Roblox Bets on AI as Daily Users Fall 9% Year Over Year

In its third-quarter 2026 shareholder letter, Roblox says users have published more than 70,000 games through Build, its AI tool for creating games from text prompts, since alpha testing began. Over 75% of Build users had never opened Roblox Studio, suggesting the tool is reaching people new to the platform's development software.

The same letter reports a 9% year-over-year decline in average daily active accounts and a 12% drop in bookings, which primarily reflect Robux sales. Roblox attributes the decline in activity to comparisons with an unusually strong 2025. It does not break out how games made with AI contribute to engagement, purchases or creator earnings.

New creators still need to attract players, keep them coming back and turn that interest into income. That is where the value of these tools becomes harder to judge: the letter provides much more detail about how people use AI than about the audiences and income those games generate.

According to the shareholder letter, average daily active users in the third quarter were 138 million accounts. That is 9% lower than a year earlier and 12% higher than in the second quarter (April to June). Monthly paying accounts averaged 30 million, down 16% from last year. These are accounts, not people.

Hours engaged came to nearly 34 billion, down 15% year over year. This is not only playing time: by Roblox's own definition, it includes time in the Roblox Studio editor and some other interactions with the platform.

Bookings, which mainly reflect sales of the in-game currency Robux during the period, came to $1.697 billion. They fell 12% but beat the top of the company's guidance. Revenue rose 16% to $1.572 billion. The 10-Q filing explains the gap: a significant part of the quarter's revenue relates to Robux purchases made in earlier periods, and money for long-lasting virtual items is recognized gradually. So revenue can grow while new purchases decline.

Not everything in the letter is worse than a year ago: bookings per hour engaged rose about 4%, and bookings per paying account rose 5%. Roblox explains the drop in activity by comparison with an unusually strong 2025: over two years, by its own figures, audience grew 55% and bookings more than 50%. The stated reason is the comparison base; AI is not mentioned in that explanation.

A game in which AI helped write the code is easy to mistake for one AI built entirely. In the letter these are different things. Here is what Roblox reports about AI.

The Build tool turns text prompts into games. By the time the third-quarter letter was published, more than 500,000 people had tried it since its alpha launch in New Zealand, Singapore, Serbia and Thailand, and over 70,000 games had been published through it. That is a cumulative alpha total, not a count of third-quarter hits. Over 75% of Build users had never opened Roblox Studio.

In its third-quarter 2026 letter, Roblox said more than 80% of the top 100 games by hours engaged had used AI tools to speed up development over the preceding month. That counts games using tools, not the share of the work done by AI and not the share of all games. The volume of games published using AI grew by more than 50% from the previous quarter, but the letter does not give their share of all games. By the company's estimate, top creators' time in AI tools (Build, Studio Assistant and external AI through MCP) had tripled since the second quarter, and daily users of its MCP server had grown almost fivefold. The letter also reported that daily asset uploads to the cloud had tripled in a month. On the October 29 investor call, David Baszucki called them a good measure of the volume of creativity.

The letter describes actual results in just two sentences. Break and Steal an Egg and Huss Valley, according to Roblox, were created almost entirely with AI and reached the top 20 by concurrent players; elsewhere the letter speaks of several such games, but only two are named. The company also said many Build games were already running ads and had enabled monetization by the time the letter was published. How many hours, bookings and creator payouts such games generate, the letter does not say.

What emerges is a set of figures on how much AI is being used, and none on how much it earns or how many players it has brought in. A place in the concurrent-player chart shows popularity at a moment, not how many weeks a game held its audience. VGTimes has already covered part of these numbers in a news report on Roblox's third-quarter results; here they are set out alongside what they leave out.

AI spending is not broken out in the report. In the third quarter, the line "certain infrastructure and trust and safety expenses" came to $258 million, up 24% from a year earlier. Roblox attributes the increase to investment in AI, including model training and inference costs. But the sum excludes personnel, stock-based compensation and depreciation, while the full infrastructure and trust and safety line in the financial statements is $385 million.

