• For the first time, Roblox is making it easier for anyone to create in Marketplace.
• Marketplace is a powerful place for creators and brands to connect with their audience.
• We’re expanding Marketplace to be more personal and to foster more self-expression.
• We’re developing new tools and systems to ensure that Marketplace is safe and that creators’ and brands’ IP is protected. 

At Roblox, we’re building an immersive platform for connection and communication where 71.5 million users* come every day to entertain themselves, hang out with friends, and have fun. 

Nearly everything users discover on Roblox is made by our global community of creators. And our job is to help creators make the experiences, avatars, clothing, and accessories our users will enjoy.

Since 2019 we’ve allowed, through application only, a small and growing number of people to create 3D virtual items in Marketplace, one of the key destinations on Roblox for users to shop and express themselves through their avatars. 

Today, we’re making it easier for anyone to create in Marketplace. This will be a powerful step forward for creators and brands to market a diverse collection of avatars, clothing, and accessories, and to connect with their audience.  

One of the biggest benefits of this is the surge of great new content that we expect will soon be available there. Millions of users already visit Marketplace every day, and in December, 2023, nearly 71 percent of them spent time editing their avatar. And people have bought billions of items there, including nearly 1.6 billion digital fashion items during the first nine months of 2023. Brands are also getting in on the action: in 2023, our brand partners sold about 27 million items on Roblox.

A great example is adidas. The brand has collaborated with Roblox creators like Rush_X and CoffeeNerdz on a diverse catalog of hundreds of items, including rare, sold-out Limiteds like its Neckpiece. adidas is bringing its iconic sport and lifestyle product to Roblox and plans to experiment with a shopping experience where users can create their own adidas virtual items and outfits.

In Marketplace, some creators have found success by diversifying the variety of things people can buy. A great example is Lirn, an original Marketplace creator, who wanted to fill a gap in gaming for authentic Black hairstyles. A self-taught creator, she’s collaborated with brands like Gucci, and created items like her HeadScarf, Bantu Knots, Pigtails Locs, Box Braids, and others. Roblox users have bought millions of her items. 

By opening up creation on our platform, we’re now able to welcome more creators like Lirn. Moving forward, here are the three areas we’re focusing on to achieve this:

• Making creation easier for anyone
• Evolving Marketplace to foster more self-expression
• Laying the foundations of a healthy Marketplace 

Making Creation Easier for Anyone

Making it easier for anyone to create and sell 3D virtual items in Marketplace and/or in experiences is just the start. We’re also working to inspire professional creators to build successful businesses on our platform by developing new ways to make creation on Roblox easier, regardless of their experience level. 

For example, our new Avatar Auto Setup tool leverages AI to quickly and automatically convert 3D models into avatars people can use on Roblox right away. Using this tool, which is launching broadly in the coming month, can reduce the time it takes to create an avatar from days to minutes.

And soon, we’ll offer templates allowing creators and brands to build customizable shopping experiences dedicated to the buying and selling of avatar items. For example, Dress to Impress is a space that celebrates diversity and inclusivity, and where users can dress up as themselves and then walk a runway or vote on others’ looks. 

There’s a growing number of experiences like this, and we’ll begin by surfacing them in Marketplace, which will help connect the creators and brands who make them with the broader audience there.

Evolving Marketplace to Foster More Self-Expression

We want Marketplace to be a more inspiring, personalized, and social shopping experience than ever before. In the coming year, we’ll expand what’s available there beyond individual items and focus on developing an avatar-first shopping experience. This will create more personalized and diverse content and unlock social shopping. It will also provide new ways for creators and brands to share their collections and connect with their audience.

Avatar-first shopping experience

Since its inception, Marketplace has been dedicated to selling individual avatar items. Now, the Marketplace shopping experience is evolving. Users will be able to find inspiration from styled avatars and outfits and buy an entire outfit’s items, or just some of it. Shopping in Marketplace will soon be similar to the physical world. When users look for a specific item, they’ll be able to see how everything they discover would look in their existing wardrobe or what they might wear it with. 

That’s important because we know that when users shop in Marketplace, they want to complete their avatar’s look with multiple items. In fact, users buy more than one item 60% of the time.

