Dear ROBLOX Community –

2015 has been a transformative year for ROBLOX. Our developer community has raised the quality bar with stunningly imaginative games that are attracting more and more players. We’ve built out the ROBLOX team with many amazing hires. And our growth has accelerated over the course of the year. We hit 250,000 simultaneous players on 12/23/2015, and we are seeing over 50% growth in new players vs. last year. We are solidly profitable and are forging aggressive plans in 2016 to expand our vision of Powering Imagination™.

ROBLOX has always been about unleashing the imagination of our community. We provide millions of players with the opportunity to experience amazing things with their friends. As we plan for the future, we will continue to focus on being THE place where you and your friends can do anything you can imagine — play games, create adventures, visualize and learn, roleplay, or just hang out and have fun.

Technology has been improving storytelling and communication for over 2,000 years, but the capability to support shared experiences is relatively new on the human time scale.

Storytelling has been on a technology-fueled march forward ever since the first cave painting. Telling stories around the campfire has evolved through epic poems, books, painting, radio, television and movies. Today we are on the cusp of highly immersive storytelling experiences ranging from 3D movies to virtual reality video.

Communication has been getting easier and more transparent ever since the development of language. It has progressed through hundreds of technical innovations, including mail, the telegraph, and the telephone. The internet is the latest chapter in making communication more seamless. Video chat is here to stay, and new forms of social communication are emerging almost constantly.

Storytelling has historically been non-interactive and consumptive, and communication technology up to now has not typically supported virtual environments that simulate the experience of being together. Only recently has technology been able to robustly support collaborative experiences. We see this in social and multiplayer games, and in the new year this will be more and more prevalent in immersive platforms such as ROBLOX, where alongside your friends you can work at a pizza restaurant, create a lumber factory, star in a fashion show, or survive a hurricane – all in immersive 3D.

This ability to provide shared experiences is at the heart of ROBLOX, and this ability to allow people to imagine with their friends will drive us in 2016. For our developers and creators, this means providing the tools and platform to unleash creativity and support amazing content.

In 2016 we will make it easier to experience ROBLOX with your friends at any time, wherever you are. Our vision is to ultimately support ROBLOX on every device and platform, including phones, tablets, computers, consoles, and VR headsets. We will streamline and enhance the ways in which you find, make, and play with friends.

In 2015 we radically improved the performance, quality, and reliability of ROBLOX on phones and tablets. This has resulted in over 100% growth in player engagement on mobile. In addition, ROBLOX for Xbox has been approved by Microsoft and is slotted for release in late January. Our Xbox app really shows off the cross-platform vision of ROBLOX.  ROBLOX for Xbox has the same great games, running on the same back end, with the same great 3D client technology, but it couples this with a new and elegant interface that is completely optimized for game controllers and the living room environment.

We first played ROBLOX on virtual reality (VR) headsets two years ago as part of a hack week project. We are seeing fast improvements in VR technology from several vendors, and in 2016 we will be showing the community first looks at full immersion in a ROBLOX VR environment. And ROBLOX VR will interact with games, experiences and players across the complete ROBLOX platform.

ROBLOX games and experiences are becoming more and more immersive, and we will support and accelerate this in 2016. We’ve made enormous improvements in the look, performance, and interactivity of ROBLOX 3D environments this year. Our new smooth terrain system and physics engine are both best in class. In 2016 we will provide tools and technology to make games, experiences, and characters even more immersive, interactive, and engaging. Big things are in the works here.

Our developer community has matured, and many of our top ROBLOX developers now make a living developing on ROBLOX. In 2016 we will focus on providing developers with the tools and platform necessary to make increasingly mind-blowing experiences that transport our players in ways never before possible.

Behind the scenes we have been hard at work on many things that you might not notice. ROBLOX continues to lead the industry in both safety and large-scale moderation of user created 3D experiences. We will highlight several innovations in both community safety and communications freedom in 2016, as our player base continues to expand and become more diverse.

I want to offer heartfelt thanks to our player community, our developer community, and to all the great people who work at ROBLOX. 2015 was transformative, and 2016 is shaping up to be a great year for Powering Imagination™.

David Baszucki

CEO and Founder