Consolidated net loss for the quarter was $230 million, against $258 million a year earlier (these are different measures). In the third-quarter letter, the company forecast a 10% to 15% year-over-year decline in bookings for the fourth quarter of 2026, to between $1.89 billion and $2 billion. It projected revenue growth of 4% to 12% and a net loss of $363 million to $423 million (against $230 million in the third quarter), excluding possible loss-contingency accruals. On the call, the chief financial officer tied the expected rise in fourth-quarter infrastructure costs to AI projects, among them Build, Roblox Reality and Universal Player.

Without the costs and added revenue of AI games, the payback on the bet cannot be calculated: even a large share of hours in such games would say nothing about profit. The company's argument is clear: an AI tool lets people without Studio experience take an idea to a working game. The counterargument is just as clear: the number of publications shows neither player interest nor quality. The debate over whether AI will save Roblox or flood it with look-alike games is better started with a narrower question: who will help a creator find a player now that publishing is easier?

For a beginner developer, publishing a game is only the start of the fight for attention. Roblox answers with recommendations: from the second quarter it retuned its Recommended for You feed toward player retention, and in the third quarter it added more precise personalization, including by age. By the company's estimate, this improved retention and monetization and had a positive effect on bookings. By the end of the quarter, about 40% of the games in the weekly top 100 of recommendations, ranked by impressions, had been created in the previous three months. New projects get noticeable visibility, but how many of them are AI-made, the letter does not say.

Creator earnings show up in the Developer Exchange program, where creators convert earned Robux into cash. Its expenses were $403 million for the quarter, down 6% from a year earlier. Rates did go up: an increase in creator payouts was announced on September 5, 2025, and a separate increase for earnings from users aged 18 and over took effect on June 8, 2026. The company cites this for the rise in the program's share of bookings from 22% to 24%: expenses fell 6% while bookings fell 12%. Whether creators of AI games earn more or less than the rest, the letter does not show.

On October 26, the Open3DLab administrators reported that a program calling itself a Roblox research project had downloaded files from the three sites in their network. By their account, it made 26,429 requests over 34 hours and downloaded 1,027 files from 712 projects, 145.5 GB in total. For 423 of those projects, licenses limited use to non-commercial purposes. The program's user-agent string referred to 3D foundation model research and an address in the Roblox domain, which the administrators tied to a company researcher. They themselves call the string a self-declared label, but say they see no sign of impersonation. They wrote to Roblox on October 18 and again later, and had received no reply by October 26.

On October 27, RuntimeWire published Roblox's response. According to a company spokesperson, a researcher built an agent to collect publicly available 3D assets, and it mistakenly collected these files. RuntimeWire reports that the agent was shut down and what it collected was not used, including for training models. "Publicly available" is Roblox's description.

In their October 26 post, the administrators described training or evaluating Roblox's 3D models as the most likely reason for the collection. They also acknowledged having no evidence that any of the files reached a model or product. The post does not include download logs. Roblox's response, published on October 27, says nothing about deleting the files and gives no download volume: the 145.5 GB figure comes from Open3DLab's account.

On October 27, Dexerto reported on three projects: Project CS, a recreation of Counter-Strike; the fan-made Left 4 Survival 2, based on Left 4 Dead 2; and a project with a PlayStation 4 menu and seven games, among them The Simpsons: Hit & Run, SUPERHOT and Undertale. The Dexerto article does not mention AI and provides no basis for attributing these clones to AI tools. VGTimes covered a Counter-Strike 2 recreation on Roblox the next day; that article did not check where the clones came from.

According to Dexerto's October 27 report, the projects did not have the original owners' permission at that point. In September, meanwhile, Roblox had expanded a licensing platform where creators can use established brands and share revenue with rights holders. The problem is not new: back in August 2025, the developers of Peak at Aggro Crab publicly complained about a clone on Roblox. According to PCGamesN's article of August 5, 2025, the studio said it would rather players pirate its game than play that clone with microtransactions.

