2022 was a unconfined year for Roblox. We are optimistically driving our vision to reimagine the way people come together, and we’re realizing it by enabling deeper forms of expression, communication, and immersion.
The investments we are making to expand the engagement of Roblox wideness geographies and age groups are paying off. Our polity grew by 23% this year to increasingly than 56 million daily global users. And our users spent over 49.3 billion hours coming together to create, play, explore, learn, and connect. Today, increasingly than half of the people on Roblox are 13 and older, demonstrating our platform’s request to a wholesale range of audiences.
Innovation and improvements wideness every speciality of Roblox played a key role in driving our growth. Here are some of our major upbringing from 2022.
Enabling Self-Expression and Connection
With the launch of Layered Clothing, we unfurled to empower people to express themselves and their identity creatively. This full-length enables suit and traps to fit any avatar soul type. Items like shirts, dresses, sweaters, jackets, and pants are now worn in layers and reprinting the way wardrobe fits and drapes on individuals in the real world. This provides our polity with the power to create never-before-seen suit and whatsit types. Users can mix and match an incredible range of soul styles and outfits, taking avatar customization possibilities to the next level. Since launch, we have seen over 115 million people own a layered suit item.
We moreover unfurled to expand the quality and immersion of social interactions on Roblox. Now, people verified as month 13 and older can use Yack with their voice to speak aloud with one another. This functionality is built to mimic in-person conversations, and is based on avatars’ proximity to each other – meaning you might whisper to a friend nearby or raise your voice to siphon wideness the room. Almost a million Roblox experiences have once enabled voice communications.
At the end of the year, we rolled out Contact Importer, a unscratched and secure way for people to find and connect with real-life friends. Contact Importer uses the same contact names saved on a user’s device, so they can quickly recognize their friends on the Roblox platform. We moreover released Friend Recommendations, so people month 13 and older can hands review and add friends directly. These two features are important steps in making it easier for people to connect while standing to uphold the privacy and safety of our community.
Expanding Creator Opportunities
Other important innovations were focused on progressive our vision of making megacosm wieldy to everyone on Roblox. We’re towers tools so anyone from new creators to big minutiae studios can bring their creations to fruition.
In 2022, our polity visited increasingly than 15 million experiences on the platform, and developers and creators published increasingly than 15,000 experiences every single day. To support this megacosm flywheel, we made advancements to Roblox Studio, our self-ruling minutiae software for towers and publishing 3D content. Roblox Studio now has a refreshed squint and new features — like support for high-resolution displays and redesigned icons for largest navigation — that indulge creators to customize their workspaces and interreact with teammates seamlessly.
In July 2022, we rolled out a number of advancements to our material system to enhance the visual quality of the full library of existing materials and make them squint and finger plane increasingly realistic than before. Materials on Roblox are unreceptive to materials in the real world. They’re used to not only pinpoint the surface visitation of a 3D object but moreover its physical properties, which in turn influences how the object behaves. Our material system will help our creators increasingly hands realize their stimulating vision.
We’ve moreover widow several new features to Roblox Cloud, our developer ecosystem, to streamline wits minutiae and enhance productivity. Developers can now wangle all their Roblox resources via APIs that enable a rich ecosystem of tools for improving creator workflows and customization.
At the end of the year, we began rolling out our new Creator Hub, a resource that brings all of our online tools and documentation for developers into a unified platform. Creator Hub makes megacosm easier, faster, and increasingly streamlined by providing operational and management support in one place. The technology we’re towers for Creator Hub will moreover bring greater fidelity and capabilities to developer creations.
Evolving our Virtual Economy
In 2022, our Economy team achieved an important milestone: increasingly than 90% of items published in Marketplace are now made by creators, getting us plane closer to the point where all content within Roblox is fully user-generated. We’re standing to modernize user discovery in Marketplace, so people can find items they want in a way that will redefine the user journey. We envision a future where select items are offered on a limited basis, and other items are increasingly widely available, so people can find a unrestrictedness of items they love.
This September, at our biggest Roblox Developers Conference ever, we spoken Immersive Ads. This innovative 3D razzmatazz wits is designed to requite brands and developers unwrinkled the worthiness to reach their audiences in new ways.
Investing in Safety and Civility
As the Roblox polity continues to grow, we are tightly focused on ensuring a unscratched and starchy environment for our users. Over the last year, we increased our investments in AI and machine learning for autonomously detecting and preventing attempts by bad actors to engage in harmful communications or upload harmful content.
We unfurled to modernize sophistication in our content and yack moderation efforts. Using natural language processing models, we’ve evolved our systems to not just flag prohibited language but to understand context and act accordingly. In 2022, we used these models to power streamlined moderation features in English, as well as in Spanish, German, Portuguese and more, and we will protract to roll them out globally in 2023.
Thanks to our investments virtually AI and machine learning, we’ve been worldly-wise to safely waterworks increasingly of our first-line moderation to streamlined systems. Roblox has made meaningful improvements to the time to whoopee on content identified as problematic. The upshot: while speed in moderation has long been a strength for Roblox, we’re now plane faster and increasingly accurate.
Creating Opportunities for Brands
Brands of all types, from Alo Yoga and Spotify to the NFL, unfurled to use Roblox to connect and engage with millions of people. Every day, Roblox makes entirely new online connections possible by giving companies the ability to create heady activations and virtual products. There were over 100 trademark activations launched in 2022.
By giving people the tools to express themselves in any way they want, we’ve seen some wondrous creativity and interesting trends from the community. These were captured in our 2022 Metaverse Malleate Trends report, published in collaboration with the Parsons School of Design. The report dives into the new trends and opportunities in digital fashion, and how wardrobe in the virtual world can inspire people to express themselves in new ways on Roblox.
We moreover unfurled to focus on supporting educational developers, providers, and educators in bringing high-quality content to the platform wideness a wholesale range of subjects, grade levels, and wits genres. We made progress in the education category by partnering with our first Roblox Polity Fund recipient, the Museum of Science, Boston, on the launch of their Mission: Mars wits on the platform.
As companies protract to establish themselves on Roblox with the help of our community, the opportunities for creators increase. And the growth of our polity expands the opportunities for organizations to connect with their audiences on Roblox. We’re excited to see this momentum continue.
Investing in Our People
None of this would be possible without our talented employees. To support the ongoing growth of our platform, we unfurled to invest in developing our talent and leadership. Nick Tornow joined us to lead the Creator Engineering group, and most recently 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-employee in-person Roblox Week at our San Mateo headquarters in July. Teams gathered for a week of activities that fostered connections, strengthened our community, and prestigious the technical innovations we’re towers to shape the future. And at the end of the year, we returned to an in-person Hack Week, with increasingly than 225 teams pursuing self-directed projects that pushed boundaries and velocious the future of our platform.
Finally, we were honored to rank third on Fast Company’s Top 100 Workplaces for Innovators in 2022. This ribbon reflects our innovation-first culture that empowers our technical teams to be responsible, take the long view, and get stuff done, all while respecting our global polity of millions of creators.
The Journey Ahead
Looking ahead, I’m excited to see how creativity and invention protract to fuel growth at Roblox. At every level, we’re seeing new opportunities to connect a billion people with optimism and civility.
I’d like to thank our employees, our Roblox board, and the unshortened Roblox polity for all the things they’ve achieved and made possible this year. We have an heady year ahead.
David Baszucki, a.k.a Builderman
Founder and CEO, Roblox
The post 2022 Year In Review – Letter from our CEO appeared first on Roblox Blog.