In addition, Roblox users can search for outfits. That means creators and brands can express their full creative vision by selling entire looks and avatars rather than just single items. And creators will be able to collaborate and sell outfits made of items by different people.

More Personalized and Diverse Avatar Content

We know that many people on Roblox want to express their individual personalities and identities. To do that, shopping needs to be personalized and it should be easy to move between discovery and avatar customization. That’s why we’re developing new tools that make all that possible. 

For example, AI has become a crucial technology across our entire platform, powering things like creation and safety. Soon, it will provide individual shoppers with diverse and personalized items rather than showing everyone the same list. Someone might see collections or outfits from creators or brands that fit their style or outfits that are popular with their friends. They might also see trending shopping experiences, or seasonal collections (like for Halloween or Christmas).

A More Social Marketplace Will Unlock Users’ Creativity

Digital fashion is increasingly a source of inspiration, and we believe the next wave of fashion designers will emerge on our platform. We want to support their efforts, and we’re proud to see digital designs created on Roblox recreated in the physical world. For example, at RDC 2023, we showcased physical replicas of two Parsons School of Design students’ Roblox creations. 

Going forward, we’ll make it easier for users to discover and follow new creators and brands and always stay up to date on their latest offerings. In turn, creators and brands will have new ways to connect with their audience and showcase their creations.

Many people see their avatars as intrinsically social — a way to connect with friends. We want to help them share their newest avatar outfits. Many users and creators are already doing that by posting screenshots or videos on external social or messaging platforms.

WhoseTrade, who created 20 items which sold more than 100,000 times (and dozens more with at least 50,000 sales), is an exceptional example. He collaborated with the electronic music brand Monstercat on a rare Limited that sold for 1 million Robux, as well as with Nivea. Like others, he’s significantly grown his social channels by posting his creations.

Soon, users will be able to share their latest avatar creations or newly-purchased items on Roblox. We think this will unlock more creativity for many users. It will also help them become curators and influencers while boosting creators’ exposure.

Laying the Foundations of A Healthy Marketplace

We’ve developed new methods to help creators and brands find success. Those include tools to defend their IP, maximize their earning potential, and simplify managing competitive pricing. 

Protecting Creativity

We recently launched Rights Manager, which helps creators, developers, and brands manage their content and IP on Roblox, and increases transparency around filing removal requests. 

We’ve also introduced a publishing advance system that inspires creators to focus on their highest-potential creations rather than generic items that distract buyers. 

At the same time, to ensure accountability and deter bad actors, creators wanting to build on Roblox must verify their identity through our ID verification process. This allows us to enforce our Marketplace policies and deter violators from returning to the platform.

An Economy Responsive to Supply and Demand

Our virtual economy should reflect market conditions, so we’re implementing a new system to ensure prices on Marketplace respond to supply and demand.

Previously, some creators had a difficult time knowing how to price their items and when such prices should be increased or reduced in response to fluctuating market demands.  Guessing at how to price items does not benefit creators or buyers.  

Our new system can help support smarter pricing to better reflect market conditions by automatically setting the lowest price in an item category based on demand. We also give creators controls that let them set rules for how much to charge for their items relative to these dynamic prices. We’re confident this will help make sure creators can earn a fair return while giving consumers more access to items at fair market prices.

Diverse Ways of Expression

We know that the Roblox ecosystem is richer and stronger when we enable varied and diverse ways for people to create and express themselves. We’re excited to build tools and systems that expand our creator community while giving people more opportunity to buy things they’ll love.

____________________________________________________________________________

* As of Q4 2023

** Rendering shown for illustrative purposes only. Actual features and other visual depictions may vary and are subject to change at any time.

 

 

 

 

The post Making Creation and Expression Easier for Anyone In Marketplace appeared first on Roblox Blog.

At Roblox, our vision is to reimagine how people come together to play, work, and connect. We are building an immersive platform for communication and connection where 71.5 million users* in 190 countries spend 2.4 hours playing games and sharing experiences every day.

We want to empower any developer or creator to make anything anywhere on our platform, and at this week’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, we showcased many of the ways we help people create, scale, and monetize.

