Roblox announced the winners of its 2026 Roblox Innovation Awards (RIAs) at the close of this year’s Roblox Developers Conference (RDC), with the horror-adjacent simulation game “Animal Hospital,” from studio Animal Anomaly, taking four of the roughly 20 category prizes, including “Best New Game,” “Best Innovation in Creative Direction,” the community-voted “People’s Choice” award, and the closing “Builderman Award.”

Nosniy Games took both “Best Shooter” for its competitive title “RIVALS” and “Best Studio” overall. Other category winners included “DOORS” (LSPLASH) for “Best Use of Audio,” “Finish The Word” (Table Game X) for “Best Puzzle Game,” “TTK” (Sable Digital) for “Best Innovation in Tech,” and “Piggy: Intercity” for “Best RPG.”

The branded-game category went to a collaboration between the viral title “Steal a Brainrot” and Sony Pictures’ “GOAT” franchise, built by studio Do Big, marking one of the more visible examples this year of a major entertainment property integrating directly into an existing Roblox experience rather than launching a standalone tie-in. On the creator side, Valkenheim won “Best UGC Creator,” and the YouTube-based creator Laughability won “Best Video Star.”

Alongside the awards, Roblox said it will launch a limited-time event called “The Hunt: Roblox 20” on September 17, tied to the platform’s 20th anniversary.

Awards Follow a Study Quantifying Creator Earnings

The RIAs land a week after Roblox released a U.S. economic impact study, conducted by the analysis firm Nordicity, that put a dollar figure on the kind of creator activity the awards are designed to celebrate. 

The study found Roblox creator activity generated $752 million in U.S. GDP in 2025, a 69% increase from 2024, and supported 7,525 full-time equivalent jobs, up 55% year over year. Nordicity attributed most of the increase to creators withdrawing a larger share of their platform earnings as cash: the average share of earnings left on the platform fell from 58% to 28% between the two years.

The same report estimated that Roblox creator activity has generated $2.37 billion in cumulative U.S. GDP since 2017, and that creators globally earned more than $1.5 billion in 2025, up from $923 million in 2024. Nordicity also found that a majority of 2025 creator payments (66%) went to ZIP codes where tech-worker concentration falls below the national average, suggesting Roblox development activity is not concentrated in traditional tech hubs.

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