Roblox Corporation (Roblox) operates a free to use immersive platform for connection and communication (the Roblox Platform or Platform), where every day, millions of users come to create, play, work, learn, and connect with each other in experiences built by its global community of creators.
The company’s Platform consists of the Roblox Client, the Roblox Studio, and the Roblox Cloud. Roblox Client is the application that allows users to seamlessly explore 3D immersive experiences. Roblox Stud...
Roblox Corporation (Roblox) operates a free to use immersive platform for connection and communication (the Roblox Platform or Platform), where every day, millions of users come to create, play, work, learn, and connect with each other in experiences built by its global community of creators.
The company’s Platform consists of the Roblox Client, the Roblox Studio, and the Roblox Cloud. Roblox Client is the application that allows users to seamlessly explore 3D immersive experiences. Roblox Studio is the free toolset that allows developers and creators to build, publish, and operate 3D immersive experiences and other content accessed with the Roblox Client. Roblox Cloud includes the services and infrastructure that power its Platform.
The company is constantly improving the ways in which its Platform supports shared experiences, ranging from how these experiences are built by an engaged community of developers and creators to how they are enjoyed and safely accessed by users across the globe.
Growth at Roblox has been driven primarily by a significant investment in technology and two mutually reinforcing network effects: content and social.
First, user-generated content, built by the company’s community of developers and creators, powers its Platform. As developers and creators build increasingly high-quality content, more users are attracted to the company’s Platform. With more users on the company’s Platform, greater engagement and monetization opportunities exist, which in turn, makes Roblox more attractive to developers and creators, incentivizing them to design increasingly engaging content and encouraging new developers and creators to start building on the company’s Platform.
Second, the company’s Platform is social. When users join, they typically interact with friends, which inspires them to invite more friends, who in turn, invite their friends, driving organic growth. The more friends that each of the company’s users have interacting on the Platform, the more valuable and engaging the Platform becomes. This drives more users to the company’s Platform through word of mouth from their existing friends on the Platform.
User and Creator Community
Roblox is powered by content from the company’s community of developers and creators who build immersive and engaging experiences found only on Roblox, as well as the vast majority of the items for customizing avatars. This content attracts the company’s users to immerse themselves in the millions of experiences found on the Platform. Many of the company’s users may also eventually become developers and creators, and nearly all developers and creators started as users.
Users
In the year ended December 31, 2024, 82.9 million average DAUs across over 180 countries enjoyed experiences on Roblox across mobile, desktop, and console platforms, of which on average, approximately 1.0 million were daily unique paying users. The company’s users are diversified across multiple dimensions, including age, geography, platform, and gender. Each day, users express themselves through their avatars, explore different worlds, and engage with others in the Roblox community. During the year ended December 31, 2024, users spent 73.5 billion hours engaged on its Platform, or an average of 2.4 hours per DAU each day. Over the same period, its users explored an average of over 21 different experiences on the Roblox Platform per month.
Developers and Creators
The company offers developers and creators the ability to build engaging, immersive experiences and marketplace items that they can easily share with the Roblox community. It refers to users who create experiences and marketplace items as creators, while developers represent a subset of the creator community that create experiences on the Platform or build and sell custom tools to help other developers create experiences. In this way, the company’s developers and creators enable it to offer a wide variety of experiences and avatar items and cost-effectively crowd-source its experiences, marketplace content, and developer tool ecosystem. In the year ended December 31, 2024, the company had millions of active developers with hours engaged in their experiences across more than 170 countries on the Roblox Platform. Its developer and creator community includes individuals with a wide spectrum of professional capabilities and team sizes, ranging from young students and independent hobbyists, all the way to full-time studios.
The company measures the health and success of its developer and creator community based on their earnings and the user engagement in their experiences. As the company’s Platform has scaled, its monetizing developers and creators have enjoyed meaningful earnings expansion over time, reflecting the increasing popularity and opportunities for monetization of its Platform and driving a growing incentive for its developers and creators to continue to build high-quality content.
