Inside RDC 2025: How Roblox Is Courting Pro Developer

[Music] Hello everyone and welcome to our Deconstructor of Fun deep dive on Roblox developer conference 2025. I'm your host Jen Dano. Let's talk Roblox. Wait, just Roblox? Why do we care? Roblox, what I like to call the Gen A and Z's social gaming hangout platform, just hit almost 48 million CCU, passing Steam's all-time peak of 40ish million inclient users and 38 million daily peak CCU. Roblox is winning the platform war, but to be fair, Roblox is crossplatform, mobile PC, console, and Steam is just PC with a sprinkle of Ethan's favorite Steam Deck handheld. The other reason we care is that it's their version of Nintendo Direct. RDC is. So RDC 2025 just wrapped this weekend in San Jose, California. Roblox Developer Conference is the annual

invite only summit for creators, developers, and brands. Been running since 2015. This 2-day event, September 5th and 6th, 2025, is where Roblox drops its biggest platform announcements, facilitates networking, and holds the Roblox Innovation Awards. While no public attendance figures have been released for for this year, last year's RDC was the biggest yet, drawing attendees from over 70 countries, RDC did not disappoint this year with lots of business safety, AI, and marketing news. They also take a victory on the nearly 112 million DAU, which is up 41%. And the 1 billion plus in creator payouts. To help me break down the big news, I have two guests who live inside Roblox every day. They're growing gardens, stealing your brain rot, and definitely not dressing to impress, but living the dream in Barbie's dreamhouse. Joe Fren is the CEO of Gamef Fam. GameFam is the OG professional Roblox

studio founded in 2019. GameFam has now become the largest and most successful metverse media company with 45 billion lifetime visits and 64 million average daily visits across the 50 plus live operated game portfolio on Roblox, Fortnite and other platforms. They do games with IPs like NFL, Netflix, Mattel, Sony, Sega, Samsung and Crunchyroll. And I also have Steven Deano. He is the founder of Max Power Gaming where he's building the leading network of Roblox professionals. His weekly newsletter is read by top executives at Roblox, Epic Games, Amazon, Netflix, Xbox, and more. He's advised top global IP owners like Paramount, BBC Studios, and Takara Tommy on how to thrive in the fast growing Roblox ecosystem. And I just learned Max Power is gaming is a nod to The Simpsons. Very fun.

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All right, guys. Let's jump in. Stephen Joe, welcome to Deconstructor Fun Deep Dive RDC.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
All right, first question. Let's just do a vibes check. What was the scene like? It's been going on since 2015, so they've had 10, 11 years to get used to this. What kinds of people attended? Any drama? So Joe, why don't you go first?
My first RDC was in 2018. There were like I think like less than 300 total

people in the room. It was in a hotel ballroom at SFO. And then their happy hour afterwards was like literally like chicken fingers and energy drinks and like board games. And there were like I kind of hung out with some of the parent chaperones at the bar. I mean I talked with that devs too. They did like a age check. They were like, "Who in here is in high school?" And like all these hands went up and they're like, "Who in here is college?" I'm like, "Less hands went up." And they're like, "Who in here is a college graduate?" And I was like the only hand in the room. This was in 2018, right? So things have really changed. I mean, my inbox was like flooded with like corporate partners from movie studios and global brands. Are you going to RDC? Can we meet up? Because everyone's got to fill up their meetings, right, for their for their business trip. So I was of course happy to see a lot of friends and partners there and I went to a topdev happy hour invite event and you know people are

ecstatic. The platform is doing great. I spent some facetime with a lot of the devs of the top 10 games on the platform. got to sit down and have some chats with them and it's a little surreal what's been happening to the top of the platform lately and the type of numbers that we're seeing in games like Grow a Garden and Steal a Brain Rod and 99 Nights in the Forest. It's a whole new era of Roblox as we have kind of hoped for since everyone who's been on this platform for six, eight, 10 years had been hoping. So, the vibe from what I saw was pretty positive. Oh, awesome. I would have loved to have gone this year. I can't currently travel, so maybe next year I'll hit my first one. I I do a lot of the events at GDC and see different developers, so next year. But Stephen, what about you? You've been going quite a few years, too, if I recall.
Yeah, this was this was my third year. And so on the surface level, it's like it's hard to tell like you see people right that as Joe's talking about, you

know, a lot of developers there who are generally on the younger end. you know, by this time you have people who are probably more in their like early 20s, you know, but I did hold a sort of industry mixer on the first afternoon of the event. And so that gave me a lot of really good insight, you know, who all the people who RSVPd and attended the events. So you had a variety of sort of business people, right, that were sort of coming to RDC for the first time. So you had investors from like VC, equity firms, private equity. You had sort of gaming companies, folks like Scopely, Riot, uh, Xbox. Yeah. So just like a lot of sort of traditional gaming folks showing up and checking it out. And then you had like certainly influencers and like a whole sort of like influencer contingent night media in addition to kind of the folks that Joe's talking about like the native developers who have been around as well as like you know sort of like maybe some of the brand and IP owners that have started to

