Roblox CEO: We Want AI To Generate Full Games — With David Baszucki

David Baszucki is the CEO of Roblox. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how the company envisions generative AI playing into game creation on Roblox. Tune in to hear his vision for a future where users can prompt entire game experiences and modify them in real time using AI. We also cover child safety concerns, Hindenburg Research allegations, and whether parents should give their kids money to spend on Roblox. Hit play for an insightful conversation about the intersection of gaming, AI, and the future of creative digital experiences. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Roblox CEO Dave Bazooki joins us to talk about creating games with generative AI, safety on the platform, and whether you should give your kids money to play with on Roblox. That's coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way.

• 0:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by Roblox CEO Dave Bazooki.

• 1:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  He is the CEO of a very large app with 85 million daily active users across 190 countries. They're not all, they're not all children. 60% are over 13 years old. So we'll talk about the appeal of the platform, the safety measures the company is putting into place to keep kids safe, and whether or not it's a smart idea to give kids money when they're on. Because I know my friends, their kids, they're asking for money for Roblox, and I want to speak with Dave about whether they should give the kids that money. So mostly excited to speak about the AI stuff. We're going to go into depth about creating games with AI in the first half, and it's my pleasure to welcome Dave to the show.

• 2:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Dave, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here, and these are fun topics. So thanks for having me.

• 2:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. I am a user of Roblox. I can't say I'm an active user, but I do know that when I'm around my younger cousins or my friends' kids, I fire the app up and they show me how to play the games and it's really, it's usually a pretty good time.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Well, hey, welcome fellow Roblox user. I've been a Roblox user for 18 years going on 20.

• 2:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. And so the question is, what are games going to look like in the future? Because to this point, you have a platform where people can build games and then you could go out and play the games yourself.

• 2:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  And a lot of that is pretty painstaking, taking certain features and moving them in certain directions to enable certain actions and you could spend a lot of time building games. Building games takes a lot of time. Then this thing called generative AI happens and all of a sudden, the idea to build becomes different where maybe some people say you could just prompt a game and it will show up. Now, I don't think Roblox is there yet, but I do know that it's on the roadmap. So talk a little bit about how you envision generative AI coming into your creation process and where things stand today.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  You know, it's pretty interesting if we go back 20 or 30 years and so many of the things maybe we would imagine 20 or 30 or 40 years ago and we'd read them in sci-fi books. Some of them have started to come true. The, you know, the Dick Tracy watch has started to come true and what we had think of as the web has started to come true. And when we started the company 20 years ago, we had the notion of this 3D digital platform in the cloud. And if we gave people this 3D platform, we would see interesting stuff. To zero in on your question, I think the fun answer is

• 4:11Speaker 01

  we don't even know. And I feel that the reason we don't even know is there's a nuanced angle to AI which accelerates all of us as humans, whether we're an artist or a 3D designer or Or just someone with an idea. Um, we accelerate that it it helps us be a better creator. Ar- arguably, just like Photoshop helped people who used to paint with oil be better creators. So we're going to see a lot of human accelerator, but there's a second nuance, which is what is a game? And as we start to have, in addition to AI creation within the games themselves and within experiences,

• 4:56Speaker 01

  the ability for all of us to access AI at any point in any time. It creates almost a new opportunity where we don't know what a game is. And and where I'm going with this is in addition to AI creation, pretty soon, we're going to have 3D generation and text generation available within any Roblox game. And so what that what that means is, for example, a fashion experience like Dress to Impress, where we typically put things on and shop and put an outfit together will be someday complemented with you or I describing what kind of outfit we would like to create. And so it it's interesting to imagine that AI may accelerate creation,

• 5:41Speaker 01

  not just for game creators, but for every player of games.

• 5:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So if you want to customize your experience, maybe you can prompt your way into a character that looks exactly like you want it to look like.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And people who watch Project Runway and say, I have those ideas in my head. I just don't know how to sew them. I don't know how to cut the fabric. When they start describing those ideas with text or voice prompt, they may start to see those ideas come to fruition. That's just a really small vertical slice of why we think there there's an emergent new world of what is a game as AI starts to power some of these experiences.