The company offers its creator and developer community several economic models to help support their goals. Specifically, developers and creators can generate earnings (either in Robux or in some circumstances, directly in fiat currency) through the following methods:
Monetizing a developed experience: Developers qualified for the company’s Developer Exchange Program can earn Robux through:
In-experience purchases, which consist of microtransactions generated from the sale of in-experience virtual items, subscription-based offerings (including access to private servers), access to certain experiences (referred to as paid access), and/or passes granting special in-experience privileges.
Engagement-Based Payouts, which allows developers to earn Robux based on the share of time that Roblox Premium subscribers engage in their experience.
Advertisements (“ads”), which include a range of high-quality, programmatically served ad units through which developers can earn Robux from impressions and/or teleports generated.
Creating and selling or reselling avatar items: Creators can create and sell entire avatars, accessories, clothes, bodies, and heads for avatars in the Marketplace or inside experiences.
Creating and selling Roblox Studio plugins: Through the Creator Store, developers and creators can sell Roblox Studio plugins in fiat currency, which are extensions that add additional features or functionality to Roblox Studio and help improve creator workflows.
Affiliate Programs: Influencers and creators can earn a share of Robux from purchases made by users they direct to Roblox.
As of December 31, 2024, over 24,500 developers and creators qualified for and were registered in the company’s Developer Exchange Program, of which over 7,500 were newly qualified and registered during 2024. In order to be qualified for the company’s Developer Exchange Program and eligible to exchange earned Robux for fiat currency, developers and creators must meet certain conditions, such as having earned the minimum amount of Robux required to qualify for the program, a verified developer account, and an account in good standing. For the year ended December 31, 2024, over 17,000 developers and creators actually exchanged their earned Robux for fiat currency through its Developer Exchange Program.
The company invests in its developers and creators by providing a comprehensive set of free tools and services through Roblox Studio, the Roblox Open Cloud, and a range of other creator resources that enable them to easily build, publish, analyze, grow, and monetize experiences. The company empowers developers and creators to get started with minimal upfront costs as it covers hosting, storage, customer support, localization, certain regulatory requirements, payment processing, and platform fees. The company provides appropriate support for all developers and creators to promote engagement and growth in its developer and creator community. This includes managing and moderating its online developer and creator forums and operating special programs for aspiring and top developers and creators, such as its annual Roblox Developers Conference. With Roblox Open Cloud, developers and creators can leverage a suite of backend APIs to seamlessly build and scale their experiences.
Products and Technology
The Roblox Platform is the underlying technology and infrastructure that supports shared experiences and is composed of three elements:
Roblox Client—The free application that allows users to explore 3D immersive experiences.
Roblox Studio—The free toolset that allows developers and creators to build, publish, and operate 3D immersive experiences and other content accessed with the Roblox Client.
Roblox Cloud—The services and infrastructure that power the Roblox Client and Roblox Studio.
The company’s technology supports the following key characteristics of the Roblox Platform: Identity, Connection and Communication, Immersive, Low Friction, Variety of Content, Anywhere, Economy, and Safety.
Identity
The Roblox avatar system allows users to create and personalize their unique 3D identities. Its avatar technology supports a wide variety of character styles, ranging from classic avatars with blocky body shapes, to ones with more human proportions, from anime characters to fantasy avatars, and more. Avatars can also be animated and mirror a user’s movements and facial expressions on the avatar in real time, allowing more interactive and authentic communication. Creators can also build avatar creation tools in their experiences, allowing users to create more personalized avatars.
The Roblox Client features the Avatar Editor, which enables users to manipulate the size and body shape of their avatars, as well as equip their avatar with clothing, gear, animations, simulated gestures, or emotes, and other accessories from the Marketplace. Its avatar system allows users to attach practically any accessory to any avatar maximizing the combinatorial variety of avatar configurations supported by the Platform. Users manipulate their avatar through a consistent set of controls for emotes, basic movement, and tap-to-move functionality which adapts to dynamically changing virtual environments. The Roblox Client normalizes camera and avatar control inputs from different device form factors, including mobile, tablet, desktop, and game console, to simplify the process of building multi-user, multi-platform, and avatar-based experiences.
