Samik Bhowal

What a phenomenal RDC 2025!🔥 This year’s Roblox Developers Conference (held Sept 5–6 in San Jose) was packed with major announcements, and I couldn’t be more excited by the direction the platform is heading: • Roblox Moments: A built-in short-form video feed for capturing highlights and instantly sharing them across the platform, think a TikTok-style discovery tool tailor-made for Roblox. • Creator earnings boost: DevEx rates increased by 8.5%, putting more cash back into creators’ pockets. • Huge growth metrics: Over $1 billion paid out to creators in the past year, with daily active users climbing toward 112 million. • Emerging tech & safety upgrades: From acoustic simulation and hydrodynamic enhancements to emissive mapping, CSG on meshes, and server authority for anti-cheat measures • Infrastructure & community support: A new data center in São Paulo is now live, improving latency for Brazilian users, and the platform is reinforcing its commitment to safety with over 100 updates and better age-based moderation. This year, Lootbloc turned up with some unforgettable moments: • Partner Dinner: We hosted a special dinner for our 60+ partners, an opportunity to connect, eat great food, and relax after a long RDC weekend. • Claw Machine: We partnered with the Roblox Commerce team to have our Lootbloc-branded claw machine featured at their booth, where attendees could win merch • Luau Plushie Launch: We unveiled an exclusive Luau whale plushie with Roblox, themed after the Luau logo that attendees could earn by completing a scavenger hunt at the Luau booth • Co-hosting Quataun party Friday night at RDC where we gave away thousands of plushies, shirts, hats and more to fellow developers. Lootbloc is only continuing to grow by bringing on new partners this year like Piggy, Pls Donate, Murderers vs. Sheriff Duels, Twin Atlas and more! Bottom line: RDC 2025 wasn’t just about big tech announcements, it was a celebration of community and all of the successes this past year. I’m so excited by the possibilities ahead, and inspired by how platforms like Roblox and partners like Lootbloc continue to grow together. Here’s to next year, bigger, bolder, and even more connected.

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One of the changes I am noticing as I do the #30DaysOfAI course via the #100School, is building an AI-First mindset. It's all about how can I do this better by leveraging AI tools that I have learnt? A sample use case: My wife Jingle Shah wanted to send a requirement of raw material to a vendor for one of her projects. This is typically called as a BOQ in Interior Design terms. She had a raw set of data, and wanted to simply add that to her business letterhead. Traditionally, this would involve using a PDF editor to paste the list of items and quantity in a tabular format from a spreadsheet, into a business letter head template and formatting it. I only had an image of the Business Letter head, so it would have been more challenging. I tried doing this using a simple one liner prompt into a #chatgpt Project that I had already created earlier for the Interior Design use cases. I attached the BOQ PDF and Business Letter Head image to this chat: Generate a BOQ for an interior design project by merging the BOQ table from the attached PDF into the Business Letter Head image. Generate the output as a PDF. After a couple of iterations (needed to fix the layout as I didn't specify it in the prompt earlier), this is the output:

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The reason that AI-native talent is top of mind for recruiting teams right now comes down to leverage. The impact a single engineer can have today is outsized compared to any time before. What used to take dozens of people can now be built by a small, sharp team. In the past, productivity early in your career was estimated by years of experience. That’s no longer the right proxy today. Part of the shift is familiarity with the latest tools. But the bigger piece is a new way of thinking and approaching problems with an “AI-first” mindset, which can matter more than tenure. We’ve seen this firsthand at Decagon. Some of our most impactful hires are people who might be dismissed as “too young,” yet they’ve shipped relentlessly and driven incredible velocity. It’s changed how we think about hierarchy too. Authority isn’t just about years on the job anymore. It’s about contribution and leverage. We’re always looking for more AI-native talent. If that sounds like you, check out our careers page.

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As I read more and more reports about the recent Xbox layoffs one thing becomes clearer about MSFT’s intent in this round: This wave was not driven by a desire to replace workers with AI as some have speculated. Instead I believe the intent was to “improve” a Span of Control KPI. What I notice is that a great number of the layoffs occurred among quite senior employees level 64-66 at the Director and Senior Director level. That is middle management. If this had been an AI replacement exercise MSFT would have kept more experienced people and fired mostly junior people as AI replacement tends to produce better results with more experienced humans in the loop. The driving out of experienced middle management, and I’m talking about some absolute legends in the industry, points to a different organizational goal: Span of Control. MSFT and many other tech firms have in recent years looked at the ratio of management to direct reports and sought to increase the number of reports each manager has as some measure of organizational efficiency. Misguided or not this is a trend that has been widely reported on before. It also doesn’t hurt that middle management is paid better and makes a juicer target for cost cutting when a business unit’s targets are not met. If you don’t make the margin goals Corporate needs you to make, you have to offer a tribute or face their wrath. And that is what I believe this is all about. Just my opinion. #xbox #gameindustry #gamedev