activate on the platform more let's say investment and sort of traditional gaming just showing up and I think trying to get a handle on like what is this platform? How does it make sense for us? what do we need to be doing here?
I just want to add that that is the eternal question of Roblox because it's a UGC platform, right? So, it's the same questions that people were asking about Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube. The same questions people are still asking about some of those platforms, which is these platforms are not built for corporate and global brand partners to come to and kind of build businesses on. They're built for creators and then global brand partners need to get there. IP owners need to be on roadblocks, but how do you create traction? How do you create meaningful results in a userenerated content platform? That is something that we talk to partners about daily and I know Stephen does as well. And it is a really fascinating area of strategy if

you're in the creative or brand industries.
It really is. And I think the last part that you mentioned IP holders, you know, brands and media. So those are the three that I think you know like it's like dogs salivating with like a bowl of food in front of them. It's like how do I reach this elusive gen A gen Z audience and you know as I talked to many many of those different folks and I also talked to folks like Geek who does like you know they do this report that talks about how brands leverage these platforms you know right now it's still in that infancy of like well like I'm getting a lot of you know topline awareness information and and bottle of the f bottom of the funnel is been a little bit more difficult to get to I'm sure we actually we'll get a little bit more to that later. So I wanted to talk about first money at least on deconstructor of fund twig. We follow all of the quarterly announcements. We know that DAU has been skyrocketing. It's now 112 million DAU. That revenue

is getting better. They're losing less money than they've ever than before. But for creators, what's interesting is they I think touted passing $1 billion in creative payouts. and they came out and said that they are going to increase the DevX which is developer exchange rate by 8.5%. So this is the rev share that developers have been making and it's always when you do all of the math and you take out platform fees and everything else it's always incredibly low. It's in the 20 21% kind of range. Some of the other numbers in there are the engagement fee. So I think there's a lot of changes. Joe, do you want to go first in in breaking down, you know, what some of those changes are and what do you think it means and then Stephen will go next.
I mean, I think it's great. The DevX rate increase is fantastic. As a company that has a, you know, 8 figure per year business in terms of AP revenue, this is a significant incremental revenue lift

and margin increment for us. And so we've been kind of waiting for this for a long time in that we know that things couldn't be going better at Roblox. I think Grow a Garden, Steal a Brain Rot, and 99 Nights in the Forest have blown away Roblox's wildest dreams in some ways. In some ways, they can't probably believe how quickly the platform exceeded tens of millions in CCUs and blew away the 100 million DAU level. These games are also making a humongous amount of money. So, they're going to blow away the $1 billion in creator payout mark if these games continue on this level of usage and spending. And at the same time, I'm not sure these games are aging up the platform the way that they had hoped.
I had a chance to get facetime with some of the creators of these games and was talking to them about their thoughts. And we don't know at the end of the day, we really don't know all the ages. It's all self-reported age data anyway. But you know what we believe is that there's a lot of parents playing these games with their children, but that there's

still probably not a lot of uh 20year-old gamers playing. And if you look at the Twitch traffic, for example, which I always use as a leading indicator of the aging up process, which is happening, and it is happening consistently, linearly, and effectively, but it has not topped with usage, I think, the way that we could all hope that it will eventually. And so because of that, I think that these DevX rate increases are meant to incentivize more professional developers to come with more aged up highfidelity content, which is still, I believe, a priority for Roblox from kind of some of the, you know, murmurss I hear.
Yeah. I mean, everything I see and what they say is, hey, you can do a 100% battle royale game. They're basically saying they're going after Fortnite, which is the older kind of UGC platform in my humble opinion. But Stephen, what did you make of this 8.5? It feels like

there's a little like I don't know, something going on behind these numbers that might not quite add up. When you peel back the onion, what do you see?
Yeah, just to start off, when I talked to developers after the keynote, after this announcement, and I said, "Hey, what were you most excited about?" This was the number one thing they said, right? So for the people who are actively building on the platform, this was excellent news. That was certainly the vibe that was, you know, present, you know, there on site. You know, that being said, I think that another sort of data point that was shared was that there's about 29,000 people, a little over 29,000 people in the developer exchange program. So Roblox says, "Hey, we have millions of people who are generating revenue on the platform, right? Right? So, they're creating games, they're selling items, but there's only 29,000 that have actually, you know, taken money off of the platform. Not everybody can take money off the platform. In order to qualify for the developer exchange program, you have to hit a certain threshold of