Connection and Communication
The Roblox Client allows users to easily connect with real life friends (through features, such as contact importer) and meet new friends (by matching users with similar characteristics, such as country location, for example). The social graph created by these connections is stored in the Roblox Cloud and requires mutual opt-in to avoid unwanted communications.
The social graph is central to human connection and communication. When a user chooses to join an experience, the Roblox Cloud is designed to automatically place that user into the same virtual environment as others connected through the social graph. In addition, most developers allow users to purchase private servers that allow groups of friends to share an exclusive, invite-only instance of a 3D immersive experience.
Additionally, the Roblox Platform facilitates communication with in-experience text-based chat amongst users of all ages joining the same 3D immersive experience. For safety, every text message passes through filters that block content which violates applicable Roblox Community Standards (e.g. personally identifiable information or directing users off platform). Using advanced pattern matching and machine learning, its chat filters are constantly evolving and process billions of messages per day.
The company also expanded its communication features through voice chat, available in over 30 countries around the world and in several supported languages, allowing users aged 13 and over to communicate using their voice in Roblox experiences. This proximity-based feature simulates realistic communication through lip sync and is based on how close users are in an experience to other users who are speaking in that experience. In addition, avatar animation allows all users to use their camera to animate their avatar with their movement, allowing them to communicate and express themselves in more natural, real-time, and immersive ways.
Recently, the company launched Party, a new way to connect and coordinate with friends. With Party, up to six friends can easily join the same instance of an experience and even move together from one experience to another. Users aged 13 and older can also use Party chat to text chat with one another.
Immersive
The Roblox Platform allows developers to build deeply immersive 3D environments where users can share synchronous experiences with others, independent of where they may be physically. The Roblox Client provides users with intuitive camera and input controls that are tuned for each device’s form factor. By abstracting these controls from developers, the process of building cross platform 3D immersive experiences is greatly simplified.
Developers use Roblox Studio to easily build 3D immersive experiences that are then rendered and simulated on the Roblox Platform. The Roblox Client leverages efficient low-level hardware-specific device APIs, such as Vulkan for Android devices and Metal for Apple devices, to efficiently render those experiences. Each experience combines thousands of meshes, textures, 3D models, and animations. Using Roblox Studio, developers can also insert immersive ads into their experiences, which are native and 3D ad units that can programmatically serve ads in image, video, and portal ad formats.
Each 3D immersive experience is simulated in the Roblox Cloud with a custom physics engine built for rigid body and constraint-based physics. Using a combination of novel mathematical formulations and aggressive optimization, the engine can simulate a large number of complex mechanisms at high levels of fidelity. To achieve an optimal balance between latency, scale, and consistency, computations for the simulation are distributed across Roblox Clients and the Roblox Cloud.
Assets that make up the 3D immersive experience are stored in a persistent tree hierarchy that is the foundation for collaborative editing and interactive multi-user experiences. The hierarchy can be modified through APIs which serve as a powerful abstraction layer making it easy to create experiences that are consistent across all Roblox Clients, regardless of device type. During simulation, this data is dynamically replicated within the Roblox Cloud and selectively transmitted to Roblox Clients. The Roblox Client then constructs and renders its own view of the 3D immersive experience.
Low Friction
The Roblox Platform gives users the ability to interact with experiences almost instantly, on most popular client devices, and from anywhere in the world over existing broadband and cellular networks. As of December 31, 2024, the Roblox Client operates on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, and virtual reality (VR) hardware, such as Meta Quest, and supports VR experiences on PC. With the Roblox Platform, developers can build an experience once and then expect that experience to operate consistently on all supported devices to both take advantage of the capabilities of high end systems and also scale down the experience to work on lower end devices. The company continually focuses on improving frame rates, increasing stability, and enhancing graphics quality.
The Roblox Client is designed for the rapid movement of users between experiences. Almost immediately upon launching a new experience, the Roblox Client will begin simulating and rendering the virtual world using a partial representation of the environment at a low level of detail. As more and higher fidelity assets are received by the Roblox Client, the fidelity of the experience automatically improves.