• 6:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  How far is Roblox from a place where you could say, you know, imagine a world where, you know, the characters are dragons and I'm trying to do this. And these are the objectives and it should be elegant. But, you know, easy for users to play. And then it just creates the game in, you know, in and of itself.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  We're getting closer at remarkably high speed. And one of the accelerants of this, and this is true for any AI system. Is the more data that's available for training in a legal copyright, TOS compliant way, the more quickly we can build up AI power. And Roblox is unique in that we have an enormous amount of 3D data, 3D objects, 3D scenes. There's hundreds and hundreds of medieval castles, there's thousands of cars, there's thousands of dragons in all of this.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  We're using that data to create, not an LLM, but a 3D foundational model within our AI team. And we're, we've said publicly, we're going to release the first version of it this quarter. And we're going to release it in several forms. We're going to release it as a open source 3D foundational model for some people, you know, for others to use. We're going to release it in Roblox Studio, so you will be able to say, "Make me a good dragon." But we're also going to release it for creators to use within their games. So we will be testing the very first version of you and I in a Roblox experience, saying,

• 8:04Speaker 01

  "You make your dragon and I make my lion," and we, we start to see them emerge. Obviously, it's version one, but this is going to happen this quarter.

• 8:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  What about like building like, I guess, so these are elements of a game. Do you envision actually being able to prompt and play a game?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  I think this is really insightful because elements ultimately add up to the full experience. And, and the full experience of a game, especially on Roblox, is really quite rich. We have 3D objects. Unbeknownst to a lot of people, the 3D objects on Roblox actually tend to be physically pretty realistic. We run physics simulation, cars have wheels, if wheels fall off cars, the cars skid out. We have 3D terrain, we have a lot of code embedded in all of those objects. Roblox game creators embed code at the world level and the object level.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  And you're exactly right, the, the North Star is not just object creation, but full-on experience creation, to where one could imagine someone drawing a few sketches of characters, describing a few fun type of gameplay. And literally generating their own Roblox experience from that.

• 9:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can I tell you a crazy thing that I did?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was, I mean, crazy. Who knows? You be the judge. I was on Claude earlier today. I guess I was thinking about this interview. And I said, can you create me like a game where a journalist hunts for scoops? And they have to ask the characters for a scoop three times. And then at the third time, they will give you a scoop and you get a point for each scoop. And it actually builds the game. It codes up the game. And it starts out as like, it's just like a text game. So like you click on the character and then you, you know, ask three times. And then eventually like you might get the, you might get the experience built out. Then I prompted it again and I said, actually, I want this to be a town square that you walk around, where characters walk around.

• 10:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it creates it and it has like depersonalized emojis. Like the lawyer is like a law icon. And I said, no, I actually want these to like, look like people. And then it goes ahead and recodes it and now then it works. Literally took me 10 minutes. I coded it up and even gave it a name. It was called Scoop Hunter, which I didn't even prompt it with. Next thing I know, I'm going out and playing it. Now, I know that's much more basic than, than a Roblox game. But like, it does make you see the path to be able to get there. So I'm curious what you think about that and how far away you think we might be from being able to do that within Roblox.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  I don't think we're too far away. And I think what you're doing, it's fun to imagine the prompts you gave Claude to trying those same prompts in a fully immersive 3D environment ultimately over time. And I feel where you're going with that is exactly right. I like the notion of your game, Scoop Hunter. I like the idea of the. The the full physical fabric of that system is a high resolution 3D environment, a 3D environment that can run on any device, a 3D environment that can be multiplayer around the world, and that that fabric then can support that query. We're gonna need some NPCs

• 11:36Speaker 01

  powered by AI. We we might need different personalities that think about their scoops. We might need a great town square that you would stylize more as you discussed it, and that'll all come to life. So I think we're not that far away from that.