earnings, which isn't very high. I think it's a few hundred. And so, right, there's if you say, hey, the the broadest, right, again, as kind of Joe is saying, this is a UGC platform, right? So, it's a lot of amateurs, a lot of hobbyists that are, you know, learning and trying to figure it out, you know, making these games. But, you know, so if you say, "Hey, there's 29,000 people out there that have actually taken money off the platform." They said the median average was like $1,440 sort of like in payouts per developer, right? So, like
that's not a lot of money if that's the median, right? So we're talking about, hey, this is most impacting those who are already professionalized, those who are already driving a significant amount of revenue on the platform. And then in talking to another developer, you know, we talked about sort of engagement pay engagementbased payouts going away in favor of a new system that is really focused on games being able to monetize

more effectively, especially with new players to the platform. And so the more effective you can be at monetizing new players, then you know, the greater your payouts. Now, I talked to a developer who said, you know, we have seen success with that because we've leaned more into that type of model. And obviously that benefits sort of both parties theoretically, right? Like it's benefiting the developer because they're getting, you know, earning more money. It's developing Roblox as a platform because they're generating more revenue. But one call out was like for the developer. He said, "Hey, we just we've had to be very careful with our community about not seeming predatory, right? Not going overly aggressive into the monetization." You know, that's one of the sort of challenges that developers have is like, "Oh, if I want to make more money, then, you know, I really need to kind of step on the gas when it comes to, you know, driving that

monetization." And so tying it back to the sort of 8.5% increase, you know, I think some people, right, we're talking about those that are most affected are those that are already effectively the top ones. And then so for those who are, you know, perhaps previously earning off of engagement, right? And it's like I make an obby, for example, and obies are terrible at monetization, but I've got like decent engagement. It's going to be tough. So maybe this is sort of like a make good for trying to help those that might have gotten more payouts from engagement before you It's like almost going completely away from UEF. So UFN is only engagement, right? And we know that that's how that system is always going to be. And so this is saying no more engagement.
Let me stop you right there. UFN is not a UGC platform. UFN is not a platform. Let's stop comparing Roblox and UFN. One platform has less than 10% of the usage of the other platform.
Fair. With all due respect to my friends at Epic and how much I respect Fortnite

as a product and how nice the ability to create little cute mods in UFN currently is, there's no platform there. There's nobody building professionalized businesses there. There's a few developers who have gotten very lucky and made a lot of money. But right now, UFN is not a platform and I hope it becomes one and we'll be the first people to jump back on when it does. But I don't find the personally the comparisons between Roblox and UFN to be helpful because UEFN is not a place where you can build long-term live services games as a service and Roblox is
I mean the payout is now very different right they have in a sense polarized that and when you look at steal a brain rot when you look at grow a garden and Stephen it's so funny you talked about well they're I don't know if they want to do egregious monetization I don't know if I've seen more predatory egregious monetization than what is happening inside of those like top games. I mean when Phil on the podcast goes into this he I mean his light eyes

light up with money because it's like everything that you would want to do if you are a monetization guru to like milk your fan base. That's what I kind of took away is like you know they are actually going more towards more topheavy which all of these networks tend to have right like the cream floats to the top so to speak.
Just one other note like tying to advertising. So, there was a section about advertising where they've talked about this idea of this flywheel and they said, "Look, we have a really new new and improved ad system in place for developers to be able to get in front of more players more cost-effectively. The old system, there used to be 40 steps to set up a campaign. We've reduced it to three. And what that's done is sort of just taken away like a lot of the targeting and saying, "Hey, we're just going to get you in front of the right users." There's new objectives

such as like retention. So, it's not just about getting visits. But what they're seeing is really low cost per visit. So, it's like under 1 cent cost per visit. And so, they're saying, "Hey, part of the flywheel that we've set up is you spending on ads. So you can use ads to help boost your game and then you can then monetize with this new product rewarded video and then rewarded video is like a win-winwin. So you're going to earn money, players will get some sort of benefit and brands get in front of really engaged players. And so this is this flywheel that they're setting up on one side. Use our ads to grow and then put ads in your game to monetize and that can be really effective. So, I heard somebody say, "Oh, you know, this increase in 8.5% of the DevX rate, is it just going to go to people then being able to use their additional Robux on ads, right, to go and then drive that flywheel?" So, interesting perspective. We'll see how it plays out.

One thing I'd add is that, you know, the the spend depth on Roblox is is still really shallow, mostly compared to mobile freeto play. and that yeah, we're seeing in some of the top games like kind of higher levels of spending, the ARP Dows are still generally in the pennies per day, you know, and so because of that,
it's still seems hard to understand how you can use user acquisition to create a business in that you'd have to acquire so many hundreds of thousands of users to start making a meaningful amount of revenue even if all those users were rorowass positive. So I think that their tools have gotten so much better for user acquisition and there's been a huge sea change in the last few months there and the rewarded video ads is really exciting. It's something that we're implementing across the portfolio and there's more and more fill rate coming in on those videos but that becoming its own flywheel. I'm not quite sure how that all nets out exactly.
Yeah, I I see the rewarded video. It's actually some something I wanted to talk about later. We'll just move it up here.