Assets are delivered to the Roblox Client through geographically distributed content delivery networks. The Roblox Cloud determines the format, level of detail, and priority of each asset sent in order to optimize for the capabilities and bandwidth available to the client device. The Roblox Client can dynamically load and unload instances and assets as the player moves throughout the experience without waiting for long content preloads, in a process otherwise referred to as streaming. All else being equal, streaming enables faster join times and larger, more complex experiences that can be joined synchronously on different devices regardless of device memory capacity.
The Roblox Cloud enables low-latency, responsive interactivity between millions of concurrent users within 3D environments. When a user joins a 3D immersive experience, the Roblox Cloud assigns that user to a particular game instance based on, among other considerations, the user’s social graph, geographic location, spoken language, and age group. Roblox Cloud is designed to automatically scale up and down the number and size of server instances to effectively serve the current user demand for an experience, thereby allowing the Platform to scale up to handle the most popular experiences while also scaling down when demand reduces. Developers can choose to allow up to 200 users within an instance but may choose fewer to optimize their experience.
Developers have access to high-speed data stores in the Roblox Cloud where information about users and each simulated environment can be persisted. This, along with other services hosted in the Roblox Cloud, make it possible for a developer to build, launch, scale and monetize a 3D immersive experience without any additional tools or services.
The majority of services operated by the Roblox Cloud are hosted in Roblox managed data centers. For some of its high-speed databases, scalable object storage, and message queuing services it leverages Amazon Web Services. Nearly all of the servers tasked with simulating the virtual environment and optimizing assets for Roblox Clients are owned by Roblox and operate from data centers and regional edge data centers widely distributed across 23 cities in North America, the Asia-Pacific, and Europe. As of December 31, 2024, the Roblox Cloud used over 140,000 servers. The Roblox Cloud is designed to be fault tolerant and prepared for disaster recovery and the company continues to expand into multiple data centers within and across geographic regions to improve reliability and fault tolerance.
Data centers in the Roblox Cloud are linked through a high-performance dedicated backbone network bypassing the public internet for traffic within and between the company’s data centers and it operates under an open peering policy where it has direct interconnection with Internet providers globally. Operating its own network maximizes performance, security, and increases the immersiveness experienced by its users.
Variety of Content
Developers and creators build nearly all of the content for the Roblox Platform, including a variety of experiences from gaming, to education, to entertainment, and beyond. Their efforts contribute to an expanding content library that included over 14 million active experiences and millions of available Marketplace items during the year ended December 31, 2024.
Developers build, publish, and operate 3D immersive experiences with Roblox Studio, a free suite of tools accessible to all skill levels. Teams can work together using built-in access control management and collaborative editing. Once content is built, it can be replicated and shared across multiple experiences, giving developers the ability to scale their efforts and make rapid updates.
In addition to constructing 3D objects and environments, developers can script complex behaviors into their experience with Roblox Luau. Based on Lua, an interpreted light-weight programming language popular in the gaming industry, Roblox Luau adds an optional static type of system and a highly optimized interpreter that maximizes performance on Roblox Clients and in the Roblox Cloud. Using scripts, developers can modify the environment, control object behavior, and create new ways for users to interact with the virtual environment. Within Roblox Studio, developers have access to a powerful script editor which supports autocomplete, debugging, and the ability to emulate the Roblox Client running on supported devices.
Roblox Studio also leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to help reduce friction for creators and developers, making it easier to build content on the Platform. These AI tools help developers and creators with varying levels of experience. For example, AI tools, such as Assistant help beginner developers and creators by answering common questions, while AI tools, such as Code Assist or Materials Generator help developers and creators with some coding experience learn how to write and improve code and easily create more complex materials. Finally, AI tools like Avatar Auto-Setup save creators time by turning 3D avatar models into animated avatar technology.
Creators can share their work with other creators through the Creator Store. The Creator Store drives collaboration within its developer community, accelerates creation of new experiences, and provides additional ways for creators to monetize their work. As of December 31, 2024, the Creator Store contained millions of models, meshes, textures, scripts, audio clips, developer tools, and packaged combinations of these items.
