Roblox, the popular kids gaming platform, is trying to find a larger pool of audience. It will launch on Sony’s PlayStation consoles in October. The platform with over 60 million players a day and is free to download is already available on PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and Xbox. The company has also said that the Meta Quest Roblox app will be “widely available” later in September (Roblox released an open beta of the Quest app in July).
Traditionally associated with kids, the company has been doing a lot of work to make it appealing to older audiences. Roblox now allows developers to make experiences that are exclusively accessible to users that are 17 and over and is introducing its own take on video chat.
Starting November, the platform of user-generated video games plans to launch an immersive video-chat option for gamers. Roblox Connect will run on any device that already runs Roblox, provided that device has a camera. It will allow you to chat with other people as your Roblox avatar, and the avatar will be able to mirror your real-life facial movements. The call will also take place in a shared virtual space that you can run around in. Face-tracking tech will be used to get facial expressions right and the Roblox app will capture the movements of 40 points on the user’s face. Roblox chief executive David Baszucki has told Wired that the platform may eventually evolve to offer photorealistic video chat in order to support business users.
The company has also announced a new conversational AI assistant at its 2023 Roblox Developers Conference. With the Roblox Assistant, creators can type in prompts to do things like generate virtual environments. The platform is also focusing on allowing users to create and sell objects, including ones made with generative AI, to Premium Roblox subscribers with verified IDs.
Roblox went public in 2021 with a market cap of $38 billion. The company’s main revenue generation stream is from the sales of Robux. When customers use the currency to buy virtual items within games, Roblox shares 30 per cent of the revenue with the game developer.