is rewarded video is actually should go in the revenue section which is where we're talking about because just like in mobile when you can't monetize you know 95 96% of your base rewarded video is a great way for you to do that especially when you know kids who often don't have a bank account who are you know only get so much in the gift cards from you know mom dad aunt uncle you know grandparents and friends you know this is a way I think for a number of the creators to actually make money. But I did note that there's some minimums. You have to have an average of 100,000 DAU over the past month and a minimal or a mild content maturity rating on the app in order to be eligible to run rewarded video. And when also when you think about the fact that 80%ish of players play on mobile and they're very very used to going and playing other games and seeing rewarded video, that seems huge. Uh, this is just

rolling out. Also, Google's a partner if I'm if I'm not mistaken as well.
It's been in a beta program thus far, right? And so, they've really been um just surfacing this in a, you know, in a few games and working out some of the sort of, you know, kinks along the way. And so, definitely got some good insights more into this program, which they're certainly, you know, bullish on. There was a session dedicated to rewarded video. It was a lunch and learn session with the sort of like you know ad tech team as well as a couple developers on stage who had you know implemented rewarded video as part of this beta. And just going back a couple years, Roblox had done a similar lunch and learn at RDC where they were pushing portal ads. And they were pushing portal ads, which was, you know, this sort of billboard with a doorway in games where you could walk through and it would take you to another another game.
And developers really didn't like it. Yeah.
Because it was sending people who came to their game away from their game,

right? And so like nobody wanted to do that. And so it was like fast forward to, you know, fast forward two years to this past weekend and whoa, what a change. Like now we have a product that people actually want that developers are excited about. They don't necessarily have to be convinced. They can see the value. And as I talked to developers, the people on stage obviously like they had good things to say. They were, you know, positive about like the impact. And the way it's being sort of pitched is like, hey, not only is it a revenue driver, but it's actually like an engagement driver because, right, the people who watch the ad, who get this special bonus, special whatever reward, now they have more incentive to kind of keep playing. They, you know, they're sort of further along in the game. So, you know, that's how they're thinking about it. But I also talked to other developers who were using, you know, rewarded video ads and they said, you know what, it hasn't really worked for us. We haven't really been able to get many impressions on them. But

admittedly, they said, you know, but we haven't done any testing, right? They actually hadn't done a lot of optimization of like, hey, what's the right place to place this ad that will, you know, actually drive, you know, increased in impressions and conversion and, you know, the results. So, it's still very new, but you know, and then to the Google piece of it. Yeah. Cuz when it was announced, it was like, "Oh, wow. This is interesting." Like Google's part of this. It's not exactly clear what this means, but it certainly gives sort of like a lot of validation to the market, right? That's like Roblox and Google partnering, you know, on this. What was clarified a little bit more was that sort of Google ad tech is really powering a lot of the back end of how these ads are served and fulfilled that you know being able to deliver at scale really requires you know that type of really sophisticated implementation that Google's able to deliver. So you know

everything that's been running through the beta has been powered by Google thus far. So Joe, you said you're in the beta and obviously I want you to share all of your secrets today. Okay. Yes. What what can what can you share as someone who is doing doing this today?
It's been really exciting to see the evolution of ad product thinking within Roblox. And if you could create like a chat GPT of me appearing on podcast and giving quotes to media, it would sound like, wow, the portals are so innovative and I hope that they'll open up rewarded video ads soon because we know that we know that that works where the portals are this really cool innovation and we don't know if they work and there are some there is some friction with them that we need to overcome and so they brought in a new ad team on the ad product side. Yep. I know for example Ben Fox is someone who I had met a few times and he had been a king prior and helped build the ad business at King and seems like a very bright guy and they are doing what has worked for all of our

kind of compatriots in the mobile freetoplay business which is rewarded video ads. We're approaching it where we can very simply we have a free reward button and if you push it you can choose to engage in a video ad and get your free reward. I think that right now the fill rates are still not where we can generate a significant amount of revenue for a game that already has a kind of multi-million dollar per year run rate in AP where we have seen really huge success for gamefam over the past few years isn't selling integrations and I think this is something that Roblox does a lot with rewarded video is people come to Roblox say we want to be on Roblox and Roblox owns the video ad system, but they don't own in-game integrations. And so, what they're trying to do is build hybrid programs because what brands want is really integrations more than video ads. You can buy video ads on YouTube. You can buy video ads on Tik Tok. You can

also buy video ads on Roblox, but they don't have clickthrough. So, it's a great way to reach Roblox gamers and provide them a positive brand association with the reward. But what's unique about Roblox is integrations, right? So, we're just finishing this massive integration across four games that we're doing for Old Navy, for example. We run these constantly across our portfolio and across a portfolio of exclusive thirdparty partners with some of the top games. We did a massive campaign for LEGO that is still going on throughout the year. So, LEGO is going big in terms of making sure that they have brand presence and positive brand associations on Roblox. And this is where we are continuing to partner with Roblox where they sell the video media portion and then we can deliver the integration portion which is the part that advertisers are you know come first and foremost to get on Roblox as a gaming platform.
Define integration versus just like a Roblox a branded Roblox experience. Give

