Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Roadblocks just held its developers conference and it really reinforced
Speaker 2: its growth prospects. To like to say that Roadblocks is
Speaker 2: CEO David Zuoki is with us here in San Francisco.
Speaker 2: Roadblocks Moments. Now, I don't know necessarily you put too
Speaker 2: much stock into the headline of what an analyst says,
Speaker 2: but there are an lists out there saying that this
Speaker 2: is potentially transformational for engagement. So let's start with Roadblocks Moments.
Speaker 2: What is it and why so important?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: So, thank you coming off a great developer conference and
Speaker 4: coming off, you know, reiterating our audacious goal of getting
Speaker 4: ten percent of all gaming running on Roadblocks. Look, we're
Speaker 4: looking for ways that developers can share and people can
Speaker 4: find their amazing experiences. A lot of people go on
Speaker 4: to social media. Roadblocks Moments is right inside Roadblocks. It
Speaker 4: allows users to capture a great moment, like at the
Speaker 4: bottom of a roller coaster, or when you have something
Speaker 4: really amazing happen, and turn that into a short little
Speaker 4: video that other people can watch. What's really exciting about
Speaker 4: Roadblox Moments. If you really like what you're seeing, you
Speaker 4: can click on it and jump directly into a Roadblox game.
Speaker 4: So it's one hundred percent Roadblocks. It's fun to watch
Speaker 4: and you find great new stuff.
Speaker 2: Dave, we've talked about this idea in the past. Is
Speaker 2: it a competition for ribles with the likes of TikTok
Speaker 2: or is it something different? You know, gamers actually people
Speaker 2: playing the games go to Twitch and YouTube. This goes
Speaker 2: back to the creator. It's slightly different.
Speaker 4: There's a really interesting angle to hear and that anyone
Speaker 4: on Roadblocks can make a Roadblox moment ultimately, and also
Speaker 4: a lot of the creators, whether we're playing miniature golf
Speaker 4: or something else, are going to have the capability to
Speaker 4: let you automatically take a clip of your favorite thing,
Speaker 4: like a hole in one. So we're hoping individual users
Speaker 4: on Roadblocks can make amazing moments, other people can watch
Speaker 4: them and then find them miniature.
Speaker 1: Golf game and develop as conference is exactly about the
Speaker 1: creator's Dave, and you offer them these moments, you offer
Speaker 1: them new AI improvements, new tools, ultimately ways to thrive
Speaker 1: the take rate for the content creators at the moment, Dave,
Speaker 1: talk us through why you're recompensing them even more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 4: You know, long term, we've shared we want to grow
Speaker 4: bookings faster than our employee costs or our cogs or infracosts,
Speaker 4: and we want to take that remaining cash and as
Speaker 4: much as possible distribute it transparently directly to the creators.
Speaker 3: So arguably the top applause at.
Speaker 4: Our developer conference was, for the first time in six years,
Speaker 4: we increased the dev x rate, or the percent that
Speaker 4: our creators take home today for every robucks they're they're
Speaker 4: earning eight point five percent more than they used to.
Speaker 4: And as you correctly know, we introduce us a pile
Speaker 4: of new AI capability that we can talk about as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what goes on behind that AI capability? How much
Speaker 1: are you having to think through, get the right talent
Speaker 1: in place? And what is it that it allows roadblocks
Speaker 1: to really harness?
Speaker 3: Yeah, rolling the clock back.
Speaker 4: We became an AI shop over four years ago, and
Speaker 4: over the last four years have developed over four hundred
Speaker 4: AI models, So text translation, safety, voice filtering, text filtering,
Speaker 4: all of that. What's really exciting is we have a
Speaker 4: vision not just of using AI for safety, civility or
Speaker 4: for creating games, but AI should be live inside of
Speaker 4: every experience and so we were demoing live three D
Speaker 4: experiences where people were creating vehicles on the fly by
Speaker 4: talking about them, where in the past it was very
Speaker 4: hard for many.
Speaker 3: Of us to create vehicles. So we would say for.
Speaker 4: Any form of creativity, fashion vehicles, we're going to have
Speaker 4: more people creating in roadblocks experiences.
Speaker 3: Dave.
Speaker 2: When you bring all these people together in San Jose,
Speaker 2: what were the pieces of feedback you got from the
Speaker 2: developer community, good or bad? That either surprise you and
Speaker 2: you think I got to go in act on that.
Speaker 4: Now with the team, when people think about building a
Speaker 4: high tech company and with us this really audacious goal.
Speaker 4: Could we have ten percent of all the gaming running
Speaker 4: on roadblocks, RPGs, auto races, sports, all of that. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 4: the creators really want raw scale.
Speaker 3: Raw performance, raw realism.
Speaker 4: They're looking as we design this gaming platform in the cloud,
Speaker 4: can it be bigger?
Speaker 3: Can it be better? So, in addition to the.
Speaker 4: Devx rate and the economics, some of the biggest applause
Speaker 4: was really around hardcore technical features that support ultimately photorealism
Speaker 4: and scale.
Speaker 2: Part of that is that use engagement. The data on
Speaker 2: engagement for August is looking strong and that might carry
Speaker 2: through for the rest of the year. We've talked about
Speaker 2: this before and it's worth repeating. You have had Friday
Speaker 2: nights and Saturday nights where the servers are melting. How
Speaker 2: are you dealing with that?
Speaker 4: I know, yeah, we like the servers to melt. That's
Speaker 4: obviously a good thing, not a bad thing. Last year,
Speaker 4: our peak concurrency around this time was eleven million people
Speaker 4: playing Roadblocks at the same time. Two weeks ago, there
Speaker 4: were over forty five million people playing Roadblocks at the
Speaker 4: same time, and this was.
Speaker 3: A coordinated event. We like it.
Speaker 4: A lot of the creators of the top games all
Speaker 4: had events at the same time to try to melt
Speaker 4: our servers. What's beautiful about our architecture is, in addition
Speaker 4: to our primary focus, like we build our own data centers,
Speaker 4: we have great cloud partners, and our cloud partners now
Speaker 4: can come online for two or three hours on a
Speaker 4: Saturday and we can burst into this.
Speaker 3: Forty five million concurrency. So it's a.
Speaker 4: Really great problem. Tell all these creators try to stress
Speaker 4: our system.
Speaker 1: Briefly, A tougher problem has been safety, Dave, and you've
Speaker 1: been leaning into that with AIS. You just articulated still
Speaker 1: about what is it forty percent of your users are
Speaker 1: run to thirteens. You've been making changes, particularly about estimates
Speaker 1: of user ages and check ins, Dave, how is that
Speaker 1: being received by developers and my countries at the Middle East?
Speaker 1: In particular of light.
Speaker 4: I'd highlight we have a history of leaning in before
Speaker 4: law or legislation, for example California Age Appropriate Design Code.
Speaker 4: We leaned in on that because we were already doing it.
Speaker 4: Last week we announced somewhat bold and audacious vision to
Speaker 4: lead the industry in using facial age estimation, id estimation
Speaker 4: and other tools to know the age of everyone approximately
Speaker 4: on our platform, who's using communication, and also to use
Speaker 4: that to maybe adjust a bit who communicates with who.
Speaker 4: The key i'd like to highlight is this sits on
Speaker 4: top of everything else we do, which is filtering all texts,
Speaker 4: filtering all voice, and also not allowing image sharing or
Speaker 4: video sharing on the platform. We think it's going to
Speaker 4: set a standard that other social media, messaging and comms
Speaker 4: products will look into.
Speaker 1: Following David ZOOKI love having you on. Thanks for talking
Speaker 1: us through it. Found a CEO of Rocks