Roblox announced a new feature called Build on July 16, 2026. It lets people create fully working games on their phones just by typing descriptions of what they want, with no coding required (Roblox Newsroom).

Build appears as a new tab inside the Roblox mobile app (Las Vegas Sun). It uses a collection of AI models to handle everything: gameplay rules, scenery, characters, visual style, and sound (TechCrunch).

The feature starts public testing on July 28, 2026, in New Zealand. Anyone aged nine and older who has verified their age can try it. During this testing phase, only users aged 16 and up can publish their creations for the whole world to see (TechCrunch).

Roblox plans to offer a free basic version of Build, with paid options for more features. The company also said it will shut down Roblox Connect, a video calling feature using digital avatars that launched in 2023 (TechCrunch).

Starting the test in a single country is a standard approach for platforms rolling out features that involve content moderation and safety at a large scale. Limiting publishing to users 16 and older suggests Roblox recognizes that AI-generated content from younger users, published globally, raises moderation challenges it is not ready to handle broadly yet.

Roblox will rank AI-created games based on player retention, meaning games that do not attract and keep players will not show up prominently when people browse for games. This is different from how discovery has worked on Roblox before, where a mix of algorithms and human curation decided which games got attention. The new system treats text-prompted games as a commodity, where visibility is earned purely through engagement rather than who made the game or how much effort went into it. For existing Roblox developers who build games the traditional way, using code and the platform's full set of tools, this means a new group of competitors who face essentially no barrier to entry.

Beyond Build itself, Roblox is working on a model that can generate entire 3D scenes from a single text prompt, scenes that are both editable and playable. The company is also building AI helpers to test games and provide creators with analytics. Both are expected to arrive in the months after July 2026 (TechCrunch).

The current Build feature assembles games from AI-generated parts. A model that produces a complete, editable 3D scene from one prompt would be a step beyond that, generating the whole scene at once rather than putting pieces together. Whether the quality will be high enough for creators to meaningfully refine and improve what the AI produces is an open question the testing phase will start to answer.

The decision to discontinue Roblox Connect is a quiet signal of where the platform is focusing. The avatar video calling feature launched in 2023 as part of a push into social communication. Removing it while launching Build suggests Roblox is betting that its long-term growth comes from making content creation easier, not from adding more ways for users to socialize with each other.

Taken together, Build, the scene-generation model, and the AI helpers for testing and analytics point toward a future where the gap between having an idea for a game and publishing a playable version for the world is nearly gone. The test starting July 28 in New Zealand will be the first real-world measure of whether that streamlined process produces games people actually want to play. The retention-based ranking system is Roblox's answer to that question before it is even asked: let engagement decide.