me a little bit more specificity of what you mean.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, this is a really important question for brand partners and we've done stuff for theatrical, right? We've done many theatrical campaigns. You know, most recently, I know we we did a Garfield campaign that won a few awards, for example. We've done so many I I can't even name all of them. We do a lot of toy campaigns. We did a huge campaign for Moose Toys last holiday, for example, that ran for eight weeks, and it delivered tens of millions of engagement. We measured purchase intent using panel data afterwards and we're able to report that back into Moose. And this is very different than a standalone brand experience. A standalone brand experience, we've also done those. The difference is when you do an integration, you're going into existing games where there are players. That's why it's an integration.
Sometimes people think Roblox is like a game. Roblox is a platform like the App

Store. There's a million games on it. We run a portfolio of top games and advertisers come to us and we build custom questbased programs with special valuable rewards that players get for engaging.
It's like a collab, right? Like like what?
Yeah, it's a collab, a crossover, a collab. We won eight Cleos last year for our work in the space, for example. Let me give you an example, though. So, if you do a a standalone game, you may or may not get any visits at all. On Row Monitor, it's a platform that our company owns and runs that tracks every brand standalone game that we know of. And you can go on the homepage and see every brand standalone game. And over 99% of those games currently have essentially no users. If you have two concurrent or 10 concurrent users, is that a good marketing execution? I I don't think that's the reach that most brands are looking for is, you know, two, five, 10, 50 concurrent users. At least you want tens of thousands of DAU

if you're going to invest in building something like this. Meanwhile, with this Moose Toys campaign last holiday, for example, in 8 weeks, we delivered 32 million visits. And during that time, we were able to deliver 286 million measured, validated brand engagements, 1.2 million minutes of engagement. And if you do a brand game, you might get essentially nothing. But when you do an integration, you can meet your campaign goals every time.
Yeah,
totally agree with what Joe's saying. You know, standalone game definitely not as guaranteed, has a lot of risk baked into it. There's some upside if you're really able to nail it, but you know, the integrations are much more sort of, you know, predictable and can be super effective. I think where the rewarded video comes in, it's just for those the whole layer of those brands that are like, "We don't want to do either of those. We don't want to build a custom game. We don't want to do an integration. We do have existing video assets that we just want to plug in. How

can you make this as easy as turnkey as possible?" Just knowing that like, hey, the ultimate sort of pool of money that Roblox wants to tap into are these just ginormous media budgets, right? And so for agencies, for media buyers, oh h like I just want to spend this money. I just want to put it somewhere. I just want to get the results. That's where you know like that rewarded video becomes like really compelling and just an easier way way to jump in. So now for brands, oh cool, it's not like I only have to build or I only, you know, or then okay, cool. There's this integration. Well, like what else? And so now there's like this becomes pretty compelling because as Joe was saying before with the sort of standard ads which was just a display ad in experiences. Well, why would I engage with that? Like there's no incentive for me as a player to go walk up to that ad and watch it. And so now with rewarded video, it just it just makes so much more sense for all parties.

Well, just to wrap this section, so you've got rewarded video, which is I'm a brand, I'm going to put my ad in a game. You've got a collab, which is I'm a brand. I want to work and put in a sense my brand inside of an existing game and create some sort of good experience. And at the end, you've got the game that you want to make itself. I think there's a place for all of these in the ecosystem. Joe, do you want to wrap this one up as well?
Well, I was at lunch with a major IP owner on Friday at Roblox Developers Conference, and I was sitting with a combination of strategy people, brand people, and gaming executives. And I was talking to the gaming executives and I I find myself kind of cracking up because for all of the marketing leaders listening to this, every marketing leader who comes to us or manager who comes to us, the first thing they always want to build on Roblox is a hub where fans of the brand or IP can get together and then go play mini games off the side

of the hub once they meet up.
Stop it. But but it's a 100% success rate at the first part of the brief being that and what I just want to share is you can go on row monitor and look in the history of hubs not a single hub has been able to create a meaningful level of engagement. And the reason why is that Roblox is a gaming platform and gaming gaming runs on genres. It'd be like putting an infomercial up on Tik Tok and expecting people to want to watch it. Tik Tok runs on entertainment and quick hilarious sketches and funny dances and trends, right? Roblox runs on a series of video game genres. And Hub with mini games off the side of it is not one of those genres. So, you're not going to get algorithm traction. And without algorithm traction, you're not going to get users. And so I'm so happy to have a chance to try to explain this

