Roblox CEO David Baszucki unveils Build, an in-app AI game creator targeting all 130M+ daily users

Roblox Build

David Baszucki is bringing AI game creation directly into the Roblox mobile app, targeting the platform's full base of 130M+ daily users. The product, called Build, enters alpha on July 28 and lets users generate games through natural language prompts — both one-shot creation and iterative refinement — from a dedicated tab in the mobile client. It's essentially Roblox Studio's AI capabilities, repackaged for anyone with a phone.

The economics are deliberately accessible. Every user gets a baseline token allocation at no cost. Additional usage can be purchased, but Baszucki frames the pricing as a transitional structure: as inference costs fall, he expects access to widen significantly. The infrastructure bet underpinning this is Roblox's own data centers, which Baszucki says deliver roughly 3x cost savings versus public cloud. The model is to run primarily on owned infrastructure and burst to cloud only when needed — a hybrid that Baszucki argues channels money toward creators rather than cloud providers.

“We have the studio assistant. People are using it with MCP... We're gathering all of those models and bringing the Studio Assistant right to a tab in our mobile app both for one shot game creation and iterative gaming creation... Our vision is that everyone will have access to this for a certain amount.”

Safety by design

Build has a structural safety advantage over Roblox Studio that Baszucki sees as meaningful. Because every game in Build originates from a prompt, Roblox retains a complete audit trail — every prompt, every uploaded image, every asset. That audit trail doesn't exist in open IDEs, and it gives the moderation pipeline a cleaner signal. Content still has to clear the platform's retention-based discovery system, which Baszucki argues is already calibrated for massive volume. Even if Build generates 20 times more games, the discovery algorithm surfaces only what earns sustained engagement — which he believes neutralises the AI slop risk.

For users under 16, Roblox has already restricted access to a curated corpus of 20,000+ games that have passed both a user funnel and a moderation review. Age verification now runs on everyone across the platform, using a combination of AI and biometric signals. Baszucki's position is that Roblox isn't waiting for regulation or device manufacturers — it's already done the work.

Photorealism and NPCs

Two other AI bets sit underneath Build. Roblox is developing a photorealistic super-upsampling video model designed to run locally on each user's device, layered over its existing 3D engine. Baszucki describes the target as multiplayer gaming at photorealistic 4K, 60Hz — a hybrid approach that doesn't rely solely on traditional 3D rendering or pure video world models. He compares the potential impact to the shift from black-and-white to colour film: most players simply haven't experienced a game at that fidelity and don't yet know to expect it.

On NPCs, Baszucki is less interested in digital twins than in using AI agents as a testing layer. His argument is that defining "good" in a game is far harder than defining passing tests for code — but if NPCs can be assigned human-like missions and run at 100x the speed of human players, a 100-player, 100-hour test collapses to roughly one hour. He calls this "Wiggins Loop programming" for game creators and sees it as a near-term tool before NPCs become meaningful interactive characters.

IP and licensing

Roblox has launched a platform called IP Manager to systematise licensing between IP holders and creators. At one end, IP owners can make their content available for licensed use — the horror film franchise Saw is listed as an example — with online contracts that small studios can execute directly. At the other end, IP holders can use the same system to block unauthorised use, with AI-assisted scanning to enforce it. Baszucki draws an explicit parallel to YouTube's Content ID: a system that routes value to rights holders automatically, with an opt-out available, and settles into a stable equilibrium most parties can live with.

Platform expansion

Roblox is in early experiments on Android TV and continues conversations with Nintendo about a Switch release. Baszucki sees the coming generation of AR glasses — lightweight, with speaker, microphone, camera, and projection — as a meaningful new surface, though he thinks the hardware isn't quite there yet. Roblox is already live on Meta Quest. On screenless experiences, his frame is that Roblox is increasingly general-purpose, low-cost multiplayer infrastructure, and that NPC-driven audio interactions could eventually bridge visual and screenless play.

The July 28 alpha launch is the first public test of whether Roblox's infrastructure advantage and creator base are positioned to absorb what could be a significant expansion in game supply.