Roblox (NYSE:RBLX) executives told investors the company delivered “spectacular” results in 2025, with fourth-quarter performance capped by strong global growth in bookings, revenue, and engagement. On the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings call, management also detailed platform investments spanning safety, discovery, infrastructure, and artificial intelligence, while providing bookings growth guidance for 2026 and outlining a shift in how it plans to guide beyond this year.
2025 results and Q4 performance
Co-founder and CEO David Baszucki said Roblox “significantly exceeded” its prior guidance in 2025, reporting revenue growth of 36% year-over-year and bookings growth of 55% year-over-year for the full year. He also pointed to platform-scale milestones, including a platform peak of 45 million concurrent users in August 2025 and a September 2025 peak of 25.4 million concurrent players for the experience “Steal a Brainrot.”
On engagement, Roblox said Q4 daily active users grew 69% year-over-year, while engagement reached 35 billion hours, up more than 88% year-over-year. Monthly unique payers were nearly 37 million, which Baszucki said was close to doubling from a year ago and also up sequentially.
Creator economics were also a focus. Baszucki said Q4 DevEx totaled $477 million, up 70% year-over-year, reflecting the 8.5% DevEx rate increase implemented in September. For full-year 2025, creators earned over $1.5 billion for the first time, and the top 1,000 creators earned an average of $1.3 million, up over 50% compared to a year ago.
Older audiences, genre expansion, and platform roadmap
Management repeatedly emphasized the opportunity to grow with older users. Baszucki said that after implementing age checking for users who participate in communication, the company found “a bigger growth opportunity in the 18+ demographic than previously assumed.” He estimated the 18-and-over cohort is growing at over 50% and monetizes 40% higher than younger cohorts. CFO Naveen Chopra echoed that view, noting the 18+ cohort in the U.S. is growing at more than 50%.
Baszucki described “novel game expansion” as Roblox’s framework for broadening genres and appealing to older audiences, highlighting technical work to support high-monetizing categories such as shooters, RPGs, sports, and racing. He also outlined infrastructure initiatives aimed at enabling high performance across devices, from low-end Android phones to higher-end PCs and consoles, including auto-translation to support multiple languages.
Among the technical features cited as supporting genre expansion were:
- A full cloud rollout of native streaming for 2D and 3D assets at various levels of detail.
- “SLIM,” which Roblox described as dynamically compositing complex assets in the cloud and delivering them at different levels of detail.
- Native Server Authority, which Baszucki said is important for competitive gaming.
- Custom Matchmaking to optimize latency, age, or social connection.
- An avatar system expansion planned for the first half of the year, including higher fidelity and more articulation.
Safety initiatives and age estimation rollout
Safety remained a prominent topic, with Baszucki emphasizing Roblox’s goal to “lead the world in online gaming safety and civility.” He highlighted that the company rolled out facial age estimation across the platform, saying Roblox is “unique in large platforms with over 100 million DAUs” in doing so.
In Q4, Roblox began a global rollout of age verification for access to communication in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. Baszucki said adoption has been strong, with about 60% of DAUs age-checked in those markets. He said the global rollout was completed in early January 2026, and as of January 31 the company had reached 45% penetration of global DAUs.
Baszucki also described plans to enhance reliability and reduce friction, including a move toward “continuous age estimation” that would incorporate additional signals such as play patterns, the social graph, and economic activity alongside facial age estimation. He said Roblox has enhanced matchmaking to cluster users based on age and skill level, and in response to questions about engagement impacts, he emphasized the opportunity to use age banding to improve matchmaking for both older users and teens.
AI as an accelerant across creation, discovery, and safety
Baszucki described Roblox as running “over 400 AI models” internally and said the company captures roughly “30,000 years of human interaction data” every day in a privacy-compliant manner to train models used for creation, safety, discovery, and translation. Among the AI initiatives cited were Cube 3D and an expansion into “4D” functional simulation, facial tracking for avatar animation, an open-sourced voice safety model as part of the ROOST consortium, and ongoing improvements to text filtering and translations.
He said AI contributed to discovery improvements in Q4, driving a double-digit increase in the number of unique experiences surfaced in the “Recommended for You” algorithm. Management said that in 2025, users engaged with over 24 unique experiences per month on average, up double digits from 2024. Baszucki also emphasized transparency with creators about the factors used for discovery.
On competitive concerns about AI-driven disruption, Baszucki framed AI as enabling Roblox to expand beyond gaming and emphasized the complexity of “3D cloud synchronization” and multiplayer communication technology compared with approaches “operating in video latent space rather than synchronized 3D multiplayer cloud space.”
2026 outlook, margin factors, and a shift in guidance philosophy
Chopra said Roblox has “more conviction than ever” in its ability to grow in excess of 20%, citing platform health, growth in older cohorts, near triple-digit international growth, and AI as a potential accelerant. For 2026, he guided to bookings growth of 22% to 26%, while noting the guidance does not assume a viral hit on the scale of “Grow a Garden” or “Steal a Brainrot” because such outcomes are difficult to predict.
On profitability, Chopra said at the high end of the bookings guidance range, margins are expected to be relatively flat year-over-year, while at the low end the company estimates a slight year-over-year decline. He attributed pressure to the full-year impact of the DevEx rate increase and planned investments in user and engagement growth, AI workloads, and “safety marketing” to educate users and parents. He added that some of these investments are being funded through operating leverage in COGS and fixed costs.
Chopra also said Roblox’s guidance implies another year of strong free cash flow growth, estimating 26% year-over-year free cash flow growth at the midpoint of guidance. He noted a slight uptick in capex as the company continues to deploy GPUs in its data centers and navigates inflation in memory prices.
In Q&A, Chopra addressed gross margin strength in Q4, pointing to two drivers: a tailwind from COGS as Roblox steered purchases of Robux to lower-cost platforms, and leverage from bookings growth against fixed costs. He said Roblox expects continued improvement in COGS rates over time as it shifts more business to lower-cost platforms, though the pace may not be linear.
Chopra also said Roblox will change its guidance approach: after providing detailed guidance for 2026, the company plans to shift toward quarterly guidance in 2027, citing the difficulty of forecasting the impact of future content hits over a 12-month horizon. On advertising, he said the business should see “pretty healthy growth” in 2026 but remains modest and is not expected to be a major contributor to the top line yet.
About Roblox (NYSE:RBLX)
Roblox Corporation operates Roblox, a user-generated online platform that enables people to create, share and monetize immersive 3D experiences and games. The core offering centers on Roblox Studio, a development environment that allows independent creators and studios to design interactive worlds using the company’s building tools and scripting language. Content on the platform spans games, virtual hangouts, branded experiences and live events, all delivered through a persistent social environment.
Roblox’s business model is built around its virtual economy and creator ecosystem.
