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Roblox Corp.’s valuation had been rising slowly and steadily until shooting up earlier this year.
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Roblox Corp.’s IPO instantly makes it one of the most valuable publicly traded video game publishers.
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Roblox Corp.’s revenues saw a large bump last year just as pandemic quarantines were going into effect.
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The number of total hours spent playing Roblox also saw a huge jump in 2020.
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Roblox revenues have risen in line with total player hours.
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Despite massive revenues, Roblox Corp. still hasn’t managed to make a profit in recent years.
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Over half of Roblox players are 12 or under, and a quarter are 9 or under, pointing to great growth potential as those players age.
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While lots of people create things in Roblox, very few of them are able to make money doing it.
Ars Technica
Yesterday, Roblox made good on its plans to go public, with employees and previous investors selling hundreds of millions of shares in a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange. In a private funding round in January, those shares were worth $45. When the market closed Wednesday, they were selling at $69.50, a price that valued Roblox Corp. as a whole at $45.3 billion (as of this writing, Roblox Corp.’s stock price peaked at $77.30 and currently sits at $72.72 in Thursday morning trading).
How did this company, whose single title has become a game platform unto itself, become worth more than major game publishers like Electronic Arts and Take-Two? To help answer that question, we put together this deep dive into the numbers that are powering the Roblox revolution. They paint a picture of a company with an extremely young and incredibly engaged user base that has ballooned during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. But Roblox is also a company that is struggling to convert its huge and growing annual revenues into profitability.
(Unless otherwise noted, numbers are sourced from SEC documents or Roblox’s own website)
Valuations
Roblox
- Jan. 2017: $500 million
- July 2018: $2.3 billion
- Feb. 2020: $3.9 billion
- Jan. 2021: $29.5 billion
- March 10, 2021: $45.3 billion
Other gaming companies (current valuations)
- Ubisoft: $9.58 billion
- Take-Two: $19.43 billion
- Electronic Arts: $38.09 billion
- Roblox: $45.3 billion
- Activision: $72.23 billion
- Tencent: $843.86 billion
Earnings
Revenue
- 2018: $312.8 million
- 2019: $488 million
- 2020: $923.9 million
Bookings
(i.e., total purchases or robux virtual currency, including robux not spent that year)
- 2018: $499 million
- 2019: $694.3 million
- 2020: $1.88 billion
Net losses
- 2018: $88.1 million
- 2019: $71 million
- 2020: $253.3 million
User base
Daily Active Users
- Q4 2018: 13.7 million
- Q1 2019: 15.8 million
- Q2 2019: 17.1 million
- Q3 2019: 18.4 million
- Q4 2019: 19.1 million
- Q1 2020: 23.6 million
- Q2 2020: 33.4 million
- Q3 2020: 36.2 million
- Q4 2020: 37.1 million
- $57.7: Average spending per daily active user in 2020
Total playtime
- 2018: 9.4 billion hours
- 2019: 13.7 billion hours
- 2020: 30.6 billion hours (2.6 hours per average daily active user per day)
Demographics
- 25%: Proportion of Roblox users under 9
- 29%: Proportion of Roblox users aged 9-12
- 13%: Proportion of Roblox users aged 13-16
- 16%: Proportion of Roblox users aged 17-24
- 14%: Proportion of Roblox users 25 or older
- 72%: Proportion of Roblox users playing on mobile platforms
- 25%: Proportion of Roblox users playing on PCs
- 3%: Proportion of Roblox users playing on game consoles
- 33%: Proportion of Roblox users from US and Canada
- 29%: Proportion of Roblox users from Europe
- 15%: Proportion of Roblox users from Asia
User-generated content
- 18 million: Total number of user-generated “experiences” Roblox Corp. says are on its platform
- 90%: Proportion of player hours spent on the top 1,000 most popular of those experiences
- 20 billion: Total number of visits/plays for “Adopt Me!” the most popular Roblox experience (Source)
- 8 million: Total number of active player-developers creating Roblox content
- 1.27 million: Number of those player-developers who generated in-game robux earnings from their creations in 2020
- 4,300: Player-developers who earned the equivalent of at least $350 in robux in 2020 (and qualified for the Developer Exchange Program to convert those robux to real money)
- 1,287: Player-developers who earned the equivalent of at least $10,000 in robux in 2020
- 305: Player-developers who earned the equivalent of at least $100,000 in robux in 2020
- 36: Player-developers who earned the equivalent of at least $1 million in robux in 2020
- 3: Player-developers who earned the equivalent of at least $10 million in robux in 2020
Total “exchange fees” paid to player-developers
- Q1 2018: $16.279 million
- Q2 2018: $16.495 million
- Q3 2018: $18 million
- Q4 2018: $21.1 million
- Q1 2019: $22.72 million
- Q2 2019: $23.29 million
- Q3 2019: $26.2 million
- Q4 2019: $39.76 million
- Q1 2020: $44.5 million
- Q2 2020: $85.05 million
- Q3 2020: $85.47 million
- Q4 2020: $113.71 million
- 36%: Percentage of total Roblox revenues paid in exchange fees to player-developers in 2020.
Listing image by Roblox
