# Roblox built its creator economy when growth stopped paying

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/roblox-built-its-creator-economy-when-growth-stopped-paying/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [David Baszucki](https://realalpha.app/people/david-baszucki/) · David Baszucki is chief blocksmith at Roblox. · Co-founded Roblox and has led it as CEO since 2004, serving more than 100M daily users.
- Host: Dylan Itzikowitz · Principal, SPC
- Show: Minus One
- Episode: [David Baszucki: Roblox, Minus One, Digital Economy, & the Metaverse](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/), Jun 4, 2025
- Moment: 14:41 to 18:37 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/roblox-built-its-creator-economy-when-growth-stopped-paying/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=881

## Quote

> “we just have to go do the **big strategic hard thing** that we think is right”
> — [David Baszucki](https://realalpha.app/people/david-baszucki/) at [16:30](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=990) · Minus One

## Takeaways

1. Revenue per user cratered under the old membership model.
2. Roblox chose a virtual currency and creator payouts over more fixes.
3. More than 100 studios were making over $1 million a year run rate.

## About this segment

With users growing but revenue per user falling, Roblox stopped chasing incremental fixes and built a virtual currency and creator payout loop. That system now supports studios earning millions a year.

From “David Baszucki: Roblox, Minus One, Digital Economy, & the Metaverse”, Jun 4, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[14:44](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=884) Roblox has started with indie creators, but there's whole businesses built on studio, like Roblox Studio now. Can you talk about the rise of the whole Roblox economy from a studio perspective? Yeah, it actually goes to a fun metaphor for one of your ups and downs that you were sharing with me. So one of our ups and downs was we started maybe too much copying Club Penguin. So we had this Club Do membership thing.

[15:13](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=913) And here we were going along, growing rapidly, rapidly, rapidly. But as we were growing, revenue per hour, revenue per user was cratering, actually, with this old club membership thing. And so we were sitting there kind of revenue flat, a lot of user growth, more server cost, all of that. And we had this fun story where we thought we had broken something. and this is this goes to actually the best defense is a good offense we first went into defensive mode and spent about two or three months what did we break the magic is gone let's let's make a list of the 50 things we should fix um and then when that stopped working well what is the list of the 51 improvements we can And if we add all those up, does that get us 20? And it's just like, we did that. And then finally, in the back of our head, separate from all of that, we'd been thinking virtual economy. And we'd been thinking, you know, the system way to do this is have a virtual currency, have users buy it, have them spend it, have the creators be able to sync it for whatever they did.

[16:25](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=985) but that's like a really hard feature to build and like let's just do the easy thing but finally we hit a point where it's just like whoops we just have to go do the big strategic hard thing that we think is right so it's like okay full court press none of these like fixes or tactical things we're just going to build this thing we can't a b test it we just have to do it um and we need a full feedback loop we need to be able to sell the virtual currency you need to be able to sync it We need on search and discovery to reward some of it.

[16:59](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=1019) So very similar to when we went live with UGC creation, we knew in about an hour when we went live, all of a sudden a couple of devs were syncing it. People were sourcing it. They showed up on search and discovery and kind of like got that full feedback loop of a perpetual motion machine. um this corresponded to a board discussion of would we ruin roblox if we made it you know a place to earn money and we actually um very early on had a lot of board discussion would this be a good or a bad thing i really pushed to do it because it it was the notion that creators could start earning a living so we got that machinery rolling that was also a perpetual motion machine. So that machine, when designed properly, just kept going and going and going. So there's now three studios that are making over 50 million a year run rate. There's

[17:59](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=1079) over 100 making over a million a year run rate. The amount of money flowing through the system will hit a billion this year. That'll go up and up. And so we're starting to see really serious studios now with hundreds of people. We're seeing M&A, we're seeing nine-figure acquisitions. We've predicted a 10-figure. No, we're seeing nine-figure. We predicted 10-figure M&A at some point. So yeah, that whole notion of building an ecosystem has moved forward.