Roblox Weekly: Apr 16–22, 2023
Facial Animations, Artificial Intelligence, and a FREE avatar item!
Welcome to Roblox Weekly, a newsletter series covering the latest and greatest news, announcements, and events that happen on the Roblox platform. Let’s recap everything that happened for the week of April 16–22, 2023…
Facial Animation Preview
For the past few years, Roblox has been teasing a new feature called Avatar Chat, which pairs Voice Chat with facial animation to bring more advanced expressions to Roblox avatars in experiences. On Friday, a live test build of facial animation in a Roblox experience was discovered. This preview showcased what it is going to be like to chat with your voice and express yourself with full facial tracking, all with a simple camera linked to your PC or build in to your mobile device. I go into more detail about how this preview worked in a seperate Blog post:
Updates to Roblox Gift Card Denominations
Starting the week of April 24, 2023, your Roblox account will be denominated in the country in which your account is registered. For example, if your account is registered in France, your account will be denominated in Euros. If your account is outside the US, any existing credits in your account will be converted from Dollars to the equivalent value of your local currency based on current exchange rates. In addition, you will only be able to redeem a physical Roblox Gift Card to your account if the Gift Card is denominated in the same currency as your account. For example, If your account is registered in the US, you will not be able to redeem a Roblox Gift Card denominated in Euros. Digital Robux codes will continue to be redeemable globally. If you have moved and would like to change the denomination of your Roblox account to a different currency, contact Roblox support.
Audio and Voice Chat APIs
Over the next few months, you will start to see updates on multimedia on Roblox, including progress on Audio and Voice Chat APIs. In a Developer Forum post put out earlier this week, Roblox went into detail about how they are working on improvements to Spatial Voice and audio on the platform to “ensure that these next-generation APIs support user safety, perform well across all devices, and enable developers of all skill levels to create awesome sounding audio in their experiences.”
Roblox’s new Audio APIs are the first steps toward providing you with powerful new ways to control audio, including selecting audio sources, adding dynamic effects, including spatial effects and volume control, create audio visualizations, and much more.
March 2023 Key Metrics
On Monday, Roblox Corporation (NYSE: $RBLX) published certain key metrics for the month of March 2023:
- Daily active users (DAUs) were 66.2 million, up 26% year-over-year.
- Hours engaged were 4.8 billion, up 26% year-over-year.
- Estimated revenue was between $212 million and $223 million, up 15% — 21% year-over-year.
- Estimated bookings were between $247 million and $255 million, up 23% — 27% year-over-year.
- Estimated average bookings per daily active user (ABPDAU) were between $3.73 and $3.85, which represents a year-over-year change of -2% — +1%.
As announced back in the monthly metrics report for December 2022, Roblox put out the following statement regarding the future of metrics reports going forward, stating that March 2023 monthly metrics would be the last.
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Roblox Tech Talks Podcast Ep 15: Education & Verticalization
Vice President of Education Partnerships Rebecca Kantar joins CEO Dave Baszucki to talk about the future of verticalization on Roblox, with a deep dive on our education vertical. They’ll start out by discussing Rebecca’s past experience starting a company called Imbellus, then discuss our overall plans around verticalization and our vision of evolving education on Roblox to better serve students and educators. Listen on your favorite podcasting platforms.
IGN AI Week: A Chat with Roblox Chief Science Officer Morgan McGuire
As part of IGN’s AI Week, Roblox’s Chief Science Officer discussed how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is powering the future of creation on the platform.
“Where eventually I would love to be — and this is our research plan — is at the point where you can give a page-long summary of what your game is about. Somewhere between what kids on a playground would say and what a professional game designer would write as the game design document, and then give it some reference art. “Here are some photos I like. This is the vibe I want.” The stuff you have concept artists for in a normal game studio. And then given all of that, it would give you a rough draft of an interactive experience.”
You can watch the full interview on IGN’s website.
And that’s a wrap! Thanks for tuning in to this week’s Roblox Weekly. Come back here next week to see what Roblox will be up to next. To keep up to date with the latest and greatest Roblox news, follow Bloxy News on social media.