We unveiled two new AI tools that can significantly speed up creating on Roblox. In addition, we announced the evolution of our Creator Fund (previously known as Game Fund). As before, it focuses on funding next-level experiences with innovative gameplay, ambitious visual designs, and original ideas. And we’re also excited to expand the types of content in the program. That means we’ll be bringing beloved off-platform IP to Roblox, including Paramount’s iconic Avatar: The Last Airbender, as well as content beyond games, like Neura Studios’ brand-new release, Clip It.

Roblox and members of our creator community also hosted sessions on topics ranging from doing business on Roblox to generative AI to the differences between free-to-play mobile creation and creating on Roblox. We want to thank the Roblox creators who shared their expertise onstage: @badcc, @Andybloxstar, @Erythia​, @Coffeenerd​, @CDDevelopment, @EncodedLua, @Toya_Studio, and more.

Here’s a deeper look at everything we presented this week that we’re confident will help enable more creators than ever to achieve their goals on Roblox. 

Create

One of the most important things we do for Roblox creators is develop tools and technologies that make creating 3D content easier and faster. So this week at GDC, we announced two new AI tools — Avatar Auto Setup and Texture Generator — that do just that.

With Avatar Auto Setup, it will be simpler than ever to create an avatar by quickly and automatically converting a 3D model into a fully animated avatar that people can use right away. This industry-leading tool also provides the ability to add facial animation to avatars and can cut the time it takes to set up an avatar from days to minutes.

With Texture Generator, creators will be able to use text prompts to quickly change and customize how 3D objects look. The textures the tool produces automatically conform to the shape of objects, significantly reducing the work required to bring an object to life.

These are the latest examples of tools that can help creators proceed faster from an idea to reality in Roblox Studio. This free, advanced 3D development software makes it simple for almost anyone to create anything they can imagine on Roblox. Built on our platform’s multiplayer, real-world simulation engine, it provides creators with out-of-the-box access to advanced physics, our growing suite of innovative AI solutions, aerodynamics, and so much more.

Scale

At GDC, we delved into how creators on Roblox do best when they have access to transparent data showing how their experiences are performing and where there’s room to grow. We’ve been building out our robust analytics suite, which gives creators actionable performance insights, allowing them to adjust their content strategies to reflect how their experiences are doing. And they can rapidly iterate based on those insights by publishing updates in seconds, anytime they want, to mobile, desktop, console, and VR simultaneously.

We also explored our principles and plans for Discovery on Roblox, which helps connect creators with their ideal audiences and encourages them to continue improving their creations. At scale, that provides a greater diversity of terrific content for our users, connecting them with the creations and communities that best match their interests. 

Roblox features an algorithm that continuously refreshes the creations and updates users see. It’s part of a healthy discovery system built on network effects, engagement, and monetization that allows creators to maximize their reach with our global audience.

One great example is Gunflight Studio’s Gunfight Arena, which Roblox users have visited more than 228 million times since it launched last October. The team iterated on it quickly, and was able to frequently test its changes to achieve their business goals and to improve its discoverability. And by optimizing for performance, they made Gunfight Arena the most popular first-person shooter on Roblox. 

Monetize

Creators of all sizes, from individuals to large studios, are demonstrating the many ways anyone can create and monetize their work on Roblox. In 2023, our more than 25 million creators collectively earned $741 million, up 19 percent year over year, and we’re always looking to give them more opportunities to succeed. When they do, our entire ecosystem does too. So our goal is to empower all creators with a wide range of ways to earn money on Roblox, including in-experience purchases, immersive ads, and selling avatar items or creator plugins. 

We want to thank everyone who came out to see us at GDC. To learn more about what Roblox offers creators, please visit our Creator Hub page. We’re excited to see how our creator community grows and thrives in the months and years to come.

 

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* As of Q4 2023.

 

The post How Roblox Helps Developers Create, Scale, and Monetize appeared first on Roblox Blog.

With the 2018 launch of RTX technologies and the first consumer GPU built for AI — GeForce RTX — NVIDIA accelerated the shift to AI computing. Since then, AI on RTX PCs and workstations has grown into a thriving ecosystem with more than 100 million users and 500 AI applications.

Generative AI is now ushering in a new wave of capabilities from PC to cloud. And NVIDIA’s rich history and expertise in AI is helping ensure all users have the performance to handle a wide range of AI features.

