Roblox Wants To Be The "YouTube of 3D" & Generative AI Holds The Key 🗝

Prediction: 10-year-olds today are about to grow up and be filthy rich 💰

Let’s /imagine for a second…

Welcome to 2033.

The once beloved childhood pastime of building 3D worlds in Roblox has evolved into a lucrative profession for a new generation of metaverse architects.

The same creators who built mini-games for fun a decade ago are now in their twenties, leading a revolution in 3D entertainment.

Today, Roblox commands a global audience of over 1.5 billion monthly active users, generating nearly $90 billion in annual digital goods sales.

This thriving platform exploded in popularity after AI turned it into a goldmine for ambitious entrepreneurs.

Recent reports show these creators have amassed a treasure trove of popular IP, making them part of an exclusive group of Roblox billionaires known as the "Roblox Mafia"

So that’s an interesting future scenario, eh? Perhaps not even farfetched, especially if you replace Roblox with the myriad of collaborative virtual worlds kids spend their time in today e.g. Fortnite, RecRoom, Minecraft etc.

Now let’s /deepdive into what Roblox is actually doing today, and their stated vision for Generative AI

TL;DR Roblox wants to be the "YouTube of 3D" and generative AI holds the key to their future 🗝

🌌 Roblox isn't just a video game — it's the world's largest UGC 3D platform. But wait, it gets better!

🧙 Roblox is embracing Generative AI, shattering barriers to 3D creation, and creating a TikTok-like flywheel 🔁

🧵 I highly suggest you watch this 20 sec overview, so you’re primed for the rest of this blog which breaks down their vision and strategy in greater detail:

1/ Roblox calls itself the “ultimate virtual universe" 🌌

With 214 million MAU (monthly active users), it's more like the "YouTube of 3D" — an ecosystem where millions can build, play, share & monetize their own 3D creations 🌎

Just like short-form democratized video, AI is poised to do it for 3D 🌐

2/ Roblox is built on a proprietary 3D engine

This is strategically valuable, because no Unity or Epic dependency 😉

And they've continually improved this engine to support greater realism.

So it's no longer just cartoon worlds — you can legit make a photorealistic FPS game in Roblox.

🤯 Mind blown. I still can't believe this is Roblox:

3/ Roblox is using Generative AI to make 3D creation easier

From gleaming metal swords to altering sports car appearances, Roblox's new AI tools lets users create and modify textures with ease.

This co-pilot experience will redefine how games are created and played. For instance, the AI Texture Generator is wild. You can use it to make a new texture, then turn it into a realistic engine-ready material.

For the uninitiated, making PBR (Physically based rendering) shaders typically involves using a complex "professional" tool like Adobe Substance — and now it's one click! Watch @RoBuilderYT lose his mind over the awesomeness:

4/ "Everyone becomes a creator" — even when in-game

That's Roblox's vision to embed AI directly into experiences 🪄

So users can customize their avatars, design clothing, or generate their own music without leaving a game.

Gone are the days of build-a-bear customization — this is next level stuff:

5/ Roblox is using Large Language Models for Code Assist

👩‍💻 Coding is hard, and coding for 3D is even harder. Conveniently, Roblox now has is AI-based code assist.

🚀 Type natural prompts and have it automagically converted into Lua, the language of choice for Roblox.

Infusing interactivity into 3D becomes far easier. Case in point:

That’s a good starting point. Maybe you want to embellish your world with a rain particle system, realistic splashes and atmospheric mist?

A few comments become complete blocks of code — like magic! 🪄

✨The 10x multiplier applies. Beginners can learn to code and experienced developers can become more ambitious:

6/ Roblox’s approach to training data

Wondering if Roblox scraped private code repositories to power code completion? 😌 The answer is no: "The model is trained on no private developer data and only uses public marketplace assets"

This is similar to what Microsoft is doing with GitHub Co-Pilot, and crucial for Roblox to not alienate developers, because it side steps a lot of the controversy associated with image-generation models scraping public data.

On that note… While there’s a clear statement reg. LLMs, it is not clear how Roblox trained their texture generation models 🙂 

7/ Roblox is using AI to make asset shopping more intuitive

🔎 Finding 3D assets to fit your description is hard. You sometimes don’t even know exactly what you’re looking for.

Roblox made this easier with an AI search feature that'll find semantically similar matches for your given description... even if those terms weren't included in the marketplace listing. Neat!

While Roblox hasn’t rolled out text-to-3D yet, it makes a ton of sense they’re focused on deriving more value from the massive library of marketplace assets they have today. But where is all of this going?

🌟 As more creators dabble with AI, game development is on the brink of a transformative era.

🕹️🔮 Roblox's existing investments across a vertically integrated stack put them well on track to revolutionize the metaverse.

Epic will push the boundaries here too. But as things stand today, Epic (despite creative mode) still feels like the Netflix of 3D. This squares away nicely with their focus on bigger IP and celebrities. Meanwhile, Roblox does have those elements but is UGC first and more akin to the YouTube of 3D

For both, generative AI holds the key to populating it with compelling content:

🚀 Conclusion: Roblox believes that AI can unlock the full potential of human creativity 🔓

With GenAI being infused into the Roblox flywheel, the future metaverse could look more like an instant holodeck — and change how we *both* create & consume 3D content.

One More Thing:

If you enjoyed this blog, please give it a like or retweet the first tweet linked below. It truly helps me out 🤝

And for more creative tech insights & AI experiments, join me on Twitter: @bilawalsidhu (and thanks for 20k!)