Roblox Will Run in Your Browser by the End of 2026 and Offline by Mid 2027, Plus a Friends Chat That Follows You Between Games

Roblox turned 20 this week, and its founder David Baszucki used the opening keynote of the Roblox Developers Conference in San Jose on Thursday, September 11 to announce the biggest change to how the platform is played since the mobile app. By the end of 2026, you will be able to click a link and join a game straight from Chrome, with no app and no install. By mid 2027, some games will keep working when you have no connection at all.

The scale behind those decisions is easy to forget. The official post says players spent 29 billion hours on Roblox last quarter across more than 180 countries, and that creators have earned more than 5 billion dollars since the Developer Exchange program launched in 2013, roughly 1.7 billion of it in the past 12 months. That is the audience the browser player is meant to grow, and the money the new payout system is meant to move faster.

Video: Roblox on YouTube

Browser play, offline play, and standalone apps

The web player is the headline. Roblox says that by the end of this year, players will be able to join a game in-browser on Chrome from a game's Experience Details Page, with more browsers to follow. The stated goal is that a link from anywhere, whether search, YouTube, X, an email from a friend or a creator's own social channel, starts the game instantly. If you have ever tried to get a friend into a game and lost them at the download screen, this is the fix.

Offline play is the more surprising piece. Over the next year, creators will be able to enable an offline solo mode alongside their live multiplayer mode, so you can keep a game going on the subway or on a flight. Roblox puts full availability at mid 2027 with early access coming soon. It is opt-in per game, so do not expect every experience to support it, and anything built around other players obviously will not.

Both sit under a broader idea Roblox is calling Roblox Everywhere. Soon, creators will have the option to ship their games as standalone apps on mobile, PC and consoles, with Roblox providing the technology and services underneath. In practice that means a popular game could live on a store page under its own name while still running on the Roblox engine and economy.

Chat that follows you, and new kinds of games

The social layer gets a real upgrade too. A new Friends chat tab follows players across games, so a group can coordinate in one place and move into a new game together instead of losing each other at every server hop. Voice typing, which lets you speak instead of type while playing, is out now. Later this year, creators can add pre-set Quick Words to their games, things like "start your engines" for a racing game, which are reviewed in advance for policy compliance so that players of all ages can use them safely.

Roblox also admitted it has been known for exactly one kind of game, the 3D multiplayer world, and it wants that to change. Studio is getting an orthographic camera, animated image containers and sprite-sheet import for 2D and puzzle games, and a notification system for turn-based, asynchronous multiplayer arrives in Studio Beta in October with a full release by the end of the year. On the creator side, the mobile-first Build tool has produced roughly 9,000 published games since its New Zealand alpha, and 71 percent of the people using it had never opened Roblox Studio before. A prompt-to-scene tool called Scene Generator lands later this year in both Build and Studio.

Money for creators, and our take

The other announcement that matters for the long run is Roblox Wallet. Once a creator opens one, earnings are paid out every business day in real currency as holds clear, rather than through the slower Developer Exchange cadence. It rolls out later this year to eligible US based independent creators aged 18 and older, with international expansion planned for the year ahead. Roblox Card, which spends that balance directly anywhere it is accepted, is planned for 2027.

Our take is that the browser player is the announcement most players will actually feel, and the one most likely to slip, since "by the end of the year" and "Chrome first" leave plenty of room. Offline play is genuinely new for a platform built on live servers, and we would treat mid 2027 as a target rather than a promise. Nothing here changes the games you are already in, so if you play regularly, our list of current Roblox promo codes is still the quickest way to grab free avatar items today. And if you want to know why one survival game keeps coming up in these keynotes, Roblox says the first episode of its new Made on Roblox podcast, about the making of 99 Nights in the Forest, drops later this month.