality content material to the platform throughout a broad vary of topics, grade ranges, and expertise genres. We made progress within the schooling class by partnering with our first Roblox Group Fund recipient, the Museum of Science, Boston, on the launch of their Mission: Mars expertise on the platform.
As corporations proceed to determine themselves on Roblox with the assistance of our neighborhood, the alternatives for creators improve. And the expansion of our neighborhood expands the alternatives for organizations to attach with their audiences on Roblox. We’re excited to see this momentum proceed.
Investing in Our Individuals
None of this could be attainable with out our proficient staff. To help the continued progress of our platform, we continued to spend money on growing our expertise and management. Nick Tornow joined us to steer the Creator Engineering group, and most just lately John Stauffer joined us as our new VP of Engineering on the Engine group.
Within the spirit of collaboration driving innovation, we held our first all-employee in-person Roblox Week at our San Mateo headquarters in July. Groups gathered for per week of actions that fostered connections, strengthened our neighborhood, and celebrated the technical improvements we’re constructing to form the longer term. And on the finish of the 12 months, we returned to an in-person Hack Week, with greater than 225 groups pursuing self-directed tasks that pushed boundaries and accelerated the way forward for our platform.
Lastly, we have been honored to rank third on Quick Firm’s Prime 100 Workplaces for Innovators in 2022. This award displays our innovation-first tradition that empowers our technical groups to be accountable, take the lengthy view, and get stuff finished, all whereas respecting our international neighborhood of thousands and thousands of creators.
The Journey Forward
Trying forward, I’m excited to see how creativity and invention proceed to gas progress at Roblox. At each stage, we’re seeing new alternatives to attach a billion individuals with optimism and civility.
I’d wish to thank our staff, our Roblox board, and your complete Roblox neighborhood for all of the issues they’ve achieved and made attainable this 12 months. We now have an thrilling 12 months forward.
David Baszucki, a.okay.a Builderman
Founder and CEO, Roblox
