Roblox prioritizing shareholders over creators is not surprising at all; they are a public company, and that's their duty.
If you want to understand the direction the company is heading, don’t look at the marketing aimed at creators. Read how they talk to investors vs how they talk to developers and artists.
In investor communications, the focus is on scalability, efficiency, margins, and AI-driven growth. In creator-facing messaging, the word “AI” is often avoided entirely, replaced with vague buzzwords like “real-time dreaming” or “4D.” That disconnect is calculated.
The strategy is clear, though: leverage developer and artist content to train their own AI labs and reduce dependence on human-created UGC over time. Whether that future arrives in 2 years or 10, the direction is obvious. At the end of the day, platforms under investor pressure look for ways to scale content creation without scaling payouts.
It’s visible in earnings calls, investor decks, hiring patterns, and the language used, depending on the audience. Creators should pay attention because the story told to shareholders contrasts with the one told to them.
What do I know? I've been on both sides: as a successful UGC creator and now as a UGC game/platform. I met with many of the big companies you can think of and was part of many discussions on monetization and business strategy for those businesses. I know this space from the core; I started from absolutely nothing and worked through every aspect of the business.
But hey, that's just my personal opinion ;)
In our research lab, we are building “real-time dreaming” - the ability to generate fully playable video worlds prompted from any text or image.
Our real-time, action conditioned world model (currently running internally at 16fps at 832x480p) is trained on a combination of data, including proprietary Roblox 3D avatar/world interaction data.
World models are different from multiplayer engines in that they store state and memory in video latents. Roblox is multiplayer, and we are actively researching optimal ways to simultaneously store state for thousands of players, and keep them in sync with their environment.
Our world model leverages database technology which stores all user interactions on Roblox in a vector format that can be used to re-render video and interaction from any camera angle.
We see several immediate uses for our Roblox world model. We will use it side-by-side text, image and video prompts as a way to launch auto-generation of immersive worlds.
In Roblox Studio, a creator could walk around and use prompts to “paint” a world and then convert it into a 3D representation or direct to Roblox native as a way for many people to play simultaneously.
All of this comes alive as we explore the notion of a “Dream Theater” - where one user is dreaming, while others watch and prompt them. 2/4