Upcoming RDC events aimed to educate and assist the Roblox community.
The Roblox Developers Conference (RDC) is an annual event organized by Roblox, which brings developers from all around the world together in Northern California. An invite-only conference that's not open to the general public, the 2-day gathering is full of keynote addresses from Roblox senior leadership, community panels, networking opportunities and even an awards ceremony.
Although geared primarily towards experience developers, RDC attracts various other groups from across the Roblox ecosystem, including UGC avatar item designers, YouTube and TikTok influencers and brand representatives actively building on the platform.
Let's take a look at some of the conference programming and unpack why these topics are important for Roblox developers.
Scale Your Business on Roblox
Description: Learn about the growing ways to scale your business on Roblox. Join this session to learn more about driving discovery of your experience with ads and earning from subscriptions within experiences, optimizing your prices and publishing ads.
At last year's 2023 RDC, Roblox was touting its immersive ad offering, specifically its portal ads. These ads transport players from one experience to another, sending traffic to the experience of the entity who is paying for the ads.
However, in Roblox's last investor quarterly earnings call, CEO Dave Baszucki mentioned that native developers were using Sponsored ads effectively to grow their games. It will be interesting to see if Roblox continues to move away from promoting portals and leans more into Sponsored Ads, which have been well-established on the platform for years.
Create & Ship Faster with AI and Collaboration Tools
Description: Get real-life examples of how to use Roblox generative AI tools to prototype and accelerate creation. Collaborate more effectively by integrating better with third-party tools and automating testing.
Generative AI was part of several keynote addresses at last year's RDC. This year's installment has a standalone session about building faster with AI. By helping its creators build and ship experiences faster, Roblox is promoting the creation of more content on the platform. More content can attract and retain more players, which is key to the company's future growth.
Monetization for Avatar Creators
Description: Learn how to find more ways to earn as an avatar content creator. Join this session to discover more about creating, publishing, and earning from avatar items and the Marketplace. Then hear directly from experienced creators who are using their creations and Marketplace to engage their community and scale their businesses.
UGC avatar items are a big part of the Roblox economy, account for 1/3 of all economic activity. And free UGC items are a big part of most branded experiences' marketing plans because they are so effective at driving traffic. It will be interesting to see what Roblox discusses in terms of helping UGC creators scale their businesses. With more and more items coming onto the Roblox marketplace, breaking through has become harder and harder.
Building for International Markets
Description: Learn about the international opportunity on Roblox, including the fastest growing markets and how to optimize for international markets. Then, hear directly from a panel of experienced developers who have successfully built for international markets.
Roblox is a global platform with huge reach across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. By being able to have your experience resonate effectively around the world, you're opening yourself up to greater exposure and potential monetization. It will be interesting to hear from Roblox about what they're fastest growing markets are and how best to serve them.
Finding Success with Your LiveOps Strategy
Description: Join us to learn directly from a developer team on how they plan a liveops roadmap to keep their players happy and metrics healthy with frequent and exciting updates. They will walk you through how to design and cost liveops features, divide tasks among their team members and delivery quality updates on a planned release schedule.
Many brands launch custom built experiences on Roblox, but many of those are temporary. They last for a few weeks or a few months and then go away. But some experiences such as Walmart Discovered are more permanent and include regular content updates to keep players interested in coming back. The more brands start developing for longer period of time, the more having a LiveOps strategy will become important to their success.
Using Analytics to Grow and Improve Your Experience
Description: Learn how to measure and optimize your in-experience economy and user funnels with Creator Analytics. Hear best practices from creators on using insights to grow and improve experiences.
Analytics are a key part of driving success on the platform. Many experiences don't become a success overnight, but instead the developers take time making data-informed improvements. It's interesting that this description highlights optimizing in-experience economy. This highlights how important monetization is on Roblox. The more effective your experience is at converting players into payers, the better chances it has at getting picked up organically by the Roblox algorithm for greater promotion.
The Power of Social: Unlock More Engagement in Your Experiences
Description: Join us as we provide an update on the future of immersive communication and connection, including a deep dive into our suite of social products and its impact on users. Additionally, we will discuss new group communication and sharing features, our continued improvements to spatial voice chat, and the latest APIs (audio, voice chat, captures). Learn how optimizing for social features within your experience can lead to more meaningful connections and in turn drive user engagement.
This last event is one I'm particularly excited about. There's over 275 million views of Roblox related content on YouTube watched every single day. When you add in TikTok, the number surely gets much larger. As individuals and brands look to get their experiences in front of more players, social media will continue to gain importance. So working with creators and even creating original video content for social on their own will be an interesting way for developers to stand out in the future.
If you're headed to RDC and want to meet up, send me a message on LinkedIn or drop me an email.
Stephen Dypiangco is a consultant that helps brands reach new audiences via Roblox.
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