Everything announced at Roblox RDC 2024: Party feature, Communities & Battle Royale games
RobloxThe Roblox Developers Conference (RDC) 2024 featured several major announcements regarding the platform’s future. Here’s everything announced from the Communities and Party features to support for creators making Battle Royale games.
This year’s RDC featured several tech-related announcements centered on new features coming to the platform. These included a Party system, a restructured economy, a new Creator Affiliate scheme, and much more.
As with each RDC, the 2024 edition began on September 7 with Builderman David Baszucki reflecting on the previous year and addressing the platform’s future to creators, developers, and the player community.
If you missed the big show, here’s a rundown of every important announcement Builderman and the development team made at RDC 2024.
RDC 2024: All major announcements
Roblox Groups will rebrand to Communities
Kicking off with new features Builderman announced that Roblox Groups will rebrand as Roblox Communities. Communities will continue to grow with tools such as Forums, which are dedicated spaces for people to share feedback on experiences, discuss gameplay, and report issues.
This feature will function similarly to Reddit but also allow users to communicate with one another and share their content. Experiences that feature large communities, like Blox Fruits, are preparing to try out this new tool.
Forums will also include moderation features such as deleting unwanted posts, banning bad actors, and implementing proactive moderation tools to reduce spam.
Roblox Party feature allows players to talk and play with friends
An upcoming feature Roblox Party will function similarly to parties in games like Fortnite. A host can invite their friends to a party where they can chat and play a game together in the same matchmaking server.
The Party feature will be enabled on text chat for users aged nine and up, and voice chat for users aged 13 and up and verified on the platform. In addition, developers who utilize the API can offer special customizations for Parties visiting their experiences to make their sessions even more engaging and fun.
For example, creators can place all party members on the same team with a visual treatment (red vs blue team), teleport them to the same starting location, and offer specialty merchandise for the whole party, among many other unique use cases.
Return of public songs and DistroKid integration
Roblox also announced the return of public songs and a new feature called What’s Playing. With it, users will always know what they’re listening to and be able to “like” their favorite songs. Roblox will also enable Music Charts built off of the likes feature, further enhancing the discovery of top artists, musicians, and audio.
The DistroKid integration with Roblox will allow artists to easily and safely distribute their music on Roblox via DistroKid, while also enabling creators to start finding and adding a diverse range of audio content into various experiences via Creator Store.
New Creator Affiliate program
The Creator Affiliate Program will allow eligible creators, influencers, and studios a share of platform-level spending for the new users they bring to Roblox.
To get started, creators and influencers can set up sharing links to promote experiences. If new users sign up via these links and spend on Roblox, the creator will earn up to 50% on qualified purchases by the user, including a share of Robux.
This is a pilot program, and Roblox will be accepting applications for the first version of the program starting September 6, intending to expand this to all creators in H1 of next year.
Shopify e-commerce integration
Early next year, Roblox plans to enable creators to sell physical merchandise directly from their experience using the e-commerce platform Shopify.
Creators who sell physical goods with the platform can sell products in their Roblox experience. Purchasing will start with US users 13 and older.
100-player Battle Royale experiences running on low-end devices
Builderman also announced that they aim to allow developers to host a high-performance, 100-player open-world, sports or battle royale–type game on Roblox and have it run on 2 GB RAM devices anywhere in the world at good frame rates.
To support these ongoing performance efforts, Roblox shared their new technology, Harmony, which optimizes all aspects of engine streaming on both client and server. This will include client-side balancing and optimizations of CPU, GPU, RAM, and bandwidth to ensure every person has the best experience across devices.
Builderman also announced the company is looking into a Roblox-supported architecture for server authority for competitive games.
Miscellaneous announcements
- Builderman went over the 5-year predictions he announced last year, out of which he expressed concern regarding Dating Experiences and his family using Roblox for communications.
- Roblox will add the ability to price paid access experiences in real currency on desktop and will support a higher revenue share for these experiences. An increased percentage up to 70% will go to the developer with a sliding scale across price points.
- Roblox games will allow ads for players to unlock a specific reward or item in-game.
- A new highlights feature will be added to Roblox for players to record live gameplay clips.
- Roblox announced a 3D Foundational Model that will leverage multimodal inputs to create 3D objects and in the future, scenes that can be used on Roblox and off the platform. It will be able to take text, image, video, and 3D assets as input and output objects or scenes.
That’s all the announcements from Roblox RDC 2024. If you’re looking for more Roblox content, check out our main page.