• 11:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so not that next year?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  I I won't say when, but I will say we're we're gonna ship in Q1 both text generation as well as 3D object generation in Roblox experiences. And we would philosophically agree with you that full experience generation is the highest way to think about that. A a full experience that's immersive is 3D objects, its prompts, its code, it's a it's pulling all of that together. I think where this ultimately leads to, as computers get faster and have more and more performance, is almost where you're going with that is happening in real time as you're walking around a 3D environment. And the ultimate,

• 12:43Speaker 01

  when we think about how you and I might dream, when we're in a dream, we're literally generating a 3D environment in real time that's changing very quickly as we move around that dream. And so, in a way, what you're describing about if it's done in real time and you're walking around Scoop Hunter and you say, whoa, morph into this. I want sci fi Scoop Hunter with, you know, the Supreme Council of 10,000 scoopers and it morphs into that. You could imagine all of that happening in real time.

• 13:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you're saying you want the players also to be able to prompt as they're there to change the game experience?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  I think the more we think of a game experience as available to the player, not just the traditional game creator, the more robust the technology is. And we, you know, at Roblox, Roblox Studio is a very powerful tool. All of the facilities in Roblox Studio, we want available to the game creator. AI creation, interactive modeling, 3D things. So there's really kind of a blurring between the studio tool and the creator. And what you're talking about could be done by the user in real time.

• 13:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  So just to confirm, this is your North Star. You're interested in, well, let's just say goal. This is your goal. You're interested in creating a experience where I could prompt an experience out of thin air like I did with Scoop Hunter. And then as I'm playing a game or I'm in an experience, I as the user can prompt my way through it to make it sort of shaped to the way that I want to experience the experience.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would say it's bigger than a goal. I think there's a class of technology problems that don't involve things like faster than light travel or hacking human biology that we can imagine with more compute and better algorithms are naturally going to emerge. This is one of those that I believe is just naturally going to emerge. It gives us the opportunity not just to set that as an interesting goal for those who want that type of environment, but also something that will naturally emerge. I'm not sure everyone 24/7 will be running around Roblox dynamically creating environments all the time.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Because many of us will be hanging out with our friends, going to a concert. Many of us will like to go to the creations of other people. Many of us will still like to play hide and go seek, but For those who want to use that type of experience or creation, I do think it'll become available.

• 15:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, because that's that is the thing about this, right? When you play a game, the thing about it that makes it so enjoyable is the taste and the talent of the game creator.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 15:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like, we like to play Assassin's Creed in this house. And part of the joy of Assassin's Creed is just the brilliance of the Ubisoft creators who have gone out and built that game. You could you experience it in the quests, you experience it everywhere. Now, when it comes to prompting a game,

• 16:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  it's almost like you could have a quote unquote normie try to prompt a game. But I'm not I'm not as as bullish that they'll be able to do what the greats can do and and replicate what it makes playing a game so magical.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  It reminds me a little of when I was younger, I got a Mac Plus and the Mac just came out. And the Mac had WYSIWYG Windows and fonts. And all of a sudden, everyone thought they could do text layout and typography. And we saw all these documents with thirty nine different fonts that looked like crap. And I think there's a little bit of an analogy to that where font craftsmanship and layout used to be done with movable type. It moved online to Photoshop and other tools. But still, there's craftspeople who are really good at layout.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  And I think the same is true as we move from oil painting to digital tools and photography. I think the same will stay for that Assassin's Creed game you mentioned. Like, there will be a lot of taste and a lot of art, even with AI acceleration.

• 17:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think that AI can replicate that human taste and brilliance that it takes to create a great game? Like, I was speaking with Demi, I want to let me put the context here. I was speaking with Demis Hassabis, who had his AI game player go and beat Go, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the grandmaster there. And I was talking to him about like, where do you want AI to go? And he says, I want to be able to not just play Go, but to prompt Go. And Go is obviously a game that has stood the test of time over the years. And what Demis was saying is like, I am trying to build AI that can actually go ahead and build a game as brilliant and as elegant as those that designed go eons ago. So let me put that to you.

• 18:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  I want to ask you, do you think AI can do this?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  I think there's about five really interesting threads right now. I think we're still in the early forms of AI. We're arguably AI is super good at word manipulation. And it's learning shape rotation and shape manipulation and more spatial type things and engineering things. So I think we're early there. 10,000 years from today, will AI be able to generate games and experiences that are maybe indistinguishable from humans? I could see that.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  What's interesting though is thinking through, what does that really mean for us culturally in a society between here and that next 10,000 years? Because there is a notion that we, there's an optimistic notion that we still like things built by humans in a way as well. And we sometimes like to buy that designer thing rather than that, you know, mechanical thing. So I don't know how we go from here over the next 10,000 years. I do think ultimately AI is going to get pretty smart.