in a you know succinct way here on doof. Thank you. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I recently had a client and I gave that similar advice. I don't want to go too too much into it but I thank you for validating what I told them which is hubs are dumb and don't work. And actually the thing that
they make perfect sense. They make perfect sense on paper. They make so much sense on paper.
Of course on paper. Yes. they they they don't work in actuality because of the behavior of the kids on the platform and that collabs I thought are the way to win.
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appcharge.com. Stay ahead of the competition with Sensor Tower, the trusted source for mobile marketing intelligence. Whether you're tracking trends, benchmarking performance, or scouting the next big hit, Sensor Tower delivers the data that drives strategy. dominate the charts with Sensor Tower. Anyway, I want to continue on the IP thing, but go a little bit differently. A few weeks back, I announced and Roblox announced that they have this new kind of like IP platform. UEFN, I know you hate the comparisons, but just to give some love to our friends over there, they have something similar, but it's not like a self-s served kind of model where basically a player can come and say, "Hey, I want to be able to leverage and use this IP that I love and the IP in a sense gets a rev share off allowing their assets to be used by the community." I think they came out at RDC with with a few more IP partners. Mattel was one of them. as someone, you know,

Joe, you and I used to work at Mattel. It was definitely CDEF level brands that I think were put in there. Please Mattel people, don't shoot me, but it is what it is. Barbie and Hot Wheels are not on that list, Joe. Now that I set you up with a a ticket,
we we still run the Barbie game with Mattel. In fact, you know, that's one of the most successful standalone brand games of all time. It's not a hub with mini games off the side. It's a standalone, I think, superbly crafted Roblox game and it's generated, it's I think the sixth or seventh most played brand and IP game of all time. We just are updating it with Mattel to keep it relevant to what's happening with the Barbie brand. Look, we're a licency of Sega. We're a partner with Mattel, you know, for Sonic Speed Simulator, the number one brand and IP game of all time. were a partner with Mattel and Barbie, which is, I think, the number six or seven brand IP game of all time. So, we see, you know, Roblox making great inroads, I think, with people who

have already had some experience on the platform and want to see more success from it. Makes a lot of sense. I think that the self-service licensing model is not clear yet exactly how it works. Yes, you can get proposals now from any developer, right? So, it's opened up the ability for developers to reach IP owners in a new way. And I think that's really great where we're hearing from IP owners and developers is okay, but how do I write a proposal? And once I get in the door, how do we build an approvals program for these games that the IP holders will feel comfortable with? I think the idea that you can mark something as an official game and then have no oversight over the content in that game is not going to be easy for IP owners to move forward with. And so we're hoping that actually this is a great opportunity for us who's worked with Mattel, who's worked with Sega, who's worked with Paramount, and

currently we're working with Tohjo and Crunchyroll on the My Hero Academia game. And we know, I would argue maybe the most about building smooth and effective approvals processes that help IP owners understand what Roblox really is and what needs to be and what allows them to say yes ongoing to building the right products on Roblox. And so we're excited to try to coach a lot of developers and partner with developers as a publisher to help bring this along.
Yeah. So look, you know, Roblox since last year has really been pushing capturing 10% of the global gaming market, right? Like that's an objective for them as a company. And so it makes sense that if you look at traditional gaming out there, right? Like you have original IP, you have licensed IP. So having licensed IP is going to be a huge part of the growth of the platform moving forward. Now what we've seen here with this sort of self-service you know IP platform is there's actually two

parts of it. So one is you know a brand IP owner says hey we're going to put this IP on the platform. There's actually two parts. So one is yes there's like a public facing you know opt like system where it has a little bit of like hey here are the deal terms and then you can apply for a license to that game. Now this is very much in talking to some people in this program on the IP side it's like this is like very rudimentary right there isn't the ability for people to actually indicate what are they going to do with it exactly what is the pitch and then like h what is that process going to look like sort of moving forward so right now IP owners are getting submissions and with some examples of like past work but it's not exactly clear oh wow should I trust this developer with my billion dollar IP brand to go make a game. So that's so that's a challenge. It is a scalable solution, right? Like you can

build this up, you can reach people at scale, but it is very much like the one right now. But the other piece of this is actually the fact that like by opting in as an IP, you're also saying, hey, I officially own this IP. And now we start to have a system in place where oh if there is you know a game that is unofficial that is somehow using my IP now I can kind of see oh wow now there's like a system in place to be able to recognize that and potentially have some sort of enforcement some sort of takeown or some sort of like oh hey let's bring you into the fold and start to tie those things together. So, in many ways, it kind of reminds me back of like the early days of YouTube, like before content ID was a thing. And then once they rolled out and like developed Content ID, then you can say, "Oh, cool. All of you kind of, you know, UGC creators out there that are using our IP, now we have tools in place to be able to kind of rein this in and have it be, you know, something that's sort of