The company provides developers with reference material, tutorials, community forums, and analytics to build their creations. Creator Hub includes reference material, API documentation, and tutorials for developers. Developer Forum is a private forum for qualified developers which provides insight on new features, community initiatives, recruitment opportunities, bug reporting, and direct engagement with its employees. Edu Hub provides content for educators, students, and parents who are using Roblox as a tool to learn coding, 3D designs, and digital civility. All developers on the Roblox Platform have access to dashboards that show daily visits to their experience, as well as earned Robux generated from their experience and Marketplace items.
Within the Roblox Client, users find experiences through personalized content recommendations, curated homepage sorts and search. Personalized AI-driven content recommendations are based on past user behavior, the social graph, and demographic information collected at signup. An emphasis is always placed on experiences where someone you are connected with is present. The search engine automatically learns user intent, accounting for misspellings, slang, and multilingual queries.
Anywhere
The Roblox Platform serves a global audience. In the year ended December 31, 2024, developers from over 170 countries and users spanning over 180 countries accessed its Platform.
Localization systems embedded within the Roblox Client and Roblox Cloud help to lower cultural barriers and enable the company’s developers to meet certain regional requirements with little to no additional effort.
Developers can build experiences in their native language and then, using machine translation and advanced pattern recognition, the Roblox Cloud automatically translates those experiences into 16 languages, including simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Developers also have the ability to customize all or part of their translations if needed.
The Roblox Client can adjust a user’s experience and available content based on their age, device type, current location and where the client application was obtained. This allows Roblox to dynamically apply relevant content filters, anti-addiction rules, payment limits, parental consent requirements, and certain other regional requirements.
Economy
Roblox has a vibrant economy built on a virtual currency called Robux, which can be purchased through the Roblox Client and Roblox website or through prepaid cards purchased via online and physical retailers. Roblox works with multiple payment and prepaid card processors, including Apple, Blackhawk, Google, Incomm, and Stripe, amongst others. Roblox relies on payment processor partners to store account information.
Users can also acquire Robux through a monthly subscription to Roblox Premium. With a subscription, users receive discounted Robux along with access to exclusive or discounted items in the Marketplace. Developers may also choose to offer additional benefits to active Roblox Premium subscribers in the form of discounted virtual merchandise or access to exclusive in-experience features.
Developers and creators earn Robux by selling virtual content or access to virtual content (including through subscriptions), as well as through the incorporation of immersive ads into their experiences, which are ad units that developers can insert into their experience for Roblox to programmatically serve ad content from advertisers.
Developers can also earn Robux through Engagement-Based Payouts based on the share of time that Roblox Premium users engage in their experiences. Engagement-Based Payouts incentivize developers to invest in the engagement of their experiences. The payout system is designed to protect against fraud and computes a developer’s earnings potential on a daily basis.
Roblox allows developers and creators to convert earned Robux into the fiat currency of their choice through its Developer Exchange Program. All Developer Exchange Program requests are reviewed on a risk-based approach to mitigate fraud and money laundering. Developers and creators participating in the program are required to create an account with its third party vendor which collects tax information, conducts certain know your customer related diligence, and executes the payouts. Additionally, developers and creators aged 13 and up can convert earned Robux into ad credits to purchase ads on the Platform.
Safety
Multiple systems are integrated into the Roblox Platform to promote the safety and civility of its users. These systems are designed to enforce the company’s policies, protect users’ personal information, and abide by local laws. It leverages text-filtering, voice moderation, content moderation, and other automated systems that proactively identify content and behaviors that may violate its policies.
Content submitted by developers and creators, including images, audio, and video, goes through a multi-step review process before appearing on the Platform. Images and videos are evaluated for Child Sexual Abuse Material using PhotoDNA and Google’s Content Safety API with flagged content automatically reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children upon review. Audio files are scanned for IP infringement. Finally, all assets are subject to review by humans or AI trained on its Community Standards. During the year ended December 31, 2024, including automated reviews, the company evaluated over 400 million assets. Assets refer to images, audio files, and video files that developers upload to the Roblox Platform to include in their experiences and in the Marketplace.