• 19:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I would be, at this point, I would say I'd be surprised if the AI can prompt a brilliant game like an Assassin's Creed. In the long term, I imagine it will. So let me, let me ask you a question about how you're doing this. You're building a 3D foundational model. Everything we hear about building foundational models is it's exceptionally expensive, takes the best AI talent to really do it well. And it's only available to a few companies. Now, Roblox is not a small company. The day we're speaking, the market cap is north of $37 billion. But I want to know how you're able to do it with the resources that you have, whether

• 20:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  you're, yeah, basically whether you're able to build what you want to build and how tough this has been.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  It's super tough. We, I was in a meeting yesterday. I, I, I join our AI group very often to check in on, I would say not just our 3D foundational model, but our text gen and ultimately our experience generational model. And we should also talk about ultimately NPC models as well, because that's the, kind of the sci-fi complement to 3D experience generation is avatar generation as well. We have a really large AI team and the beauty of, it's pretty big. It's like, because thing, if you, if you look at our history, we've, we've made some acquisitions with Loom AI

• 20:58Speaker 01

  and some brilliant talent there. We've been constantly hiring and we've been building models for four years now, primarily for text and voice safety, for asset moderation. And we've gotten really good at building and running AI at Roblox. Behind the scenes, there's over 200 different models running on our system that are doing so many things at higher quality and higher performance. We, we have also gotten very good at running relatively complex models efficiently. And, and I, you know, DeepSeek's in the news. That, that's kind of, you know, rings the bell for us

• 21:39Speaker 01

  because our voice model runs very efficiently. We're able to use it to help moderate all the voice on our platform. And we've, we've even open sourced one of our voice models so other people can use this model for safety and civility. So bridging that into 3D generation, where I have a lot of experience with that. We also have an amazing amount of data and a very big data set that I mentioned is, is usable for training object, 3D object generation and started to put that together. So we're training, we have enough hardware,

• 22:22Speaker 01

  we have a great team and we're going to run this efficiently so that any creator can use it in their, in their game. So we think we're uniquely poised to generate this 3D foundational model and expand on that.

• 22:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's all proprietary?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  All proprietary.

• 22:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. And you're training on actual gameplay to be able to create more gameplay or not yet?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  So you're, this is very perceptive because we have both static information, which would be 3D objects and shapes. We have something more than static information, which is the code embedded in those objects. So cars on Roblox, we call them 4D cars, not 3D, because they have code, like how, how do you, when do you open the door? How does the user interface work on that? What are the properties of the wheels and the motors on that car? So we have that data to train on as well. How does a car actually function? As opposed to how does it look good? Then the future, though,

• 23:32Speaker 01

  once again, in a privacy compliant and IP compliant way, is we also will know more and more how people interact with objects. What's a typical way for you or I to walk through a building? How do people interact in a sword fight when they're pretending they're knights? How do people climb on cars? So that time-based information complements the static information and starts to beckon more interactive type experiences. And, and I, I would say, when I say proprietary, proprietary plus, of course, the huge open source ecosystem that's out there for tools,

• 24:15Speaker 01

  open source complementary things, but all of the 3D stuff very heavily proprietary.

• 24:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so what I'm hearing is you're training on the objects, some of the interactions, but not actual gameplay to be used to generate more gameplay, not yet.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Um, I would say not yet, and I would say, um, training on gameplay isn't necessarily something we would use to create gameplay. Uh, but training on gameplay may allow when you or I, you pick your favorite historical figure, whether it's, you know, uh, George Washington, or, you know, the founder of any country. Um, that data may allow us to make more natural avatar simulations as well. It may allow a, um, your, your, um, scoopers to act more natural, you know, like if we know what,

• 25:11Speaker 01

  how, how those various character archetypes work when they've got a scoop and they want to share it with you. So I think we'll, we'll see that ultimately drive avatar simulation as well.

