More than 150 million kids enter Roblox's world daily. That's the equivalent of a Super Bowl audience -- every day. The stock could gain 50% from here. By Adam Levine

In September, a quirky game called Steal a Brainrot hosted 25 million players at the same time on Roblox's global platform, surpassing a record set just months earlier by Roblox's prior hit, Grow a Garden. Since it came out in May, Steal a Brainrot has been played over 42 billion times.

Roblox's games are free to play, and the company has nothing to do with their creation. Roblox just provides the tools for making the games and the platform for their distribution, like a YouTube for games.

And, like YouTube years ago, Roblox is blowing up an industry.

"If you think about the disruption that YouTube brought to video and the idea that anybody could create, anybody could distribute, you didn't need $10 million, $20 million, $50 million budgets to create something," Manuel Bronstein, a Roblox advisor and the company's one-time chief product officer, tells Barron's. "We're doing the same for games."

Grow a Garden was made in a few days by an anonymous teenager. Compare that to the decade-plus that Take-Two Interactive Software has been working on its next version of Grand Theft Auto. The game, which has cost an estimated $1 billion to $2 billion to make, has been beset by delays, much to the chagrin of shareholders. The latest delay, announced in early November, erased $3.8 billion from the company's market value in one day.

Roblox, meanwhile, churns out new viral hits that are reaching ever-higher levels of popularity. Steal a Brainrot, an irony-filled game in which players collect fantastical creatures, became Roblox's third-most played in just six months. Other hot games are 99 Nights in the Forest, in which players try to survive killer deer and Grow a Garden, which is exactly as it sounds. The latest hit is Fish It!, which has been steadily rising up the charts for a year.

These titles build on the success of 2020 hit Brookhaven, where kids role-play life in the titular suburb. In total, the game has been played 75 billion times since it was launched.

On average, over 150 million users, mostly under 17 years old, were on Roblox daily in the third quarter, which is the seasonal peak of gameplay. That's the equivalent of the Super Bowl audience -- every day. There are millions of games, most of which are made possible by Roblox's easy-to-use programming tools.

"None of the top 100 would ever make it through the brainstorming meeting at a mobile game studio," developer Yonatan Raz-Fridman of game studio Supersocial tells Barron's. "They're almost exclusively games built by native Roblox developers."

Alex Hicks is a Roblox developer who had success making games when he was a teenager. "I grew up on it," he tells Barron's. "Coming home from school, I was excited to hop on, see what my friends were building, and they'd come look at what I was building." He now works with other developers across the world through a studio called Twin Atlas.

Zander Brumbaugh also saw early success. "I taught myself how to program on the platform and kind of just continued to iterate and eventually had some successful titles before I graduated high school." His games have been played over 500 million times, Brumbaugh, 23, says, and he has made $1 million off the platform this year. He now runs an analytics dashboard for other Roblox developers called Gamebeast.

Roblox generated $3.6 billion in revenue last year, but that number undercounts the platform's commercial power because the company recognizes most revenue over a two-year period, which is considered the average lifetime of a customer.

Because of that timing issue, Roblox's income statement is a sea of red. In the third quarter, the company lost $256 million on $1.4 billion of revenue, a per share loss of 37 cents. More important for a growth-stage software company, it banked $444 million in free cash flow.

Wall Street prefers to look at bookings, a real-time view of the money flowing into the platform. Those bookings totaled $4.4 billion last year and are forecast to grow 52% this year, to $6.6 billion.

So, how does a company that distributes free games bring in almost $7 billion in one year? Enter "Robux," the lifeblood of the Roblox economy.

Players use Robux to buy virtual goods for their avatars and to aid their progress in games, a now well-trodden business model for free-to-play games. On average, developers get around 20% to 25% of the dollar-value sales that originate from their games. Roblox also pays hefty processing fees for the Robux bought on Apple 's and Google's app stores. Increasingly, the company is moving those purchases to its own website, which will boost profits.

All told, Roblox has paid out roughly 43% of its bookings to developers and payment systems.