Universal Player matters here. In the third-quarter letter, Roblox described it as a project aimed at letting creators import any existing console, PC or mobile game onto the platform, supported by AI-based engine improvements. On the investor call on October 29 (per a Quartr transcript), an analyst asked whether this would need licenses from rights holders. David Baszucki did not answer yes or no directly; he spoke of respect for intellectual property and of takedown requests under the DMCA.

That is a position, not a license for the clones.

In its 10-Q for the third quarter, Roblox reports accrued expenses for agreements and negotiations with states and territories over the protection of minor consumers and digital safety: $49 million for the quarter and $140 million for nine months. As of October 29, several states had also filed lawsuits, among them Florida, Iowa, Nebraska and Tennessee. Some obligations are not included in the accruals, among them public service campaigns, staff for law enforcement liaison, platform changes and liquidated damages if terms are breached, so $49 million cannot be treated as the final price of these agreements and negotiations.

By Roblox's estimate, on average over the last seven days of the quarter, age-checked accounts made up 64% of global daily audience. The estimate rests on limited data and cannot be compared with earlier figures, where users stated their own age.

AI also plays a safety role here: the letter describes models that check scenes, avatars and messages.

Roblox's figures suggest Build is reaching people who had never used Studio. For those creators, publishing a first game is a useful start. The third-quarter 2026 letter says little about what followed: how many found an audience, earned money or kept developing their projects.

A decline in Roblox's overall audience cannot tell us how its AI-made games are doing, and two games in the concurrent-player charts cannot represent the rest. Judging the investment requires data on retention, bookings and creator payouts, along with a separate figure for AI spending.

What matters to me is whether a first release gives a new creator a reason to keep making games. Discovery, clear rules for using other people's work and protection against clones all have a part in that. If Roblox wants these newcomers to stay, it needs to show that their games can find players and generate income.

Answers to the main questions about Roblox's AI tools and its third-quarter 2026 results.

The third-quarter 2026 letter does not give a total. Roblox reported that Build users had published more than 70,000 games since alpha testing began, and that more than 80% of the top 100 games by hours engaged had used AI tools during the month preceding the letter. The volume of games published using AI grew by more than 50% from the previous quarter. The company calls two games, Break and Steal an Egg and Huss Valley, almost entirely AI-made; both reached the top 20 by concurrent players.

Average daily active users in the third quarter of 2026 were 138 million accounts: 9% lower than a year earlier and 12% higher than the previous quarter. Monthly paying accounts were 30 million, down 16%. Accounts are not people; the company attributes the decline to comparison with a strong 2025.

In the third quarter of 2026, bookings, which mainly reflect Robux sales, fell 12% to $1.697 billion. Revenue rose 16% to $1.572 billion because it includes a significant share of purchases from earlier periods. Net loss was $230 million against $258 million a year earlier: the company is still unprofitable, but the loss narrowed.

It is a tool for creating games from text prompts. By the time the third-quarter 2026 letter was published, more than 500,000 users had tried it since the alpha began, and over 75% of them had never opened Studio. Many Build games were already running ads and had enabled monetization, but the letter does not give their contribution to bookings. At that point, Build was in alpha in New Zealand, Singapore, Serbia and Thailand. Roblox planned to expand access by the end of 2026 and retain a free base tier.

In its response published by RuntimeWire on October 27, 2026, Roblox said an agent built by a researcher had collected the files by mistake and that the material was not used, including for training. In their October 26 post, the Open3DLab administrators described collection for training or evaluation as the most likely explanation for the 145.5 GB download, but acknowledged they could not prove it. Neither publication confirms that the files were used for training.

Dexerto's October 27, 2026 article does not mention AI being used to create these projects. Roblox's statements about AI and Universal Player do not establish such a link or confirm that the clones were authorized. According to Dexerto, the projects lacked the original owners' permission at the time of publication.

In the third quarter of 2026, Developer Exchange program expenses were $403 million, 6% lower than a year earlier. These are accrued expenses for the period, not necessarily cash paid out. The letter has no breakdown by AI games, so the sum cannot be used to estimate any individual creator's earnings.