• 25:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. And now David, I want to ask you, um, you're probably better positioned than most to answer this question, which is, we've been asking, uh, when can you prompt, uh, a, a blueprint, for instance, when can you prompt a design of a piece of furniture? The systems hallucinate too much right now to actually be able to do that in a useful way, at least those that I've seen, maybe someone's built one. Uh, having built this or work, being someone that's working on one of these foundational models uh, for 3D, you're somebody that understands the spatial dynamics of something, how things interact with each other in the real world. Um, do you think that this type of technology can then be applied to be able to

• 26:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  successfully, uh, be able to prompt a blueprint, uh, prompt furniture design, prompt some sort of, uh, town layout, whatever, whatever permutation of this you might imagine?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  This is really interesting because there are, there's probably hundreds of thousands of town layouts on Roblox. And there are probably, as we start to use the data of human motion through those town layouts, there's, I'm sure, a lot of embedded information. What layouts work? What layouts promote better social cohesion? What town layouts aren't very good? And the combination of those existing town layouts, plus how people interact with them, does beckon a future of, really, the interesting thought of getting useful type of layouts

• 27:04Speaker 01

  from what's traditionally thought of as a game engine that could actually be used for real-life purposes. I'll give you one example. I just saw a few days ago, we asked our 3D foundational model to generate an over-the-road 18-wheel semi-trailer. And we started constraining it a bit. We started saying, "Make it fit in this size." And these models are getting smart enough that in a smaller size, we'll generate the cab of the trailer without the trailer. And in a larger box, we'll say, "Oh, now you have enough space to generate the trailer." So I like the idea of a creator on Roblox

• 27:49Speaker 01

  who's thinking of it as a game, using our AI to build a fun game called "Build My Own House", have some AI help power it, and have it be a mix of human intuition and AI to make the house really functional. And over in AutoCAD land, or Replit land, are these beautiful 3D architectural programs. Imagining those being driven by AI physics and aesthetics, I think, you know, we're all going to be designing our own homes. Absolutely.

• 28:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Got some questions from our Discord. A lot of them about responsibility. Starting with the AI responsibility question. We have a member that says, "AI likely will soon be building its own worlds inside Roblox." Who actually takes responsibility if something goes wrong? Is it going to be the user? Is it going to be Roblox? Who's responsible if AI builds something bad?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think what we're gonna see, wonderful question. And I, I, I've, you know, we are put in a position where we, we have an amazing amount of responsibility here of a wide range of ages. We're running in different countries with different regulations and policies. And where I see this going is we need to be handled, we need to be able to handle whatever comes out of AI. And what that means is if one of our creators makes a really interesting 3D experience and they're running in a fairly untethered mode, we'll give them the guidelines on the

• 29:32Speaker 01

  type of experience, the age range, but it's our job to be watching that still. And I think it's our job to be using AI to analyze the output of what their AI built to see, is it policy compliant? And so we take that responsibility. We take the responsibility of making sure you can predict and trust the policy adherence of what is on our platform.

• 30:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so it will be Roblox's responsibility, not the creator that prompts?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  We, it, it is still the creator's responsibility. Like, we have terms of service, do not build this, we do not tolerate this, we have zero tolerance for a wide range of things, including bullying, hate, you name it. But if someone does, if someone breaks that policy, we're gonna catch it and we're gonna handle it. And so it's really both.

• 30:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so no new precedent on digital liability if someone uses your prompting tool?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't think so. No, I don't think so.

• 30:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  But if the prompting tool hallucinates some weird shit?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Uh, humans can already hallucinate weird shit.

• 30:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but anyway, when you use a prompting tool, you give up some control. But I hear what you're saying. We can and we do. All right. Let's take a break and we're going to come back and we're going to talk a little bit more about child safety, covering the Hindenburg Research Report. And then I want to talk about the metaverse and I want to talk about financial responsibility within Roblox, which is something you and I spoke about offline and I definitely want to get to. All right, we'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it and prove it's under control.

• 31:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. App Point, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to apppoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast.