Users at home and in the office are already taking advantage of AI on RTX with productivity- and entertainment-enhancing software. Gamers feel the benefits of AI on GeForce RTX GPUs with higher frame rates at stunning resolutions in their favorite titles. Creators can focus on creativity, instead of watching spinning wheels or repeating mundane tasks. And developers can streamline workflows using generative AI for prototyping and to automate debugging.

The field of AI is moving fast. As research advances, AI will tackle more complex tasks. And the demanding performance needs will be handled by RTX.

What Is AI?

In its most fundamental form, artificial intelligence is a smarter type of computing. It’s the capability of a computer program or a machine to think, learn and take actions without being explicitly coded with commands to do so, or a user having to control each command.

AI can be thought of as the ability for a device to perform tasks autonomously, by ingesting and analyzing enormous amounts of data, then recognizing patterns in that data — often referred to as being “trained.”

AI development is always oriented around developing systems that perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence, and often significant levels of input, to complete — only at speeds beyond any individual’s or group’s capabilities. For this reason, AI is broadly seen as both disruptive and highly transformational.

A key benefit of AI systems is the ability to learn from experiences or patterns inside data, adjusting conclusions on their own when fed new inputs or data. This self-learning allows AI systems to accomplish a stunning variety of tasks, including image recognition, speech recognition, language translation, medical diagnostics, car navigation, image and video enhancement, and hundreds of other use cases.

The next step in the evolution of AI is content generation — referred to as generative AI. It enables users to quickly create new content, and iterate on it, based on a variety of inputs, which can include text, images, sounds, animation, 3D models or other types of data. It then generates new content in the same or a new form.

Popular language applications, like the cloud-based ChatGPT, allow users to generate long-form copy based on a short text request. Image generators like Stable Diffusion turn descriptive text inputs into the desired image. New applications are turning text into video and 2D images into 3D renderings.

GeForce RTX AI PCs and NVIDIA RTX Workstations

AI PCs are computers with dedicated hardware designed to help AI run faster. It’s the difference between sitting around waiting for a 3D image to load, and seeing it update instantaneously with an AI denoiser.

On RTX GPUs, these specialized AI accelerators are called Tensor Cores. And they dramatically speed up AI performance across the most demanding applications for work and play.

One way that AI performance is measured is in teraops, or trillion operations per second (TOPS). Similar to an engine’s horsepower rating, TOPS can give users a sense of a PC’s AI performance with a single metric. The current generation of GeForce RTX GPUs offers performance options that range from roughly 200 AI TOPS all the way to over 1,300 TOPS, with many options across laptops and desktops in between. Professionals get even higher AI performance with the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU.

To put this in perspective, the current generation of AI PCs without GPUs range from 10 to 45 TOPS.

More and more types of AI applications will require the benefits of having a PC capable of performing certain AI tasks locally — meaning on the device rather than running in the cloud. Benefits of running on an AI PC include that computing is always available, even without an internet connection; systems offer low latency for high responsiveness; and increased privacy so that users don’t have to upload sensitive materials to an online database before it becomes usable by an AI.

AI for Everyone

RTX GPUs bring more than just performance. They introduce capabilities only possible with RTX technology. Many of these AI features are accessible — and impactful — to millions, regardless of the individual’s skill level.

From AI upscaling to improved video conferencing to intelligent, personalizable chatbots, there are tools to benefit all types of users.

RTX Video uses AI to upscale streaming video and display it in HDR. Bringing lower-resolution video in standard dynamic range to vivid, up to 4K high-resolution high dynamic range. RTX users can enjoy the feature with one-time, one-click enablement on nearly any video streamed in a Chrome or Edge browser.

NVIDIA Broadcast, a free app for RTX users with a straightforward user interface, has a host of AI features that improve video conferencing and livestreaming. It removes unwanted background sounds like clicky keyboards, vacuum cleaners and screaming children with Noise and Echo Removal. It can replace or blur backgrounds with better edge detection using Virtual Background. It smooths low-quality camera images with Video Noise Removal. And it can stay centered on the screen with eyes looking at the camera no matter where the user moves, using Auto Frame and Eye Contact.

Chat with RTX is a local, personalized AI chatbot demo that’s easy to use and free to download.