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Grateful for the chance to demo Powder at the Intel booth during Microsoft Build—huge thanks to Tonya, Bryan, and the entire Intel Corporation team for making it possible. Powder is shaping the future of real-time, edge AI content creation for gamers and creators worldwide. It was an honor to showcase what we’ve been building, live and in action, to so many talented developers in the Microsoft community. Special thanks to Nicolas, Jay, Eric, Shaun, and the entire Ubisoft team for letting us feature the breathtaking, cinematic world of Skull and Bones in the Powder demo and breakout sessions. Excited for what’s next as we continue pushing the boundaries of AI and gaming together! Catch a quick look at what we're building at Powder in the video below #Intel #Ubisoft #Powder #MSBuild #AIEditing #Microsoft #Windows #AIFoundry #EdgeAI #NPU #SkullAndBones 

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GDC 2026 Wrapup (2 of 2): A Shift in the Craft In Part 1 I covered what I learned at GDC this year. This one's more personal. I've spent 30+ years working professionally on traditional game AI. Behavior trees, GOAP, utility AI, finite state machines, genetic programming, neural networks, battle pattern matching and tactics, etc. That was my craft. GDC used to include a two-day AI Summit with multiple overlapping sessions to choose from throughout. This year you could count the traditional game AI sessions on one hand and still have fingers to spare. In the Game AI Roundtable, one of the few surviving AI sessions, people kept steering toward ML and LLMs while the host kept pulling it back to traditional game AI. It felt like watching our community process the loss in real time. I know I was. The Fireside Chat with Damian Isla and Jeff Orkin hit the same note. Veterans reminiscing about what felt like the golden age of traditional game AI. I knew some of those people from previous GDCs. Worked at some of the same companies. Bittersweet is the right word. But the PUBG Ally session I mentioned in Part 1? An AI buddy that learns your play style, remembers your favorite weapons, talks to you in combat through two-way voice? That's where it's all heading. And honestly, it's exciting even for someone who grew up in the old school. What I'm Taking Home Between the two posts, here's what I'm bringing back to the studio for The Realm: Return Home: - AI companions and villagers you can actually talk to and who learn from you - Adaptive music that matches gameplay, layering tracks and crossfading between themes so the soundtrack reacts to what's happening in real time - Polish and marketing fundamentals so our players can actually find us on Steam - VR gesture-based interactions that skip the controller entirely - Steam localization to reach a wider audience - And a personal favorite throwaway: texture-trained neural network shaders that dramatically improve both compression and fidelity at the same time 25 sessions. 20-30 pages of notes. A head full of ideas and a craft that's changing under our feet. It's a strange place to be, but exciting at the same time. What sessions stood out to you? #GDC2026 #GameDev #GameAI #IndieGame #VR

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Just wrapped up an inspiring day at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Exec Offsite for Games in Irvine. Truly an informative event for navigating today's dynamic industry landscape. Key insights: With 77% of studios embracing generative AI, it's clear this tech is revolutionizing content pipelines and player engagement. Amid stagnant markets dominated by live service titles, strategies like DTC unlocks, transmedia tie-ins, and brand-formance marketing are essential for growth. AWS's ecosystem (from SageMaker for cost-efficient AI workflows to efficiently hosting game servers) offers scalable tools to build, run, and grow at pace. Grateful to the AWS team (with a special thanks to John D’Eufemia) for curating such a forward-thinking event, packed with unfiltered trends and actionable sessions. Shoutout to the speakers (like Jen Donahoe) and fellow execs (great to see you J. Aaron Farr) for the vibrant discussions that sparked new ideas for our roadmap. Excited to implement these takeaways and collaborate more deeply! #AWSGames #GamingIndustry #GenerativeAI #GameDev

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ACTORS + AI: Director/Actor/Producer/Writer AI Chef 🧑‍🍳 Hans Obma visits the Cozy AI Kitchen 🎂 https://lnkd.in/gjiAvEfP to share his insights on how AI has transformed his creative processes. You may have seen Chef Hans in such 📺 hits as Better Call Saul, Wandavision, or Narcos — and yes, he's probably the most handsome AI 🧑‍🍳 chef we've had in the kitchen to date :-). Hans needed to learn a new language ... how did he do it? He got multimodal AI models to help him speak Welsh. Hans needed a way to scale how he communicated with his stakeholders ... how did he do it? He created an authentic-to-him way of scaling by creating an instant entourage of supporting agents. HT 🧑‍🍳 Ross Heise 🧑‍🍳 Matt Scholz and the power of the Wisconsin network for bringing such a storied talent to the Cozy AI Kitchen! --- This 🍰 episode: https://lnkd.in/gjiAvEfP All 50 episodes: https://lnkd.in/g6upvbGX

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🙌 Bitmovin has joined the OpenMOQ Foundation as a member. Media over QUIC (MoQ) is gaining momentum as the industry pushes toward ultra-low latency streaming and more interactive live experiences. We’re excited to collaborate with the OpenMOQ community and contribute to the continued development of MoQ alongside other industry participants. Additionally, see how Player Web X supports MoQ playback in our latest blog: https://okt.to/58gVns #MoQ #LowLatency #VideoStreaming #PlayerTech

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