• 32:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a wide-glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwell.com/bigtechnology, fill in the quick form and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are

• 32:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwell.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 33:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Roblox CEO Dave Bazooki. Dave, thank you so much for coming and speaking with us. I've been telling you, I told you right beforehand that I've been following Roblox for a very long time. I've got younger cousins, friends, kids that use it and gotten a chance to see the platform and it's a fascinating place and they do love it. So let's ask a couple of these safety questions, just my job, I have to ask you them. So don't get too mad at me, but I gotta run through some of these accusations.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  We actually like talking about this and we feel it's a wonderful area for the future to really lean in on. So we don't, if anything, we welcome the discussion.

• 33:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. That's great to hear. So let me bring up some of the points that Hindenburg Research made and toss them over to you. First, they say that Roblox has lied to investors, regulators and advertisers about the number of people on the platform, inflating a key metric by 25 to 42%.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting that Hindenburg is no longer in business. Now, I'm not going to say there's any correlation.

• 34:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. They're out of business now. Yes.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  But it is interesting they're no longer in business and on this point in particular, you know, on TV publicly on earnings call, we completely disavow the whole allegation. And the interesting thing is investors can look at the ratio of the time on Roblox to the hours on Roblox, to the bookings on Roblox, that's available for four or five years and you can watch the ratios of all of those. And when you dig into that math, it becomes very apparent that their research was completely flawed.

• 35:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, they say that there's a potential that bots can inflate the numbers and there are some games that users have said are botted out. So do you think there's a chance that bots might have been increasing those numbers?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  I would say, once again, we report daily active accounts on the platform. We are constantly, constantly patrolling for, we don't call them bots. We call them accelerated play or, you know, things that are doing weird thing. And the situation you're talking about, which no one on the platform wants, is some experiences. There can be an incentive to put in account farming type activity and resell that kind of thing. We're constantly getting better at that. We are constantly working on that. The numbers are not, are really not significant.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  And, and once again, if for, there's some interesting thing. If we, if we imagined three quarters of the accounts on Roblox were bots. Interesting, that would mean a quarter of those accounts are really making a lot of money per hour. Because the one thing that always pencils out is raw cash in our bank account. That is audited. We go through that with auditors. We can measure it. And there's no way to bot raw cash. So, yeah, we disavow the significance of bots in really distorting our numbers.

• 36:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that is the cash that Roblox players are spending within the game?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  That is real cash. Spent by, so bots don't typically spend cash. And so we, we do think, because our ratio relatively of cash intake to hours to DAUs is inspectable for four or five years. It highlights those, you know, kind of the, the reason we push so back hard on those allegations.

• 37:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, one of the things they say is that, you talked about how you track active accounts. But there could be one user with multiple accounts. And one of the things they say is that Roblox doesn't de-alter, basically bring down the number of players to individual users. It's more on the account level.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll share, this is a common practice. And it's one of the reasons why many companies report daily active accounts or daily active user accounts.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  It's because we wouldn't, we wouldn't reject, you know, you or I might have two Gmail accounts and we might use them for different things. So we, we count accounts, we count them every day and we think it's the best way to report on what's happening on our platform.

• 37:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, okay. Let's go over to child safety. Again, we'll mention Hindenburg is, is not in business, but they did say that their research revealed X-rated, that, that Roblox is an X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content, and extremely abusive speech. Now, even if it's just at, you know, a much smaller percentage than they, they talked about that would be an issue. So how do you react to that?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would, I would go even further and say we are disturbed by even one bad issue on the platform. Like, it's, it's serious stuff for us. All of our employees, many of them have kids on the platform. I have cousins on the platform right now, playing all the time. But every day, tens and tens and tens of millions of people are having an amazing experience on our platform right now. One issue is too much. We constantly are improving and getting better. We shipped over thirty safety improvements in the last year.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  We had a huge release in November around parental controls and giving parents more control. And we run every single asset, every single video, you know, every single image through AI. And then one thing people don't quite always realize is unlike most other platforms, on Roblox, there is no sharing of images. There is no posting of images. That does happen on a lot of other platforms. On Roblox, people are connecting and communicating. So we take it very seriously and it's really something we really focus on.

• 39:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. They said that they were, they registered as a child and found games like Escape to Epstein Island and Diddy Party, Six Hundred Diddy Games, including Survive Diddy and the Run From Diddy Simulator.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  I would say, I would say in pop culture. It's no excuse for us. Terms that sometimes are very welcome in five hours in our culture can all of a sudden turn into very bad terms. And I would say we're constantly experiencing, you know, accelerating the velocity of picking up things like that.