Over the past six years, total bookings have grown by an annualized 44%, with the low point coming in 2022 when kids emerged from the Covid-19 lockdowns. In the past two quarters, bookings have surged 51% and 70%, respectively.

Despite the upward trend, investors are still treating Roblox's success as a collection of one-off hits. The stock is down 36% from its September peak. Shares trade at about eight times estimated bookings for the next 12 months. That's a small premium to the seven times multiple being paid for slower-growing, hit-driven Electronic Arts. The maker of EA Madden NFL is being bought by a consortium of private-equity players for $55 billion.

But Roblox is a platform, not a hit maker, and it should be valued as such. As investors reassess the company's mission, shares could revisit their September high of $142, or 57% above recent levels.

Roblox was founded in 2004 by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel, who had spent years working on education software to simulate the physical world. Their original programs were used to study events such as two cars crashing or a soccer player heading a ball.

Students began using the physics platforms, which used 2-D blocks, to make games.

Today's Roblox still largely appeals to young people. But the Roblox demographic is aging up. In 2020, 42% of daily users were over 13, but they have represented a majority since 2021, and were almost two-thirds of users in the most recent quarter. According to the company's 2024 annual report, 44% of users were over 16 years old.

When Roblox went public in 2021, it put itself in the teeming conversation about the metaverse: "Some refer to our category as the metaverse, a term often used to describe the concept of persistent, shared, 3-D virtual spaces in a virtual universe," the company wrote. With the advent of increasingly powerful consumer computing devices, cloud computing, and high-bandwidth internet connections, the concept of the metaverse is materializing.

While the broader metaverse excitement has faded since then -- Meta Platforms and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have pulled back on their metaverse efforts to focus on artificial intelligence -- Roblox can credibly claim to have the world's biggest metaverse: millions of players meeting in a 3-D world and communicating in real time, with a digital economy backed by its own currency.

The core of Roblox is its game-development software called Roblox Studio, a free tool that enables people to quickly make a game. There are competing gaming platforms from Unity Software and Unreal Engine, but they're far more complicated and don't come with a built-in audience. Roblox Studio is the company's unique asset that drives developers to the platform.

Traditionally, developers need luck or a large marketing budget, says Janzen Madsen, head of Roblox studio Splitting Point, which bought a share of Grow a Garden from its anonymous creator. "With Roblox, you release a game, and if the game is good, the users will come. And there's nothing like that on the internet."

Hits rise to the top, the way they can on YouTube. Roblox has put a lot of effort into removing the friction of leaving one game and entering another. When users get bored, they hop off and find something else to play. The jump from one piece of content to another keeps Roblox sticky -- and very much like YouTube.

The YouTube and Roblox connection is more than symbolic; the companies have developed a mutually beneficial working relationship. In August, YouTube announced that Roblox-related videos had surpassed one trillion views.

Covid-19 was a seminal event for the company, with kids stuck at home -- and bored. During the peak 12 months of the pandemic, daily users rose 97%. As lockdowns ended, much of the videogame ecosystem saw a decline in activity, but Roblox still grew users by 31% in the following year. It has grown at an annualized rate of 34% since then.

Time on the platform, which surged during Covid, has held up since the pandemic, as well, another sign of Roblox's appeal. In the third quarter, Roblox users spent an average of almost three hours a day on the platform.

Roblox is driven by user-generated content, which means its gaming lineup is maturing along with users. As on YouTube, the content quickly adapts to cultural trends. For Gen Z and Gen Alpha users, Roblox is now as much for hanging out with friends as it is for gaming. In the first quarter, the company's content filters processed a daily average of 6.1 billion text messages and 1.1 billion hours of voice chat. Playing and role-playing with friends is crucial to the success of Roblox, and why life simulations like Brookhaven are so popular.

To be sure, Roblox's young demographic is also the platform's biggest risk. Two decades of social media history tells us that the reach and anonymity of the platforms facilitates predatory behavior. Social media companies are playing a game of Whac-A-Mole to stop bad actors.

And Roblox has faced its share of serious issues. Games with wildly inappropriate titles or content can get past the company's scrutiny and be live until someone reports it. There is bullying. Of most concern is predatory behavior by adults, and there have been a handful of real-world examples of child endangerment that began on Roblox.