When experiences are published or updated on the Roblox Platform, they are evaluated by a suite of AI driven tools that identify problematic language, potential bypasses to its safety systems, and content that falls outside its policies. A human review team is continuously operating to evaluate flagged experiences. The Roblox Platform includes a suite of anti-intruder technology leveraging machine learning, throttles, and circuit breakers designed to block automated bot attacks and mitigate the impact of humans who attempt to spam users and disrupt the service. The company also leverages targeted penetration testing, a bug bounty program, code reviews, secure by design principles, targeted security testing, and vulnerability scanning to promote the security of the Platform.
Roblox operates a customer service portal that provides self-help information along with ways to contact Roblox via email or from within the Roblox Client. In the year ended December 31, 2024, Roblox responded to millions of customer inquiries and had a human respond to actionable safety issues on average within 18 minutes of their submission.
Safety and Digital Civility
The company’s highest priority is to create a safe and civil online environment for its users. Because the company’s Platform includes children aged 5 and over, its safety and civility policies are purpose-built to be strict. It has a multi-layered moderation system that is designed to assess all content uploaded to Roblox for potential safety and civility issues. The company’s safety and civility policies, which include its Community Standards, define acceptable content and communication, and coupled with user behavior, inform a wide range of AI algorithms that automatically moderate content. Those algorithms are backed up by a team of thousands of moderators focused on improving quality and handling the most difficult decisions. On top of that, it has robust user reporting that provide additional coverage.
The company works with regulators, authorities, and safety groups in many countries. The company endeavors to promptly report any suspected child exploitation or abuse materials to the relevant authorities. The company’s Platform is designed to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and it regularly monitors and evaluates compliance with other U.S. federal and state and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy and data protection, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The company partners with leading global organizations focused on child and internet safety, including the WeProtect Global Alliance, Digital Wellness Lab, Family Online Safety Institute, UK Safer Internet Centre, Internet Matters, the Internet Watch Foundation, and kidSAFE, among others. The company is also a member of various organizations, such as the Association for United Kingdom Interactive Entertainment and the Technology Coalition, with a goal of cross-industry collaboration, knowledge and technology exchange in areas of user safety, and child safety. As a member of the Technology Coalition and a founding member of its cross-platform signal sharing Lantern program, it is committed to providing transparency and promoting child safety online. The company also nominates the board chair position of the Family Online Safety Institute where it educates and provides balanced perspectives to policy makers to help draft thoughtful online safety legislation. The company continues to work diligently with other digital platforms to report bad actors and inappropriate content so that they can also take appropriate actions on their platforms.
Trust & Safety Systems
The company uses AI and a dedicated team of human moderators to review content, including images, audio, and video, uploaded into its Platform. The company’s scanning algorithms also review and monitor communications that flow through Roblox to proactively block and protect users from inappropriate behavior, such as questions about personal information and instructions on how to connect on less protective third-party chat applications. The algorithms in its chat filters are age-sensitive: they monitor both what users can say and see based on their ages.
Throughout the company’s site and in-experience, it provides its users with the ability to report activity that they find objectionable. The company also provides parents with customizable parental controls, which allow them to limit access to features like chat, control screen time, and view their child’s friends list. In addition, parents can restrict access to experiences based on their content maturity levels. In 2024, it introduced significant updates to its safety systems and parental controls. As part of this launch, the company introduced remote management, which allows parents and caregivers to adjust controls and review their child’s activity even if they aren’t physically together. It also updated the naming of its content labels to give parents greater clarity and restricted access to certain experiences for its youngest users based on user behavior sometimes found in those experiences.
The company has a dedicated team and thousands of trust & safety agents whose role is to protect its users by focusing on detecting inappropriate content and behavior 24/7 through a combination of AI and human moderation. The company takes swift action to address any content, developer, creator, or user that violates its terms of use once detected. It has a Safety Advisory Board, made up of global industry experts that advise on the best practices to protect its community.