• 40:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Last thing on this, I mean, I mean, yeah, okay. Last thing on this, they say that you reported a 2% year-over-year decline in trust and safety expenses as you were pushing to profitability in the second quarter of 2024. Would seem to me like as your users increase, that would be an investment that you'd want to increase.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's interesting is they don't have access to our internal graphs that we track so carefully. And, you know, I track all the time, we track in our, our staff meeting on the quality of our safety systems, on the accuracy of our safety systems, on our vision, really to protect people of all ages, not just under 13, but 13 through 17 and even 18 and up. And all of those, all of those systems are getting so much better continuously over time. The one thing they are noticing is in many areas, we're accelerating AI.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  And in many cases, we're able to move people to more high-level roles in the company. So that, that's a, that's really an apple to oranges thing. We would push back and say, all of our systems are getting better as we move to more AI on those systems.

• 41:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, and I was, I was gonna move on, but I do want to follow up on one thing you said, which is that culturally, things can appear normal one day and the next thing you know, like allegations come out and they're different. But something like Escape to Epstein Island or like Survive Diddy, like there's no way that they were fine at one moment and then not in the other.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  I would say in, in those areas where we have historically put an enormous focus on the actual 3D content, we are more and more incorporating the 3D experience as well as the description of the experience in a holistic way. And so we're always improving that.

• 42:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  What does that mean?

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Well, I think what you're saying, what I'm saying is the 3D experience itself, which we've been very, very careful of in what you can actually do in that. You're, I'm agreeing with you, the title of experience can also matter and needs to be more responsive to cultural events.

• 42:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, okay, all right. So I actually want to speak with you about something concrete that also came up in our Discord, which is that Apple recently said it's gonna let parents share the kids' ages to limit app access. I'm very curious, like, what you think about this move? Do you support it? And yeah, the question is, that we got here is, should that be expanded to more operating system, more operating systems and codified into law? So I want to put that to you.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  This is really a good one, and we've, we've taken the posture that we can't wait for mobile providers or OS, and we have to be fully capable of doing it on our own, whether it's in age estimation, how we filter all text, how we filter all voice, all of that. As these systems come to play and as we get a more reliable signal maybe from a mobile phone, we of course will use, to the degree we can trust that signal, as part of how we build our safety systems, but I would say we can't, we can't be waiting for that, and we have taken the posture, we can't wait for that.

• 44:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  But do you think other operating systems should follow Apple's lead here? Basically, it's apparent in putting the age of a child sort of to make sure that an app has that information and can gate content appropriately.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  I feel if we could see on a mobile phone or some other device that a person we can really trust as a parent has really said that as an eight-year-old, we would use that signal and that signal would be helpful to us. But as far as whether between operating systems and our legislature, that's going to be a forced issue or voluntary issue. We're kind of building irrespective of it.

• 44:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. All right. I want to wrap up talking about one of my favorite conversations here that I have with my friends. Because they have, they're kids. I don't have kids yet. Oh, please, someday we will. And we're going to run into this issue, I'm sure, because they're going to be on their phones and iPads without a doubt as kids of a tech reporter. This is, it comes with the territory.

• 45:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  They, they beg the parents for money to spend on Roblox. And my friends are like, what do I do here? Do I give my daughter money to spend on the internet? And, you know, buy a dress on Roblox? Or do I like not give them that money or give them a physical dollar? And not allow them to spend it online? So I'm very curious to put that question to you, CEO of Roblox. What would your response be?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Well, first off, I remember when I was in kindergarten and I got 10 or 15 cents to go buy a comic book. And that was my allowance. And every week I took that 15 cents and I walked down to this store and bought a comic book and built some financial literacy. So that would be point number one. Point number two, the vast majority of people on Roblox are not using any money. And part of the reason we've, we've grown is we've always viewed the platform as a free utility that brings people together with optimism and civility, no matter where they are in the world and supports them. And we, we behind the scenes,

