Roblox is giving game developers more ways to make and distribute games–and faster access to the money they earn along the way.
At the latest annual Developers Conference, Roblox said that in the past 12 months, game developers and UGC item creators have collectively earned $1.7 billion.
It also boasted engagement stats for the players driving that revenue: In Q2 2026 alone, players from 180 countries spent a total of 29 billion hours playing games on its platform.
Roblox, as you may know, marks its 20th anniversary this year–and it says the announcements made at RDC are part of “usher[ing] in the next chapter of growth for creators.”
Chief among these announcements are big updates for game distribution. Right now, if someone wants to play a Roblox game, they have to download the Roblox app. It’s the gateway to every UGC title (through the game launcher) and item (through the Marketplace).
But that’s changing.
Roblox plans to introduce “Roblox Everywhere,” a system that will let developers turn their games into standalone apps on PCs, mobile devices, and gaming consoles.
These games will still be built on Roblox’s development engine, and Roblox will provide underlying technical infrastructure and services to apps–meaning devs won’t have to deal with things like app design or paying for server space to host operations. From the sound of it, devs will do almost nothing different from what they do now; they’ll just get the benefit of their games appearing as distinct branded apps across devices.
Roblox also plans to introduce an offline gaming mode as well as “Play on the Web,” which will let users play titles directly within Google Chrome “with no app or install required,” it said in a press release.
“A shared link, anywhere on the web, becomes a direct path from discovery to play,” it added.
All these new distribution methods will (hopefully) contribute to developers’ earnings. And Roblox has a major update there–an update it says are “the next evolution in creator earnings” on its platform.
This “next evolution” is Roblox Wallet, a creator earnings account Roblox said “lets creators earn directly in real currency, get paid automatically each business day, and move funds to other Roblox accounts or an external account, with richer earnings analytics in Creator Hub.”
Wallet accounts are provided by Airwallex US, LLC, a San Francisco-based fintech company that says it provides “AI-native financial infrastructure and software” for businesses around the world.
In conjunction with Wallet, Roblox is adding Roblox Card, a debit card connected to Wallet accounts that lets creators “spend their available balance anywhere the card is connected.” So creators (or, at least, eligible creators 18 and older) won’t even have to transfer their Robux payouts to their own bank accounts. Roblox will keep them firmly on-platform.
It’s not clear yet if Roblox Wallets and/or Cards will come with any fees. (Roblox will of course take its standard cut of creators’ earnings before any revenue hits their Wallet accounts.)
Roblox says Wallet and Card will open up to U.S.-based creators later this year, and will begin expanding globally in 2027.
Other quality-of-life tweaks for devs:
- Beefed-up support for 2D games, with Roblox implementing “a new orthographic camera, animated image containers, and direct sprite-sheet import.” (Sprite sheets are single image files of game assets like characters and objects.)
- New UI features, including blur, text shadows, and improved gradients to “enhance the look and feel for games,” and a new notification system will “support turn-based, asynchronous multiplayer games,” per Roblox.
Game discovery is getting work, too.
Roblox has pushed out its TikTok-esque short-form video feed, Moments, to all U.S.-based users, and said that soon, “videos from a game’s Experience Details Page will begin appearing in Moments, players will be able to tap any avatar to buy the items shown, and Build games will be playable in the tab.”
The platform is also rejigging its discovery ranking system to recommend games across age groups. The system “now optimizes for both younger players, who tend to engage best with shorter-form games, and older players, who are drawn to deeper games they return to over time,” it explained.
A future update may add a metric for what Roblox calls “direct growth,” aka how many brand-new players a game brings to the Roblox platform.
Amidst all this talk about developers’ value making Roblox what it is today, Roblox used RDC to talk up Build, its LLM chatbot that takes users’ text prompts and extrudes basic games.
“Roblox has built what is effectively a cloud operating system for gaming and is now building an AI creation layer on top of it: not a single tool or model, but a system built for the complexity of games,” the platform said.
It debuted Build in alpha this summer, open only to residents of New Zealand. In the months since, thousands of people have used it to ‘create’ 9,000 games, Roblox said.
71% of those people, it added, had never before used Roblox Studio to develop a game. That tracks, considering game development is a years-honed creative and technical skill–exactly the sort of pursuit some people would love to shortcut with a 20-word text prompt.
Build will next expand to alpha users in Singapore and Serbia.
“Roblox is also adding new tools to give creators more control, including a new asset library, desktop access, and iterative control. Today, creators can quickly review analytics and add monetization, and soon they’ll also be able to launch ads for their games from their phones,” the platform said.
The next addition to Build will arrive later this year. Called “Scene Generator,” it “will bring prompt-to-scene functionality to both Build and Studio, with greater creator control available in Studio,” Roblox said. “Creators supply a text prompt and a reference image, and Scene Generator returns a fully functional layout they can then refine in Studio.”
Roblox is in a difficult place right now, facing numerous lawsuits from regulators and parents, but you wouldn’t know that from its tone at RDC. These announcements make it clear Roblox envisions a future where it has successfully weathered child safety concerns and is a–or even the–top development and distribution platform for indie gamemakers around the world.
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