The company continues to innovate and release new safety features and policies and invest in technology and people to combat bad actors who attempt to undermine its efforts to connect millions of people. The company’s priority remains the safety and digital civility of its community.
The Roblox Economy
The company supports its developer and creator community by providing the tools to build, publish, operate, drive discovery, and monetize content. The company’s economy enables developers and creators to generate income through Roblox. As of December 31, 2024, over 24,500 developers qualified for and were registered in its Developer Exchange Program and therefore met certain conditions, such as having earned the minimum amount of Robux required to qualify, having a verified developer account, and having an account in good standing, and were therefore eligible to exchange their earned Robux for fiat currency. Of such developers and creators, for the year ended December 31, 2024, over 17,000 developers and creators actually exchanged their earned Robux for fiat currency through its Developer Exchange Program.
Business Model
When users sign up for Roblox, they can create an avatar and explore the vast majority of the company’s experiences for free, although the business model for any given experience is ultimately up to its developer. Most free experiences allow users to spend Robux by purchasing experience-specific enhancements. Users can also use Robux to obtain items, such as clothing, accessories, and emotes from its Marketplace or within an experience. Roblox retains a portion of every Robux transaction and distributes the rest to developers and creators. Robux can only be purchased from it at a price set by it and can only be spent within its Platform. Robux have no monetary or intrinsic value outside of the company’s Platform and can only be converted to fiat currency through its Developer Exchange Program. It is aware that some users seek to use unauthorized third-party websites to exchange Robux for fiat currency which is not permitted under its terms of use. The company regularly monitors and screen usage of its Platform with the aim of identifying and preventing these activities, as well as regularly send cease-and desist letters to operators of third-party websites offering fraudulent Robux or digital goods offers.
Consistent with the company’s free to use business model, a small portion of its users have historically been payers. For example, in the year ended December 31, 2024, of the company’s average 82.9 million DAUs, only approximately 1.0 million represented its average daily unique paying users. Roblox also allows developers, creators, and brands to reach their audiences by purchasing ads. Further, Roblox offers sponsored experiences and sponsored items, whereby developers and creators can pay to purchase ads to increase discoverability of their creations, which appear where experiences and items are discovered, including through search.
Growth Strategies
The company is continually innovating the Roblox Platform, including making significant investments in high fidelity avatars, more realistic experiences, AI tools, and other social features, as well as more diverse opportunities for monetization. The company is focused on the following key growth strategies:
Roblox Everywhere: The company wants to give users the ability to interact with experiences almost instantly across the most popular client devices. As of December 31, 2024, the Roblox Client operated on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, and VR hardware, such as Meta Quest, and supports VR experiences on PC.
Platform for Everyone: As the company expands the diversity of content, experiences, and communications that people can have on Roblox there is significant potential to increase its penetration and engagement across all demographics. The company ultimately intends to be a brand that serves everyone. It also looks to continue expanding new verticals, such as brand partnerships, education, and communication.
International Expansion: There is significant potential for the company to grow the global reach of its Platform. In addition, the company is investing in technology that will also enhance its growth around the world.
Vibrant Economy: There is significant potential to increase monetization on its Platform and it is constantly investing in new ways to empower its developer and creator community. The company is actively working on empowering its creator community through initiatives, such as User-Generated Content (UGC) for all and dynamic price floors in the avatar marketplace. The company is also supporting its developer community’s monetization efforts through in-experience price optimization recommendations, higher revenue shares for paid access experiences, and its Creator Affiliate Program. At the platform-level, it is continuously investing in its Search and Discovery algorithms to advance personalization and drive engagement and spending. Finally, the company expects to continue working with leading brands to build unique commerce opportunities and help them reach their audiences at scale within Roblox experiences through immersive ads. Its immersive ads system is designed to be native to the experience in which it is placed and will provide unique commerce opportunities for brands on the Platform. Immersive ads also provide developers and creators with another monetization method on the Platform.
