Here’s what marketers need to know about Roblox Developers Conference 2024

RDC 2024 was chock-full of announcements spanning across just about every aspect of Roblox. Don’t worry — we sifted through them for you. Here are the most important updates for brands and marketers announced during this year’s Roblox Developers Conference.

The key numbers

• This year was the 10th annual Roblox Developers Conference and the biggest ever in terms of attendance, featuring attendees from over 70 countries, according to Roblox CEO David Baszucki during his keynote speech. 
• Baszucki used his keynote to boast about some of Roblox’s impressive growth stats from the past year. “Our daily active users grew by 21 percent year over year; we saw double-digit growth in every region,” Baszucki said. “We grew at over 20 percent in the U.S. and Canada and over 30 percent in Asia/Pacific, and at double digits in Europe and the rest of the world.”
• Roblox’s user base is aging up. Over 58 percent of Roblox users are now aged 13 or older, with this cohort growing by 26 percent year over year in Q2 2024, per Baszucki.
• The reach and scale of Roblox transcends gaming. Roblox’s monthly user count of 380 million is double as many as the leading PC gaming platform Steam, and three times as many as the number of unique annual users of the Nintendo Switch console. In 2024, Roblox has recognized the power of this scale and is looking to leverage it for marketers and advertisers.

Enter Shopify

Over the past year, Roblox has run a series of e-commerce pilot tests with partners such as Walmart and Fandango, giving users the opportunity to purchase goods to be shipped directly to their doorsteps without ever exiting the Roblox platform. The test sparked some speculation that Roblox might work with Walmart or another partner to help expand e-commerce options to more users across its ecosystem.

At RDC, Roblox announced its first official e-commerce partner: Shopify. In early 2025, the company will allow creators and brands to sell physical merchandise as a self-serve tool, meaning anyone who sells their goods on Shopify will also be able to sell products directly within virtual Roblox worlds. The partnership with Shopify is not exclusive, and more e-commerce platforms might join the party as Roblox’s e-commerce business matures.

The long-term goal is for Roblox to become a dominant e-commerce platform, not unlike Amazon or eBay — but in the form of a three-dimensional virtual shopping mall, rather than a 2D platform. 

“We know that Shopify is among top platforms that a number of creators and brands in our community are already leveraging to run their existing online shops,” said Roblox vp of global brand partnerships and advertising Stephanie Latham. “The idea was to make it very easy and seamless for them to port existing product catalogs, and integrate shopping into their experiences. It’s certainly helpful that Shopify also has a robust solution for sales channels partners to easily integrate with their platform.”

Expanded video ads

As Roblox continues to turn its focus to ads going into 2025, the platform used the stage at RDC to announce that it would soon be offering more options for where and when creators can publish video ads. At the moment, creators are able to publish video ads within their experiences in the form of in-game screens and billboards. 

And starting later this year, creators will be able to trigger a video ad overlay that can pop up anywhere in their experience, including menus and in-game stores. This is potentially exciting news for both brands and developers because it means they will no longer be limited to advertising inside Roblox experiences that contain natural opportunities to include videos.

“We believe every brand needs to consider a Roblox strategy to reach the next generation of consumers,” said Joe Ferencz, CEO of the Roblox studio Gamefam. “That’s why we think the expansion of video ad capabilities is great because it allows brands to test and learn what works for them on Roblox before diving deeper into a full-blown strategy that incorporates much larger, more expensive branded experiences and activations.”

Roblox Partner Program updates

In 2023, Roblox launched an official Partner Program intended to streamline the relationships between brands and developers within the platform. At RDC 2024, the company announced plans to expand the program to new participants beyond its original seven members in January 2025. 

“They’ve built out programmatic within the Roblox ecosystem, but it’s not connected to anything — so you have to go directly to Roblox, and I think that can be quite daunting for a lot of brands,” said Nina Mackie, co-founder of the agency WeGame2. “So what they’ll normally do — as an agency or a brand — is go to one of the seven [Roblox Partner Program] partners.”

The Partner Program will also be updated to include more explicit criteria on how to become part of the program, in addition to the implementation of an official badging system that gives one or more of three different badges to partners depending on the services they offer, including media buying and strategy, campaign management and building virtual spaces with brands. 

“I know The Gang have all three; I don’t think anyone else has all three yet,” Mackie said. “But everyone will be competing to be the top Roblox partner and have the badges.”