Roblox plan to grow their absurd gaming empire even further by letting devs release games as "standalone apps", potentially via Steam, Epic, and GOG

Also coming soon: offline singleplayer features and browser-based joining

Not content with pulling in daily active user counts roughly equivalent to the population of Japan, game creation platform Roblox are planning to let developers release their games "as standalone apps across mobile, PC, and consoles, with Roblox powering the technology and services underneath." The news comes via this year's Roblox Developers Conference. They are calling the new initiative "Roblox Everywhere", two words that can surely only ever be uttered in the form of a Machiavellian giggle or a scream of purest terror.

There's no timeframe for introducing the functionality, and much remains to be explained or confirmed. Will the standalone app version of the game still require a Roblox account or some other form of authentication? How will it work alongside Roblox's recently introduced age verification policies? Will people be able to sell their standalone games on other stores, like Epic, GOG and Steam? Roblox ain't saying anything else just yet, but a rep has told Parchment Gamer that they hope to let Roblox devs release standalone games via every storefront available: "We will start with a select set of gaming developers and storefronts to test, and we will share more details soon".

It comes alongside other adjustments designed to give Roblox players more flexibility. Roblox are planning to let people join Roblox games from a browser (Chrome, to begin with) by the end of the year, with no external software or installation required. They're also looking to introduce a new offline option for singleplayer games.

The company are making it easier for developers to earn cash from microtransactions and other monetisation features. Via The Strait Times, they've announced a Roblox wallet feature managed by payment company Airwallex, which will allow Roblox devs to automatically receive converted real-world revenue from their games, doing away with the need to request currency conversions after reaching certain Robux revenue thresholds. The new wallet doohickey is coming December for US devs, then internationally in 2027, alongside a new kind of payment card.

Of possible relevance to the above: Roblox recently saw their market capitalisation plummet after revealing to investors that they were making less money from in-app monetisation, thanks to "a greater-than-expected shift of engagement from high monetising 2025 vintage viral games to a combination of new and evergreen experiences with lower hourly monetisation". This shift was apparently "compounded by changes in our recommendation algorithm, which optimizes for long-term retention".

Roblox are the subject of lawsuits and, most recently, a US Senate investigation accusing them of failing to protect their sizeable audience of under-aged children against predators. Many Roblox games are created by younger people who see little return for their labours: as reported by the Strait Times, the median earnings of the roughly 42,000 paid Roblox devs are about $1500 a year.

There are also – inevitably, given the sheer popularity of the platform – a fair few very clever devs on Roblox. The example I always come back to is Zeekerss, who started out making Roblox games in 2012, before shifting to Itch.io and Steam: his co-op extraction horror game Lethal Company is one of the foundation stones of the ever-contentiously named "friendslop" genre, and also, a wonderfully creepy experience that owes something to Roblox's banal plasticky aesthetics. While I'm mistrustful of Roblox as a platform, I am happy, at least, for comparably gifted Roblox devs who might soon be granted an easier way of releasing their games outside the platform.