above the board versus like in the shadows." So, a couple pieces there. This is basically the IP copycat ripoff smackdown tool. And that's kind of what I called it when I saw this. And it's got a long way to go before it's actually going to be usable and that brands are going to be happy with a creator taking their IP, using it in the game because there's something called TTP, time to penis, and no IP wants a bunch of 12-year-olds running around with their IPs making little, you know, penis what whatevers. All right. words.
I wanted to hit two more things just on the tool set and then at the very end, you know, maybe I can just give a quick blurb about the what they announced with safety, which basically they've already kind of announced all of their safety stuff already. But on tools, I mean, as with any thing these days, AI was mentioned a thousand times, and I saw 4D mentioned a couple of times. Joe, do you want to go first and talk a little bit about like any key AI feature set or tool sets that you thought would be like

top of mind for folks to need that they need to know about?
I mean, the stuff all looks amazing in the demos, you know, the jailbreak stuff where they were like, you know, like typing in generative cars and it all looked really impressive. And I use generative AI every day at my job. And I think that to be able to create simple 3D assets is going to be a huge boon for developers. Right now, one of the biggest pain points for Roblox developers is, hey, I'm a programmer, but I need a modeler, right? Or I'm a modeler, but I need a programmer. And what Roblox is doing, the way the world is going, right, is individual people with the drive and ambition are able to do more and more on their own. And I think that this hopefully creates new opportunities for us and for other publishers like us to then help those who are getting traction figure out how to set goals and grow their businesses from there. That's how we've grown GameFam over the past 6 years. And so

what we want to see is more creators coming on shipping innovative and wild ideas and then helping them take those ideas and 3, four, five, 10x them over the course of years as a publishing partner.
Yeah. But interestingly, that's not how Roblox was framing all these AI tools. So that's how they were framing it last year at RDC was like, hey, look at this. You can, you know, text to creation, right? Like you can generate all this amazing stuff. They made this like slight but significant pivot this year, which was, hey, these are AI tools not for you and the audience, not for you, the developers, but it's for players of your games. And so, hey player, in this game, you can type in, you know, alligator car and it'll show up and then you can then ride and utilize that car in the game. And so, and I think it's sort of like two things going on here. Number one is current developers are

like very apprehensive about AI taking their jobs, right? So, I think part of this pivot is like, no, no, no, no, we're not trying to take your jobs. We're trying to make the games push what games are, make them sort of cutting edge, more fun, interactive in different ways. And that ties into the second part, which was this idea of Roblox is a UGC platform, right? Users are creating these games. Now, what they're doing is kind of adding an additional layer of UGC on top of UGC and saying, "Hey, not just the developers of these games are creators, but now the players of these games can become creators." And so you can come up with, you know, additional items and then we'll get into maybe like these moments and create content that's postable within the platform. And so it's sort of like stacking UGC on top of UGC is is how I'm reading this. And now ultimately, will AI take developer jobs? Like maybe, probably, who knows? But

like that's not how like Roblox has adjusted their positioning on that to like really put it in the sort of players hands.
Oh, got it. Let me actually get to that. You're right. Let's touch on basically, you know, Tik Toks and Roblox having a baby. All right. So, this feature that I saw announced was called Roblox moments. And so, it looks like it's basically Tik Tok short form video coming into Roblox. Users can capture, edit, and share moments while others can click join to instantly try out the experience. Soon Roblox will release moments APIs and the source code to developers as well. So Stephen, you want to talk a little bit about what this is and you know we we know that Tik Tok basically complete competes with Gen A and Gen Z for attention.
Yeah. So at RDC Roblox mentioned that there's 1.2 billion views of Roblox related content on Tik Tok and YouTube every single day, right? So, like it

makes sense for Roblox to take all of that sort of Roblox content and keep people on their platform. And so, this is a new tool where players um if a developer opts in, they can um a player can go in and just start recording these little clips. They can edit them down and then post them. And I guess the incentive for developers and the way this was framed was under this, you know, this this theme of discovery. Hey, here's a new way developers for you to be able to get your games developed on the platform. And so when people watch these clips, they can hit a join button that's at the bottom that'll take them directly into your experience. And so this, you know, currently the way you watch these clips is is in a standalone experience. So when I looked at this experience after the first day, it had about a 52% approval rating with 1.7 million visits. So, it's brand new, but you know, it is bringing together the social media aspects and the fact that

they're open sourcing the code, there's going to be a ton of, you know, sort of innovation certainly in the space. And if they're able to like really make it work and make it sticky, it opens up so much possibilities in terms of like getting additional data on like player interest. It opens up additional sort of like ad inventory. This is a huge huge game changer. the editing inside of it too. I think they they took this from a developer or this was an like an innovation award winner or something,
right? Clip it is one that has like done this where it was a game where you could basically like they had their own feed and you can comment, you can create content. So yeah, this is something that they had supported and now they're sort of bringing broader into the platform.
I mean I agree with everything uh Stephen said. I I think it's great. I think that it is potentially very valuable for advertising and the product isn't quite ready for prime time yet. I guess I would argue. I went on it this morning. There were 2,000 people using

it and when I went on it, the video quality uh was low. It I mean it was grainy. So I I'm sure they will improve that undoubtedly. It's a really interesting shot on goal. And will will it land? Will it stick? It's really hard to say. I could see it going very well. I could see it also failing to gain meaningful traction. But even if it had 20, 30, 50,000 concurrent users on it, which would make it a top 20 Roblox experience, I think that would be really valuable for Roblox as an increment to their media ability to sell media and bring brands onto the platform. So, I I think it's a a no risk all reward initiative for Roblox and I hope it goes great.
Yeah. No, it's interesting. They are in a sense going to take away their own UA revenue source because this is probably this is a freeto use game feature. Correct. Like so you would think you would sell this.

