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Minus One · 2 min · Jun 4, 2025

Roblox chose native clients for 3D performance

David Baszucki says Roblox accepted the friction of a client install to preserve 3D performance. He sees WebAssembly as a possible route to spontaneous play and access where clients are blocked.

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.

  • DI

    Dylan Itzikowitz, Host · Principal, SPC

About this segment

David Baszucki says Roblox accepted the friction of a client install to preserve 3D performance. He sees WebAssembly as a possible route to spontaneous play and access where clients are blocked.

From “David Baszucki: Roblox, Minus One, Digital Economy, & the Metaverse”, Jun 4, 2025. Watch the full episode

“Because we were so into 3D performance, there's just huge native benefits.”
David Baszuckiat 52:40 · Minus One52:40

Takeaways

  1. Native clients offered performance advantages for Roblox's 3D platform.
  2. WebAssembly could make a web version more practical.
  3. A web version could help in places where client installs are blocked.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 10:34Roblox seeded its first viral loop with about $100 a day4:10
  2. 14:41Roblox built its creator economy when growth stopped paying3:56
  3. 27:02Roblox is turning its platform data into creator tools and NPCs3:22
  4. 48:09Creator earnings are spreading beyond the top developers2:14
  5. 21:27Older users arrive through the creator ecosystem2:20
  6. 42:26Roblox made email and meeting punctuality cultural norms2:07
  7. 45:42Roblox held off on NFTs because 3D assets lacked standards2:13

  8. 52:03Roblox chose native clients for 3D performance2:28

Up next · The Shawn Ryan ShowAI helps insurers price more of the business they want2:43

Transcript

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

  1. 52:07

    In particular, sort of a two-part question, how you think about the web? Roblox is a giant of UGC, and the web is a major UGC platform. I'm curious if the decision to still not launch Roblox on web is a technical limitation or a monetization form of payment readiness. So when you're thinking about a new platform like VR, how do you decide? Yeah, I would say 15 or 18 years ago, not being flash or not being web was a huge friction point for VCs.

  2. 52:37

    And, you know, you got a client, no way, you know, everything's flash, like there's no way. Because we were so into 3D performance, there's just huge native benefits. And so we sucked it up and had the client install issue, which was, I would say, less an issue today. And now, you know, on PC and Macs, we use Spotify's app more than, you know, web. And so it's kind of come full circle. That said, web is super interesting for a spontaneous play, IO gaming.

  3. 53:15

    There's environments where clients are blocked and having a web version of Roblox would be very interesting. And also the performance is getting there now that it's super interesting. So I would say WebAssembly is super interesting. Figma runs pretty good on it. Google Maps runs pretty good on it. We've had people in Hack Week do interesting things with Roblox on WebAssembly. And it's also very interesting that the same C++ code base that we target everywhere, iOS, Android, PC, Mac, whatever, just redirect to WebAssembly.

  4. 53:52

    So I would say there's some interesting possibilities there. It's interesting at SPC, we have a lot of people looking at the gamification of browsing. How do you turn every browser into a gaming experience? I think if we see high-performance gaming browsers, I have seen some companies that are like, we're building the best browser for high-performance WebAssembly or whatever these other things are.

  5. 54:19

    If Roblox was ever to have a WebAssembly version, it would work really good in those. I'm just wondering, how are you thinking about AI NPCs or AI companions? This is really interesting.