Someday soon you too may be able to make digital games for desktop and mobile, just by speaking to an AI engine: no coding experience required.
“I think we’ll get to the point where in the future you could, if you wanted, make a game entirely with voice. So by talking to the system, working with it over the course of an hour,” Morgan McGuire, chief scientist at Roblox, said in a recent TechFirst podcast. “And it’s just up-leveling what you’re doing. Instead of typing every single thing using your mouse, we can have AI take your intent and produce it for you.”
Roblox is so successful, it might be the biggest gaming entity on the planet. The social gaming platform currently has over 300 million monthly players and 80 million daily average players. That’s twice what game hub Steam gets, and three times Playstation’s numbers. It’s also five times what the super-popular Minecraft has achieved. People spend six billion hours a month on Roblox, more than double the time spent on the streaming platform Disney+.
“It’s likely Roblox has more monthly users than the entire AAA gaming ecosystem combined,” says venture capitalist Matthew Ball.
But all that success requires more … everything. More safety and moderation controls, because Roblox has a large youth user base. More development of games and experiences on the platform, because all those users need new things to see and do and play. More cross-cultural communication capability, because so many of these new players are from outside Roblox’ traditional strongholds of the U.S. and Canada. More ability to make better and better images and objects that players can use in their gameplay.
There’s no really good answer for all that more without AI. Moderation, translation, development: all are not scalable economically as Roblox continues to grow. So Roblox is on a mission to use AI to transform what it means to make and play games.
Take moderation. With so many kids on the platform, safety and moderation really matter. But Roblox has real-time voice and chat communications in 45 different languages—50,000 text messages a second—which you just can’t monitor in any realistic world with human moderators. Plus, a platform full of kids and young people attracts the wrong kind of attention. In 2023 alone, Roblox reported 13,316 instances of child exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, says Bloomberg.
Which means it’s critical that Roblox AI gets moderation right. Roblox now uses AI to monitor 100% of real-time voice and chat communications on-platform in each of those 45 languages while being sensitive to nuance and context.
McGuire says the result is now better than humans could achieve.
“We deploy when we hit superhuman levels,” he told me. “So we don’t deploy when we see 80% of human [performance], but there’s a cost savings. We actually target saying, is this the best way to do it? And when it is, we’ll switch over.”
That AI moderation has saved the company millions of dollars so far in 2024, according to a recent shareholder letter, and promises to save much more as the company grows.
“In Q2 2024, certain infrastructure and trust & safety expenses were 8% lower than they were in Q2 2023 due to internal efficiency initiatives, the shift to AI-driven moderation which increased the accuracy of our safety and civility systems, and optimizing infrastructure,” the company says.
AI is also critical for game development, mostly because Roblox doesn’t do any of it.
“The content is why people are there, right?” says McGuire. “That amazing content, Roblox produces zero of it. So part of our community, and hopefully someday 100% of our community, creates content. It’s a user -generated content platform.”
That content, bubbling up in five million “experiences” or environments/games that Roblox players use every single day, is generally 3D content, which can be challenging, even in Roblox’ game creation tool, Studio.
“They’re the easiest 3D generation tools to learn, but it’s still 3D generation,” he says. “You still have to know a lot about 3D modeling, about programming. It doesn’t matter that we have the friendliest programming language on earth. It’s still programming, right?”
So while the ultimate goal might be prompting game development and game environments and game tools and accessories just with voice, Roblox is starting by helping Roblox players build tools and avatars with conversational AI, making components of games faster, easier, and better.
Another area the company is working on: AI for communication. With people from hundreds of countries speaking 45 main languages, real-time voice translation is a holy grail for community building.
And for what Roblox calls “voice fonts.”
“Ultimately, we want to do voice translation so you can speak to people in different languages, McGuire says. “We want to ultimately do voice fonts … so basically voice role-playing kind of transitions. So I’m speaking in my voice, but you’re hearing a dragon. So it fits my character, right?”
And, eventually prompting entirely new game experiences with our voices just as simply as today we use generative AI to prompt an image or get an answer from ChatGPT.
That would unleash huge quantities of human creativity. And huge quantities of new games and experiences.
“A million people are making new ideas on Roblox every day,” says McGuire. “And if one of them is a winner, then it’s great for all of us. We all get to experience that new thing.”
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