Roblox RDC 2026 Roundup: Everything Announced at the 20th-Anniversary Conference
Roblox just wrapped its 12th annual Roblox Developers Conference in San Jose, and it doubled as a 20th-anniversary party for the platform. Thousands of creators turned up, and the company used the stage to lay out a big slate of changes across how you play, build and make money on Roblox. For context on the scale here: players spent 29 billion hours on Roblox last quarter alone, across more than 180 countries. Here’s everything worth knowing.
New ways to play
The headline shift is that Roblox wants to stop being a walled garden. It’s working toward letting individual games ship as standalone apps you can find and download from regular app stores, which is a huge change to how discovery works. On top of that, by the end of the year you’ll be able to join a game straight from your browser, so a shared link goes from discovery to play in one click.
Creators will also be able to combine online and offline modes in a single game, opening the door to single-player campaigns and sessions with no connection. And the engine itself is growing: Roblox is adding proper 2D support with a new orthographic camera, animated image containers and direct sprite-sheet import, so expect a wave of genuine 2D games alongside the usual 3D fare.
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New ways to build
Build, the tab that lets anyone make and publish a game just by prompting for it, is pushing its public alpha into new regions, adding Serbia and Singapore. It’s also getting more hands-on controls, including a new asset library, desktop access and iterative editing rather than one-shot generation.
Coming later this year, a Scene Generator brings prompt-to-scene creation to both Build and Studio, with the deeper controls living in Studio. Roblox is also expanding what NPCs can do by year-end, including, notably, NPCs that can playtest your game for you. That last one is quietly a big deal for solo creators.
New ways to grow
This is where Roblox is clearly courting its most serious creators. Roblox Wallet is a financial account built to scale with a creator business: you earn directly in real currency, get paid automatically every business day, move funds to other accounts or out to an external one, and get richer earnings analytics in Creator Hub. Tied to it is the Roblox Card, which lets creators spend their balance anywhere the card is accepted.
There’s more on the discovery side. The Moments tab is now fully live in New Zealand with more features on the way, and Roblox’s discovery ranking now tries to serve two crowds at once: younger players who bounce off into shorter games, and older players who come back to deeper ones over time.
The Innovation Awards, and a win for New Zealand
RDC also hosted the 2026 Roblox Innovation Awards, handing out trophies across 20 categories to the developers and studios behind the platform’s standout experiences. One result stood out to us: New Zealand studio Grandma’s Favourite Games took Best Survival Game for its hit 99 Nights in the Forest, putting Kiwi talent on a global stage. The full winners list runs across all 20 categories.
Put it all together and RDC 2026 reads like Roblox trying to grow up: standalone apps and in-browser play to escape the walled garden, real-money Wallet and Card to keep its best creators paid and loyal, and AI build tools to lower the bar for everyone else. Twenty years in, the platform’s ambition clearly isn’t slowing down.
Source: press release from Roblox. Images courtesy of Roblox.
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