2022 was an incredible 12 months for Roblox. We are optimistically driving our imaginative and prescient to reimagine the best way folks come collectively, and we’re realizing it by enabling deeper types of expression, communication, and immersion.
The investments we’re making to increase the engagement of Roblox throughout geographies and age teams are paying off. Our group grew by 23% this 12 months to greater than 56 million each day world customers. And our customers spent over 49.3 billion hours coming collectively to create, play, discover, study, and join. Today, greater than half of the folks on Roblox are 13 and older, demonstrating our platform’s attraction to a broad vary of audiences.
Innovation and enhancements throughout each side of Roblox performed a key position in driving our progress. Here are a few of our main accomplishments from 2022.
Enabling Self-Expression and Connection
With the launch of Layered Clothing, we continued to empower folks to specific themselves and their identification creatively. This characteristic permits clothes and niknaks to suit any avatar physique kind. Items like shirts, clothes, sweaters, jackets, and pants are actually worn in layers and replica the best way attire suits and drapes on people in the actual world. This supplies our group with the ability to create by no means-earlier than-seen clothes and accent sorts. Users can combine and match an unimaginable vary of physique types and outfits, taking avatar customization potentialities to the following stage. Since launch, we’ve got seen over 115 million folks personal a layered clothes merchandise.
We additionally continued to increase the standard and immersion of social interactions on Roblox. Now, folks 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-particular person conversations, and is predicated on avatars’ proximity to one another – which means you may whisper to a good friend close by or elevate your voice to hold throughout the room. Almost one million Roblox experiences have already enabled voice communications.
At the tip of the 12 months, we rolled out Contact Importer, a secure and safe method for folks to seek out and join with actual-life buddies. Contact Importer makes use of the identical contact names saved on a consumer’s gadget, to allow them to shortly acknowledge their buddies on the Roblox platform. We additionally launched Friend Recommendations, so folks ages 13 and older can simply evaluation and add buddies straight. These two options are necessary steps in making it simpler for folks to attach whereas persevering with to uphold the privateness and security of our group.
Expanding Creator Opportunities
Other necessary improvements have been targeted on accelerating our imaginative and prescient of creating creation accessible to everybody on Roblox. We’re constructing instruments so anybody from new creators to huge growth studios can convey their creations to fruition.
In 2022, our group 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 growth software program for constructing and publishing 3D content material. Roblox Studio now has a refreshed look and new options — like help for top-decision shows and redesigned icons for higher navigation — that permit creators to customise their workspaces and collaborate with teammates seamlessly.
In July 2022, we rolled out a lot of developments to our materials system to boost the visible high quality of the total library of current supplies and make them appear and feel much more practical than earlier than. Materials on Roblox are akin to supplies in the actual 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 understand their aesthetic imaginative and prescient.
We’ve additionally added a number of new options to Roblox Cloud, our developer ecosystem, to streamline expertise growth and improve productiveness. Developers can now entry all their Roblox assets through APIs that allow a wealthy ecosystem of instruments for enhancing creator workflows and customization.
At the tip 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, quicker, and extra streamlined by offering operational and administration help in a single place. The expertise we’re constructing for Creator Hub may even convey better constancy and capabilities to developer creations.
Evolving our Virtual Economy
In 2022, our Economy workforce achieved an necessary milestone: greater than 90% of things printed in Marketplace are actually made by creators, getting us even nearer to the purpose the place all content material inside Roblox is totally consumer-generated. We’re persevering with to enhance consumer discovery in Marketplace, so folks can discover objects they need in a method that can redefine the consumer journey. We envision a future the place choose objects are supplied on a restricted foundation, and different objects are extra extensively accessible, so folks can discover a breadth of things they love.
This September, at our largest Roblox Developers Conference ever, we introduced Immersive Ads. This progressive 3D promoting expertise is designed to provide manufacturers and builders alike the power to succeed in their audiences in new methods.
Investing in Safety and Civility
As the Roblox group continues to develop, we’re deeply targeted on guaranteeing a secure and civil atmosphere for our customers. Over the final 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. Using pure language processing fashions, we’ve advanced 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.
Thanks to our investments round AI and machine studying, we’ve been in a position to 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 velocity carefully has lengthy been a power for Roblox, we’re now even quicker and extra correct.
Creating Opportunities for Brands
Brands of every kind, from Alo Yoga and Spotify to the NFL, continued to make use of Roblox to attach and interact with tens of millions of individuals. Every day, Roblox makes completely new on-line connections attainable by giving firms the power to create thrilling activations and digital merchandise. There have been over 100 model activations launched in 2022.
By giving folks the instruments to specific themselves in any method they need, we’ve seen some wonderful creativity and attention-grabbing tendencies from the group. These have been captured in our 2022 Metaverse Fashion Trends report, printed in collaboration with the Parsons School of Design. The report dives into the brand new tendencies and alternatives in digital vogue, and the way attire within the digital world can encourage folks to specific themselves in new methods on Roblox.
We additionally continued to concentrate on supporting instructional builders, suppliers, and educators in bringing excessive-high quality content material to the platform throughout a broad vary of topics, grade ranges, and expertise genres. We made progress within the training class by partnering with our first Roblox Community Fund recipient, the Museum of Science, Boston, on the launch of their Mission: Mars expertise on the platform.
As firms proceed to determine themselves on Roblox with the assistance of our group, the alternatives for creators improve. And the expansion of our group expands the alternatives for organizations to attach with their audiences on Roblox. We’re excited to see this momentum proceed.
Investing in Our People
None of this may be attainable with out our proficient workers. To help the continuing progress of our platform, we continued to spend money on growing our expertise and management. Nick Tornow joined us to guide the Creator Engineering group, and most lately John Stauffer joined us as our new VP of Engineering on the Engine group.
In the spirit of collaboration driving innovation, we held our first all-worker in-particular person Roblox Week at our San Mateo headquarters in July. Teams gathered for every week of actions that fostered connections, strengthened our group, 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-particular person Hack Week, with greater than 225 groups pursuing self-directed initiatives that pushed boundaries and accelerated the way forward for our platform.
Finally, we have been honored to rank third on Fast Company’s Top 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 carried out, all whereas respecting our world group of tens of millions of creators.
The Journey Ahead
Looking forward, I’m excited to see how creativity and invention proceed to gasoline progress at Roblox. At each stage, we’re seeing new alternatives to attach a billion folks with optimism and civility.
I’d prefer to thank our workers, our Roblox board, and your entire Roblox group for all of the issues they’ve achieved and made attainable this 12 months. We have an thrilling 12 months forward.
David Baszucki, a.ok.a Builderman
Founder and CEO, Roblox
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