This Week's Roblox Recap (21 May 2023)

Table of Contents

• Platform updates

• Roblox’s Quarterly Financial Report

• Innovation award nominations

• Up and Coming games

• News and incidents

Platform updates

This week we received 5 platform updates and a creator roadmap update. This includes terrain tools receiving a major overhaul, a new Studio template being introduced and DragDetectors being released as a beta feature.

Friend Activity Revamp: Roblox seems to be experimenting with banners under game icons that say “Friend Activity” instead of having a separate category for it. While this does seem like a good idea, People aren’t happy about the fact that it hides the game’s player counts and like to dislike ratios in the continue tab. This is currently being rolled out to a few people as a test but might release globally soon.
Here’s a discussion thread: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/roblox-what-the-hell/2344632 

Terrain tools overhaul: Roblox has announced Terrain Editor changes, such as streamlining the toolset, merging functionality, and adding new capabilities. These enhancements are intended to streamline workflows while also providing options for working with huge areas of terrain. Many tools now include keyboard shortcuts and a lot of existing tools now have more utility. More features will be added in the future, such as the ability to save terrain regions as stamps.
Link to Devforum post: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/improvements-to-the-terrain-editor/2344311 

DragDetectors: Roblox's beta release includes DragDetectors (Similar to ClickDetectors) which is a new instance type that allows for easy manipulation of 3D objects. The configurable feature works with both tethered and unanchored items, giving game play and mechanics a more physical feel. The beta version is only available in local Studio mode. This is a really cool update that will easily help make objects in game interactive.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/dragdetectors-beta/2387249 

New City Template: The former City Template has been replaced with the new Modern City Template, which includes a fully developed city area and a Modular City Building Kit that allows users to build visually appealing city buildings. New features such as MeshParts, SurfaceAppearance, MaterialVariants, Future Lighting and much more have also been included in the template. All models are optimized and have streaming enabled by default which helps to reduce join times and crashes. This template is really well made and sets a new standard for realistic games, especially those with a city theme.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/new-studio-template-endorsed-packs/2333430 

Private Server Blocking: Private server owners can now simply remove unwanted players thanks to a new feature. The blocking tool not only evicts the undesirables, but also adds them to the server's block list to prevent them from returning. If necessary, server owners can quickly remove the block. This is a pretty useful feature as most games do not give the private server owner access to a ban/kick menu.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/private-server-owners-can-evict-unwanted-players-via-blocking/2344341 

Packages Upgrade: Packages can now be configured with a standard approach that allows attribute changes to be made on each copy of the package. These changes are considered default configurations for the package and can be applied to newer versions of the package. The upgrade also allows for additional changes to tags and the name of the package root, as well as the activation of Enum attributes. The enhancements make object systems easier to implement and allow for easy customisation of modules without needing to fork them.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/packages-upgrade-package-configurations/2334306 

Creator Roadmap: Roblox's Creator Roadmap is a new resource on the Creator Hub that attempts to empower creators with tools to attract and engage users. The roadmap's second section focuses on expanding and engaging the audience, with enhancements to discovery, matchmaking, notifications, and communication. The plan is not thorough, and after it is completed, a "Ask Me Anything" session with the creators will be held.
Read more: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/creator-roadmap-pt-2-of-4-grow-and-engage-your-audience/2338913 

Roblox’s Quarterly Financial Report

Roblox published their financial report for Q1 2023 on May 10, 2023. Here’s a short summary:

• Total costs and expenses in the first quarter increased to $945 million from $688 million last year.

• While growth and user engagement seems to be growing year on year, The losses are widening too.

• Average DAUs were at 66.1M and the monthly returning paying player base is at 11.2M.

• The latest quarter also saw Roblox increase the number of its monetized developers by 63% year on year, ending at over 4 million which is pretty robust.

• While these numbers sure are interesting, What’s even more intriguing is that cash reserves were at $3B according to their last financial report but now they’re at $2.2B. The report says it’s for a “Long-term investment” but no more details have been provided. I’m genuinely curious as to what this could be - acquisition? assets? For now, We’ll just have to wait for an official statement from Roblox.
  Read more: https://ir.roblox.com/news/news-details/2023/Roblox-Reports-First-Quarter-2023-Financial-Results/default.aspx 

Innovation award nominations

You can now cast your nominees for the Innovation Awards that will be conducted on 9th September along with RDC 23. This is certainly a great opportunity if you want to nominate a youtuber or developer that you like. Here are some of the available categories:

• Best New Experience

• Best Use of Tech

• Best Video Star

• Best Video Star Video

• Best User-Created Item

• Best Collaboration

• Best New Video Star

• Best User-Created Limited

You can cast your nominees here: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/roblox-innovation-awards-2023-nominations-are-now-open/2340411 

Up and Coming games

A game that did really well last week was ‘Obby But You Can't Jump’ by ‘Super Obbys’. Its CCU peaked at over 60K and it got 6.9M (nice) visits last sunday which was pretty impressive for an obby. While this isn’t an original idea, A lot of such obbies have been popping off recently and they’re all doing fairly well. For example, ‘Obby but you’re a ball’ or ‘Obby but you have a long arm’. The only difference is that ‘Obby But You Can’t Jump’ has a good like to dislike ratio unlike other similar obbies which is very fascinating.

Another interesting thing that I would like to mention is how ‘Driving Empire’ isn’t the #1 vehicle simulation game on Roblox anymore. It has been promptly replaced by ‘Vehicle Legends’ which is astonishing considering the fact that ‘Driving Empire’ had higher CCUs than ‘Vehicle Legends’ for almost 2 years. Could this be due to ‘Driving Empire’ being acquired by Voldex?

News and incidents

Roblox wants to allow virtual dating in the future to “Age Up” the platform.
Quoted from the blog post: “Roblox could envision different types of experiences, like virtual dating for older age groups, indie movie screenings and new forms of content such as news and hot topics“.
Obviously the community does not like this and Roblox has received tons of backlash on Twitter and on the DevForum. Followed by this, Roblox employees confirmed that this “feature” will be age restricted and might take a few years to come out. It’s still very contradicting to their existing community guidelines so I guess we’ll have to wait for a while to see what happens.
Read more: https://blog.roblox.com/2023/05/our-vision-for-all-ages/ 

Users with the term “YT” in their username have been receiving bans on their accounts. This is happening again for the second time and is very concerning as to what is and what isn’t safe to have as a username.