Yeah. And I'm not sure how valuable it'll be for UA. The UA situation today on Roblox is is very algorithm driven, right? So if your game doesn't have metrics, it really doesn't matter like how good your marketing is. like you you need metrics to you know it's same as YouTube or Tik Tok or Instagram right if you're not getting engagement doesn't matter how well you market your game your game will not be able to get meaningful traction on the platform is how it's kind of set up right now so I'm not really seeing exactly the UA value of this tool for developers at this time but I would love to find out more about it and see it
all right let's just wrap very quickly on safety it's been a hot topic IC with the state of Louisiana filing a lawsuit against Roblox a couple weeks ago. We all work in kids products and media and know that everyone takes this seriously. I know that the folks at Roblox take this very, very seriously. Here's what Roblox said at RDC, much of which we've heard from them over the, you know, last

few months. Expanded aged estimation across communication. By year end, Roblox will require age estimation from facial recognition, ID verification, and parental consent for any user accessing communication features. And then they've also announced that they've had 100 plus safety tools and policy upgrades since January 2025, improved moderation tools, upgraded voice and text filters, a lot of AI text filters, I think sounds cool. In any event, do you guys have any thoughts quickly on, you know, what you heard coming out of RDC around the safety topic?
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. You know, talking to brands, there's certainly some brands especially that are like, "Hey, we've had to pause, right? This has really been a big conversation. Not that we're not interested or not committed to moving forward on the platform. It's really important for us." Hearing those types of things, but hey, it's creating a pause as we figure this out. Other brands I heard say, "Look, this is the internet. the internet is not a safe place, right? And so like believing firmly though that Roblox is

doing the best job it can to, you know, create a safe space on the platform. So certainly, yeah, pause, but you know, sort of belief in where the company is headed.
Well, you know, as a publisher who works with brands every day, safety is front and center at Gamef Fam every day. And we know that Roblox also cares very deeply about safety. And I've known like Tammy Balck for a year. She's the vice president of of of civility. Like they are so passionate about providing a safe environment for users, but it is a moving target on a social platform and they continue to add more and more safety protocols. At Gamefam, we have even additional focus on safety because we have to take responsibility for the safety of our own games. We are partnered with KU, the Children's Advertising Review Unit. We are the only developer we know of that has partnered with them to continue to help evolve guidelines and help educate brands and parents about what is safe on Roblox.

And you know, this is a topic very near and dear to my heart on a personal level. I'm a board member at a local nonprofit called 826LA that provides inschool and out of school supplementary educational programs for Los Angeles public school students. So, this is something that GameFam cares very deeply about and that we know that Roblox cares very deeply about as well.
Okay. Any last things before we need to close out here? Did I miss something hot?
There was one thing that I'll say which was like the thing that stuck out to me. So, over the summer, as we know, Grow a Garden huge. Steal a brain rot was huge. It was shared on stage that during the summer on Tik Tok, Roblox content had 20% share of voice. So, one out of every five videos watched on Tik Tok was related to Roblox, which is mindblowing. Like, Tik Tok is so huge. It just shows the scale, the growth that Roblox is having. And so, if Roblox is not on your radar, just know that like this is a

Roblox's world. We're living in it. And just like just wow. If you don't have a child, and I know this sounds creepy, go figure out how you can look over the shoulder of young people playing on Roblox, especially if you're kind of an OG in the game industry. The way that they play games is completely completely different than the way that we grew up playing games. And if we don't realize and know that, then we're not going to be able to kind of shift with the business opportunities. You know, the direct public offering on Roblox was a huge moment for the platform and really put the platform in the public consciousness. And this last six months of Grow a Guard and Steal a Brain Rod has really, I think, further rocketed Roblox into where we all hoped it would be. When I first got on Roblox in 2016, this is where I thought it could land. And when I started GameFam in 2019, this is what we were expecting. And so, you know, it's been amazing to be part of this journey and we're excited to see

where it goes from here and thank you for the opportunity to share some of our thoughts today.
Oh, you're quite welcome. I know that we pulled this together really quickly, so thank you to my two Roblox experts, Joe from GameFam and Steven from Bax Power Gaming. Thank you and see you next time.
Bye.
Thanks.
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