Roblox is "democratizing creation" with its new AI upscaling tech, but admits its too costly for your average dev

Roblox is the metaphorical bastion of creation. Its entire model relies on player-made content: from Grow a Garden to Steal a Brainrot, Roblox is a game within a game within a game - gameception. The developer's latest endeavor, a new AI-focused upscaling technology called Roblox Reality, is hoping to "democratize creation" by providing developers with new, photorealistic upscaling for multiplayer games. There's a lot of buzzwords here, and Roblox admits that the tech currently sits outside of most players' price range, but generally I just don't really think it's worth the hassle (or the associated cost).

Roblox Reality's core focus is to "combine hyperscale multiplayer gaming with photorealism." In English, that simply means taking games that can support hundreds - if not thousands - of players, and making them look a lot more realistic (I'd have said nicer, but that depends on your perspective).

Reality utilizes Roblox's Cloud engine, as well as Video World Models (referred to as 'super upsamplers'). These models struggle to withstand the pressures associated with multiplayer gameplay - thousands of players reacting simultaneously in an open world is too much for it to handle. Reality hopes to blend Cloud's multiplayer capabilities with AI upscaling tech to create worlds that both look beautiful and allow for extensive player activity.

"We believe this will ultimately remove barriers to high-fidelity creation, allowing a team of three people to build a narrative-driven, photorealistic masterpiece in a single week," CEO David Baszucki writes on X. "This is an early look at turning solitary AI dreams into a social, playable reality."

There are, however, some issues with this. As Senior Vice President of Engineering Anupam Singh writes in Reality's reveal blog, "the process is currently cost-intensive, and achieving high-fidelity, real-time performance, such as 2K resolution at 60 Hz, remains a development challenge." Given that a large proportion of Roblox's audience is children and younger, indie-level developers, that immediately puts the tech out of their reach.

It's also worth noticing that AI upscalers require some serious hardware to run, meaning that only the best graphics cards can really handle the tech. Even if Roblox delivers on its promise to "significantly [reduce] the development time, cost, and compute," I doubt my GPU would be able to use it for development, or be able to run games that utilize Reality's upscaling.

But, more generally, I'm just not interested in the tech. Looking at the video above, the current Roblox render just looks better. I can immediately recognize that it's a Roblox game, character movement is more fluid, and, best of all, it has personality. Every single one of the upscaled games look the exact same - they're soulless and emotionless, just like the tools that have created them.

One of the things that makes games games are those unique aesthetics: whether its the almost monotone colors of Neverway, the black and white noir of Mouse PI, or the blocky vibrancy of Roblox. Every Roblox game looks and feels unique; we should be celebrating that instead of pouring cash into something that is just making gaming worse.

Roblox Reality will be available "in an early version later this year or early next" for those who are interested. It's also worth noting that the video above doesn't show off finished products, with the bottom left showing Reality's current status, and the bottom right being a mockup of 'what could be.' Maybe I'll change my tune when the tech finally releases, but right now, I'll stick to my non-aesthetic, non-hyperscaled blocks, thanks.