Gaming Market Expansion: There is a strong potential to capture a greater percentage of global gaming revenue within the Roblox ecosystem. According to Newzoo’s 2024 Global Games Market Report, it is estimated that 3 billion people will have played games in 2024. Additionally, the company continues to innovate behind the scenes to improve the raw performance, quality, and cost-to-serve efficiency of its core Platform, with the goal of making it as easy as possible for creators to build better experiences, including games, and reach more users. Within the traditional gaming ecosystem, it also has a tremendous opportunity to expand content into new genres. Today, genres, such as Avatar Roleplay, Simulation, and Survival are popular on its Platform, and it wants to help its creators grow into untapped areas of demand, such as Shooter, Sports & Racing, and RPG experiences.
Brand and Marketing
The company has millions of experiences to choose from on Roblox, and developers continue to build new experiences on the Platform and publish them daily. As experiences on the Platform grow in popularity, this success accrues to the Roblox brand and serves to draw in new audiences. Its approach is to amplify these experiences on both earned and owned channels which builds awareness and affinity for Roblox. This approach includes educating its creators, users, and brands on the Platform’s capabilities and innovations, all of which elevates each stakeholder’s experience.
The company operates a highly efficient marketing model. Its approach is highly organic, with its user, creator and developer adoption driven by mutually reinforcing content and social network effects. The company also leverages its influencer community to increase brand awareness and its reach across all age demographics. In 2024, the company launched an Affiliate Program whereby influencers and creators can earn a share of Robux from purchases made by users they direct to Roblox.
Competition
The company competes for users and their engagement hours with global technology leaders, such as Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Google, Microsoft, and Tencent; global entertainment companies, such as Comcast, Disney, ViacomCBS, and Warner Bros Discovery; global gaming companies, such as Activision Blizzard (owned by Microsoft), Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Epic Games, Krafton, and Valve; online content platforms, including Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube; and social platforms, such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, X (formerly known as Twitter), Reddit, Discord, and Snap.
The company competes for developers and creators and engineering talent with gaming platforms, such as Epic Games, Unity, Meta Platforms, and Valve Corporation, who provide developers and creators the ability to create or distribute interactive content.
Seasonality
The company has historically experienced seasonality in monetization on its Platform and tend to generate higher levels of bookings in the fourth quarter (year ended December 31, 2024) of the year primarily due to the end-of-year holiday season. It also typically sees higher levels of engagement in the months of June, July, and August, which are summer periods in the northern hemisphere, and lower levels of engagement in the post-summer months of September, October, and November.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company owned more than 180 U.S. patents relating to aspects of its actual or contemplated operations and technologies. Its issued patents are scheduled to expire between 2025 and 2043. The company also had more than 260 pending patent applications in the U.S. and abroad.
The company has registered Roblox, Robux, and its corporate logo as trademarks in the U.S. and other jurisdictions. In total (including its subsidiary entities), it is the owner of over 460 trademark filings and have over 20 trademark applications in the U.S. and foreign countries as of December 31, 2024. As of December 31, 2024, the company was the registered holder of over 790 domestic and international domain names. It continually monitors the registration of its domain names, trademarks, and service marks in the U.S. and in certain locations outside the U.S.
Security, Privacy, Data Protection and Regulatory Matters
The company relies on a variety of statutory and common-law frameworks and defenses relevant to the content available on its service, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Communications Decency Act, and the fair-use doctrine in the U.S., and the Digital Services Act in the European Union (EU). However, each of these statutes and regulations are subject to uncertain or evolving judicial interpretation, regulatory guidance and enforcement, and legislative amendments.
The company is also subject to the U.S. federal and state and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy and data protection, including with respect to the collection, storage, sharing, use, processing, transfer, disclosure, and protection of personal data. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), went into effect on January 1, 2020. The CCPA requires covered companies to, among other things, provide new disclosures to California consumers, and afford such consumers new abilities to opt-out of the sale of personal information. Additionally, the California Privacy Rights Act (“CPRA”) became effective on January 1, 2023. The CPRA significantly modifies the CCPA, potentially resulting in further uncertainty and requiring the company to incur additional costs and expenses in an effort to comply.
History
Roblox Corporation was founded in 2004. The company was incorporated under the laws of the state of Delaware in 2004.