Investors have initiated short positions on Roblox stock, arguing that the child-endangerment issues are an existential problem for the company. Attorneys general in three states have filed civil lawsuits against the company.

Should Roblox lose these cases, the penalties could add up quickly and imperil the company's image -- potentially leading to a moral panic.

Roblox says safety is the company's No. 1 priority. "Our goal is to make Roblox far safer than anything else you could be spending time on -- far safer than going to a playground, far safer than even going to school," Matt Kaufman, Roblox's chief safety officer, says.

Meanwhile, other social media like Facebook, YouTube, and X are relaxing their moderation policies, favoring free speech over user safety.

"It's not something that's solved with one particular piece of technology," Kaufman says. "Already this year, I think we've launched a hundred different significant changes to our safety system, and we're launching all the time."

Roblox just became the first social or communications platform to require that every user be filtered through an AI age estimate to use any of the communication features. The system will also keep chat segregated by age group. Users can still play the games without undergoing age estimation, but they won't be able to talk to anyone.

This is no panacea, because these age-estimation systems aren't 100% accurate, and Roblox will keep having to spend more on safety and add new layers of technology to the stack. Even if Roblox escapes the worst of the legal and moral consequences, continued spending growth for safety and moderation will impact its financials.

The focus on spending seemed to catch investors by surprise in the latest quarter. The company said its safety investments would lead to a profit-margin decline in 2026. "Bookings have grown faster than our ability to deploy the appropriate growth investments," Naveen Chopra, Roblox's chief financial officer, said on the company's earnings call in October. "But I think those investments really should give everyone even more confidence in our ability to continue to deliver sustainable long-term growth."

The stock dropped 16% on the report, and has continued to slide.

Roblox's focus on the future, though, has paid off for investors in the past.

In 2022, the company took the signal from the pandemic and decided to prepare for its next phase of growth by heavily investing in the platform, including its own cloud, which runs the Roblox back end. That year, expense growth far outpaced bookings, and it was the only year the company has shown a free-cash loss.

Investors wrote the business off as another pandemic flash in the pan, but the spending laid the groundwork for the company to handle the record 45 million players that came to Roblox at one time this past August.

Since 2022, bookings have nearly tripled, and the stock has jumped 288% from its May low that year.

Once again, Wall Street appears too pessimistic about the business. Analysts see Roblox's 2026 bookings growth returning to the 20% to 25% range that Roblox saw in 2023 and 2024. But the new viral hit machine could easily support growth of 30% to 40%.

Even some of Roblox's bears recognize the platform's long-term potential, including Clay Griffin of MoffettNathanson, who has one of the lower price targets for Roblox at $88.

"What's so difficult about Roblox is that it is kind of early innings; so much so that any kind of deviation between your view of the world for Roblox in 2030 and mine has this enormous impact on the valuation....It's one of those stocks where reasonable people can disagree."

Baillie Gifford is an investment management firm that has a sizable Roblox position built on its 2030 outlook for the company. Its managers "look for long-term structural shifts, societal changes, cultural winds of change as our backdrop to surface ideas," according to U.S. equity fund manager Dave Bujnowski. He thinks Roblox fits squarely in this category, as a part of a long-term trend of social, user-generated media moving into the territory of traditional media.

In his view, Roblox investment cycles like the one coming in 2026 are part of a long-term stance. "They invest in infrastructure, they invest in safety, they invest in [research and development], AI. They do not throw money at sales and marketing to buy growth."

Finally, there's a wild card on Roblox that could push the business into another realm: advertising. Almost all of Roblox's bookings come from sales of Robux. But it is also rolling out in-game advertising very slowly compared with what is happening in the rest of the mobile gaming industry, and it's still unclear how material this will be to the bottom line.

In touting a future metaverse, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg once said: "Creation, avatars, and digital objects are going to be central to how we express ourselves. This is going to lead to entirely new experiences and economic opportunities."

His company never got there, but Roblox already has -- and the game is just beginning.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com

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November 28, 2025 21:31 ET (02:31 GMT)

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