avday Roblox has raised creator pay twice since September 2025, yet it paid creators $25m less in the third quarter than a year earlier. Its top creators, meanwhile, tripled their time on AI tools since Q2.
That’s the tension in Roblox’s Q3 2026 shareholder letter, filed on 29 October. It spends pages on AI creation, including outside agents working in Studio through its MCP server. The headline figures, year on year:
- Revenue: $1,572m, up 16%.
- Bookings: $1.7bn, down 12%.
- Daily active users: 138 million, down 9%.
Roblox says revenue can grow while bookings fall because it recognises most bookings as revenue over 27 months, its estimate of a paying user’s average lifetime.
Roblox Q3 2026: the AI creation numbers
What the letter claims:
- Outside agents: since Q2, “those using our MCP server daily grew nearly 5x.”
- Time on AI tools tripled among top creators over the same period, including “Build, Studio Assistant, and external AI via MCP”.
- Top games: more than 80% of the top 100 by hours engaged used AI tools in the month before the letter. Roblox says “multiple games built almost entirely with our Studio MCP connector” broke into the top 20 by concurrent users.
- Survey: of several thousand creators, “97% of those regularly using AI said that it accelerated their development timelines.”
The MCP server is the part developers can use today: it lets an agent such as Claude Code or Codex work inside Studio. Our guide to setting up Roblox Studio’s MCP server covers how, and which lookalike repos to avoid. Our Blender MCP tests show what that kind of access can do in another 3D tool.
Build is coming, with a paid tier
Build, Roblox’s “prompt-to-game creation tool”, had more than 500,000 users and over 70,000 published games in an alpha in New Zealand, Singapore, Serbia and Thailand. Over 75% of those users had never opened Studio. A wider roll-out is due later this year, with a free base tier and “paid tier options for additional prompt capacity.”
Roblox is also “building art agents for UI, UX, and visual assets to avoid generic AI-generated output”, and NPC models that playtest and “give feedback to the coding agent”. That’s the check-your-work loop developers who code with AI agents rely on.
A section headed “Surfacing New Content vs. AI Slop” says ranking changes helped new games surface. By the end of Q3, about 40% of the weekly top 100 games by impressions on its Recommended for You feed were under three months old. It gives no figure for low-quality AI games.
Creators were paid less, but got a bigger slice
Developer Exchange (DevEx) fees, what Roblox paid out to creators, fell 6% year on year to $403m, from $428m. Bookings fell twice as fast, so DevEx rose to 24% of bookings from 22%.
Roblox credits the pay rise it announced on 5 September 2025 and a “targeted O18 DevEx rate increase” (O18 is its 18-and-over cohort) from 8 June 2026. On the quarter, payouts rose $40m from Q2’s $363m (our arithmetic).
Roblox’s infrastructure bill moved the other way. Certain infrastructure and trust and safety expenses rose 24% year on year to $258m, “driven by AI-related investments to support growth initiatives, including AI training and inference costs.”
What the letter doesn’t tell you
Every AI figure is Roblox’s own. The chart beside them cites “Internal Company Data”, and the 97% comes from Roblox’s survey of its own creators, counting only those who regularly use AI. “Nearly 5x” has no base number: the letter’s chart of daily MCP server users climbs steeply from June, with nothing on its axis but zero. So daily MCP users could have gone from hundreds to thousands, or from thousands to tens of thousands.
