Roblox Corporation will let developers publish their games as standalone apps on external stores including Steam, the App Store and Google Play, the company announced at last weekend's Roblox Developers Conference.

The move opens the door for creators of titles such as Steal an Egg, Scream and Run, and Welcome to Bloxburg to reach audiences well beyond Roblox's own platform. It also raises immediate questions about economics, since Roblox currently takes anywhere from 10 to 70 percent of fees depending on the in-game transaction type.

A Roblox spokesperson told Game Developer that the first cohort of creators shipping externally will "benefit from the same revenue-share economics that the Roblox app offers, including a higher DevEx rate for 18+ age-verified users in the US."

What does this change for developers?

Publishing outside the Roblox client removes the platform's discovery bottleneck but keeps its monetization framework attached. Under the DevEx program, which converts earned Robux into real currency, the general rate currently stands at $0.0038 per 1 Robux.

Roblox has iterated on its fee structure repeatedly in recent years under sustained scrutiny of its platform policies — though the sharpest regulatory attention, from the US Senate and several state attorneys general, has targeted child safety rather than revenue splits.

New tools target browser play, offline modes and 2D

Alongside the external publishing plan, Roblox Corporation announced:

• Browser-based play via Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and other browsers
• Offline modes for single-player games that don't require a connection to Roblox servers
• 2D engine capabilities including "a new orthographic camera, animated image containers, and direct sprite-sheet import"
• An expanded public alpha of the genAI "Build" development tab into new regions, plus a prompt-to-scene generator bridging Build and Studio
• New capabilities for non-playable characters

For studios, browser and offline support effectively decouple Roblox experiences from the desktop and mobile apps for the first time, widening potential distribution surfaces without a separate codebase.

Real-currency payouts and a creator spending card

Roblox is also adding financial products for creators. "Roblox Wallet" will let creators "earn directly in real currency," bypassing the Robux conversion pipeline for qualifying flows, and a companion "Roblox Card" will let them spend Wallet balances anywhere the card is accepted.

Why the discovery change matters

The company also adjusted its discovery ranking system, which now "optimizes for both younger players, who engage best with shorter-form games, and older players, who return to deeper games over time."

That tweak lands against a rocky monetization backdrop. CFO Naveen K. Chopra previously said Roblox's second-quarter results were hurt by "a greater-than-expected shift of engagement from high monetizing 2025 vintage viral games to a combination of new and evergreen experiences with lower hourly monetization."

"This underlying mix shift was compounded by changes in our recommendation algorithm, which optimizes for long-term retention and is, therefore, providing more impressions for highly retentive games at the expense of near-term monetization," Chopra said.

In other words, the algorithm already trading near-term revenue for retention is now formally tuned to serve two distinct player cohorts. How standalone distribution, real-currency wallets and the split ranking model interact with that monetization drag will be the metric to watch when Roblox reports its next quarterly results.