Users can easily connect local files on a PC to a supported large language model simply by dropping files into a single folder and pointing the demo to the location. It enables queries for quick, contextually relevant answers.

Since Chat with RTX runs locally on Windows with GeForce RTX PCs and NVIDIA RTX workstations, results are fast — and the user’s data stays on the device. Rather than relying on cloud-based services, Chat with RTX lets users process sensitive data on a local PC without the need to share it with a third party or have an internet connection.

AI for Gamers

Over the past six years, game performance has seen the greatest leaps with AI acceleration. Gamers have been turning NVIDIA DLSS on since 2019, boosting frame rates and improving image quality. It’s a technique that uses AI to generate pixels in video games automatically. With ongoing improvements, it now increases frame rates by up to 4x.

And with the introduction of Ray Reconstruction in the latest version, DLSS 3.5, visual quality is further enhanced in some of the world’s top titles, setting a new standard for visually richer and more immersive gameplay.

There are now over 500 games and applications that have revolutionized the ways people play and create with ray tracing, DLSS and AI-powered technologies.

Beyond frames, AI is set to improve the way gamers interact with characters and remaster classic games.

NVIDIA ACE microservices — including generative AI-powered speech and animation models — are enabling developers to add intelligent, dynamic digital avatars to games. Demonstrated at CES, ACE won multiple awards for its ability to bring game characters to life as a glimpse into the future of PC gaming.

NVIDIA RTX Remix, a platform for modders to create stunning RTX remasters of classic games, delivers generative AI tools that can transform basic textures from classic games into modern, 4K-resolution, physically based rendering materials. Several projects have already been released or are in the works, including Half-Life 2 RTX and Portal with RTX.

AI for Creators

AI is unlocking creative potential by reducing or automating tedious tasks, freeing up time for pure creativity. These features run fastest or solely on PCs with NVIDIA RTX or GeForce RTX GPUs.

Adobe Premiere Pro’s Enhance Speech tool is accelerated by RTX, using AI to remove unwanted noise and improve the quality of dialogue clips so they sound professionally recorded. It’s up to 4.5x faster on RTX vs. Mac. Another Premiere feature, Auto Reframe, uses GPU acceleration to identify and track the most relevant elements in a video and intelligently reframes video content for different aspect ratios.

Another time-saving AI feature for video editors is DaVinci Resolve’s Magic Mask. Previously, if editors needed to adjust the color/brightness of a subject in one shot or remove an unwanted object, they’d have to use a combination of rotoscoping techniques or basic power windows and masks to isolate the subject from the background.

Magic Mask has completely changed that workflow. With it, simply draw a line over the subject and the AI will process for a moment before revealing the selection. And GeForce RTX laptops can run the feature 2.5x faster than the fastest non-RTX laptops.

This is just a sample of the ways that AI is increasing the speed of creativity. There are now more than 125 AI applications accelerated by RTX.

AI for Developers

AI is enhancing the way developers build software applications through scalable environments, hardware and software optimizations, and new APIs.

NVIDIA AI Workbench helps developers quickly create, test and customize pretrained generative AI models and LLMs using PC-class performance and memory footprint. It’s a unified, easy-to-use toolkit that can scale from running locally on RTX PCs to virtually any data center, public cloud or NVIDIA DGX Cloud.

After building AI models for PC use cases, developers can optimize them using NVIDIA TensorRT — the software that helps developers take full advantage of the Tensor Cores in RTX GPUs.

TensorRT acceleration is now available in text-based applications with TensorRT-LLM for Windows. The open-source library increases LLM performance and includes pre-optimized checkpoints for popular models, including Google’s Gemma, Meta Llama 2, Mistral and Microsoft Phi-2.

Developers also have access to a TensorRT-LLM wrapper for the OpenAI Chat API. With just one line of code change, continue.dev — an open-source autopilot for VS Code and JetBrains that taps into an LLM — can use TensorRT-LLM locally on an RTX PC for fast, local LLM inference using this popular tool.

Every week, we’ll demystify AI by making the technology more accessible, and we’ll showcase new hardware, software, tools and accelerations for RTX AI PC users.

The iPhone moment of AI is here, and it’s just the beginning. Welcome to AI Decoded.

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