Roblox doubles down on AI creation as developer use accelerates

Roblox is expanding its generative-AI creation strategy, saying the tools are speeding the path from an idea to a playable game and already feature heavily among its most successful titles. More than 80% of the platform’s 100 leading games by hours engaged used AI tools to accelerate development during the month covered by its third-quarter shareholder letter.

The push comes alongside a mixed set of audience measures. Game Developer reported that daily active users were 138 million, 9% lower than a year earlier and below an estimate of 145 million, while hours engaged fell 15% year on year to 34 billion. Roblox attributed the comparison to exceptionally strong growth in the prior year.

Its shareholder letter presented the same 138 million daily users as a 12% increase from the second quarter, while nearly 34 billion hours engaged represented a 17% quarterly rise. The company said both daily users and hours engaged had nearly doubled since the third quarter of 2023.

Third-quarter revenue rose 16% year on year to $1.6 billion. Bookings, however, declined 12% to $1.7 billion, though they were above the high end of Roblox’s guidance and more than 50% higher than two years earlier. Operating cash flow was $395 million and free cash flow was $364 million.

Roblox said its creator use of AI had accelerated sharply. Daily asset uploads to its cloud tripled month over month; top creators’ time using AI tools tripled since the second quarter; and their daily use of its MCP server rose almost fivefold. Two games, “Break and Steal an Egg” and “Huss Valley,” were created almost entirely with AI and reached the platform’s top 20 by concurrent players during the quarter.

The company has pursued AI-assisted creation since releasing Roblox Studio Assistant in December 2023. Its prompt-to-game Build tool has been used by more than 500,000 people since an alpha launch in New Zealand, Singapore, Serbia and Thailand, resulting in more than 70,000 published games.

Roblox is also building AI tools for 3D-asset generation, NPC playtesting, scene verification and visual design. It has nearly 400 models supporting functions from creation to moderation, with self-hosted models handling 77% of model requests. Chief executive David Baszucki said AI was reshaping games by changing the pace at which content could be created.

The expansion has also drawn scrutiny. Game Developer reported that Roblox confirmed an AI agent had scraped 145.5GB of 3D assets, including adult material, from Open3DLab. A company spokesperson called it a mistake and said the material would not be used for AI training in future.

Roblox expects the first phase of Roblox Everywhere, which is intended to let creators self-publish standalone Roblox-made games to app stores, to begin with selected top games in the first half of 2027.