• 46:24Speaker 01

  when we're discussing things like search and discovery and what are our algorithms? And all of that stuff that's a lot in the news. Behind the scenes, we are generally optimizing user joy, user retention, connection, rather than money. And I think that's that that's actually contributed to our growth is we put that first and foremost. That said, yes, we do, we build the company on the small percentage of people on our platform who use virtual currency, and that's going to be supplemented with other forms of monetization. And we're very appreciative of that because it allows us to build this platform and and keep moving.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  When it comes to kids, I do feel it's 100% a parental choice. I would, I would never recommend to a parent, oh, you should spend money on Roblox. I would recommend to a parent to think through their situation, their family, financial literacy. And I would say the Roblox angle is, I think, more and more young people, as they build financial literacy, may balance physical world, financial with digital world, like, we already do that, right? We have subscriptions and we have online things with physical things. And so I do think as if for those parents who are interested in financial literacy, this could be a kind of a compliment to that.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  There's another thing about it in that there, in a way, there are situations in Roblox where young people might be able to spend virtual currency in ways that we would, you know, buying a ticket for an airplane or something that in a little bit of a way is a simulator of things to see later in life. So, you know, I would leave it to parents, but I think it's it's getting to be an interesting mix.

• 48:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, my advice to my friend is do it. Give them money. It doesn't have to be a lot. It'd be maybe a couple bucks a week or a month. And it is an amazing educational tool, I think, because it shows the kid you have a budget. You immediately have a budget if it's a dollar or two. And, OK, like, is what they're buying the most valuable stuff in the world? Like a new shirt or a ski hat on their avatar? I don't know what you'll say, I'll say no, but I think that like they're gonna eventually end up in the real world and they're gonna have, you know, a thousand dollars in their bank account and they're gonna have to learn how to allocate that and then hopefully more. And I, I think that early budgeting is really helpful. I'm gonna, I would definitely do it.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  It's an interesting thing that someone will probably write a research study on is it better for kids to give one lump of virtual currency every month or to give a little bit of virtual currency every day? The once a month may have more educational financial literacy literacy impact than the once a day thing.

• 49:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, like you, here's your budget. Um, you want to spend it? Go ahead, but you're not getting any more until, you know, the next quote unquote paycheck. I mean, maybe they have to work for it. Maybe do some chores and you'll get $2 in your Roblox account and you spend that on the hat or the skateboard. I don't know. David, I gotta tell you, my avatar is ugly. I mean, I'm embarrassed to be walking around with mine. Uh, but I do think that like, yeah, it, it's this thing where you learn work translates to money. Money is finite, right? And this is what it does.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  If only all parents could copy your speech right there. This is your allowance. You're not getting any more. I thought that that was a good model for every parent in the world.

• 50:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great. Uh, and so let's just close with this. Um, CEO of Roblox, uh, you're, you have 85 million users. Um, what do the next five years look like for you if things go really well?

• 50:29Speaker 01

  I'm super optimistic. Like the, like we've said, we believe 10% of the world's gaming market can run on Roblox. That's our target. We think it's gonna usher in a lot of optimism, a lot of human connection around the world, um, allowing more people to learn and create. And I do think also an opportunity to usher in the use of 3D AI in a really safe and civil way. So I've never been more optimistic.

• 51:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, David, look, thank you so much for spending the time talking with me. I learned a ton about where generative AI is going. We talk so much about text generation, voice generation, 3D generation, game generation, a model that understands the world to me is the next frontier, and you're living that. So that's, that's quite cool. Maybe we get Scoop Hunter on the platform one day. I don't know.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  I want to play Scoop Hunter.

• 51:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'll send you. It's live as a cloud artifact right now. And, and yeah, definitely. Thank you for taking some of the tougher questions and for showing us where the platform is going. So great speaking with you and really hope to have you back sometime soon.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Thank you, Alex.

• 51:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Awesome, David. Thank you so much. Thank you to the Roblox team for putting David on the show with me. And Ranjan and I will be back on Friday to break down the week's news. So we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  In this life, you can't win.

• 52:22Speaker 04

  When the world gets you down.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  No!

• 52:24Speaker 04

  Escape to Pluto TV.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Schwing!

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Even our news is uplifting.

• 52:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Ex-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  We're not worthy!

• 52:42Speaker 04

  The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.