When 11-year-old Giselle logs onto the online gaming platform Roblox after school, she usually plays horror or survival games.
She plays very often, but has tight limits on what she can spend.
“I get Robux once a year, because it’s getting expensive because of inflation,” she said. Birthday gifts, or making a slideshow justifying the purchase for her dad, are her only way to buy the platform’s virtual currency — which are used for in-game purchases, power-ups, and accessories for the players’ blocky avatars.
Giselle is representative of Roblox’s core user-base: loyal, cash-poor, and very young. The company — which claims that half of all US children under 16 play on its platform — is far from profitable. But It’s betting that as players like her spend more time on the platform — across hours, years, and stages of life — they’ll eventually start spending more money too.
Over the third quarter, the company’s daily active users grew 70 percent year-over-year, powered largely by those 13 and older, whose DAUs rose 89 percent.
Despite this surge, Roblox reported a net loss of $257 million in Q3 and is on track to report roughly $950 million in losses for 2025 and $4 billion in revenue. Last year, the video game platform lost $935 million despite bringing in a similar $3.6 billion.
“Over time as the content improves and our platform functionality gets better, we expect more users to become payers and for payers, on average, to increase their purchase of Robux,” the company wrote in the prior earnings report, referring to the in-game currency.
This promise to investors follows a familiar tech playbook: build the audience first, figure out monetization later — and so far, the market is buying in. Roblox’s stock is up 93 percent over the past year, currently trading at $107, outpacing the broader S&P 500 Index and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index.
But right now, only about 1 in 80 players buys Robux, the company’s virtual currency which can be purchased on the website, app, or via gift card. The average amount of real dollars spent by gamers over the fiscal quarter remained nearly flat at $12.68 from Q2 to Q3. As of the latest earnings report, bookings — or Robux bought — are up 70 percent over last year with the company bringing in nearly $2 billion. But much of the money goes directly back to developers who make the games enjoyed on the platform.
A central part of Roblox’s current and future success is its community of developers, the people who build the games. BMO Capital Markets estimates earnings for developers will grow by nearly 48 percent year-over-year to $1.36 billion in 2025. More than 17,000 creators exchanged Robux for cash last year. And, according to the company’s Creator Hub, the top one hundred developers made an average of $6 million over the past 12 months from their work on Roblox.
“There is a lot of money that flies around Roblox,” said Sam, a developer in the program and former intern at Roblox. “It’s a very nice deal — like, it pays your rent still somehow.”
Analysts like Brian Pitz at BMO Capital Markets see Roblox’s investment in developers as a strategic hedge in a new era of gaming dominated by user-generated content.
“Similarly to creators and influencers gaining importance in social media, UGC developers and creators are gaining influence and significance in the video game sector,” Pitz wrote, arguing that Roblox’s competitive payout structure, and recent 8.5 percent raise to creators, could help it lure and retain top talent.
Roblox CEO Bazzucchi echoed that optimism on the Q3 earnings call, highlighting the “ability of a new creator or an existing creator to make enormous economic returns.” Already, in the first nine months of 2025, developers earned over $1 billion, a staggering amount for a company already in the red.
To make up for those losses, one might think the company would turn to advertising. But for now, executives insist they’re taking things slow.
“We remain very bullish about the long-term opportunities there,” said Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra on the company’s third-quarter earnings call, referring to advertising. “But we are cautious about them in the near term, because we want to make sure that we get it right”
As Roblox’s audience “ages up” into the 13+ and 17+ brackets, the platform will gain room for more advertising integrations, mature content, and social gameplay. “Their average user age is higher than it used to be,” said Alicia Reese, senior vice president of equity research at Wedbush. “They’ll be able to advertise to their older players, and there are a lot of opportunities to do that in a thoughtful and careful way.”
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A central part of Roblox’s current and future success is its community of developers, the people who build the games. BMO Capital Markets estimates earnings for developers will grow by nearly 48 percent year-over-year to $1.36 billion in 2025. More than 17,000 creators exchanged Robux for cash last year. And, according to the company’s Creator Hub, the top one hundred developers made an average of $6 million over the past 12 months from their work on Roblox.
“There is a lot of money that flies around Roblox,” said Sam, a developer in the program and former intern at Roblox. “It’s a very nice deal — like, it pays your rent still somehow.”
Analysts like Brian Pitz at BMO Capital Markets see Roblox’s investment in developers as a strategic hedge in a new era of gaming dominated by user-generated content.
“Similarly to creators and influencers gaining importance in social media, UGC developers and creators are gaining influence and significance in the video game sector,” Pitz wrote, arguing that Roblox’s competitive payout structure, and recent 8.5 percent raise to creators, could help it lure and retain top talent.
Roblox CEO David Baszucki echoed that optimism on the Q3 earnings call, highlighting the “ability of a new creator or an existing creator to make enormous economic returns.” Already, in the first nine months of 2025, developers earned over $1 billion, a staggering amount for a company already in the red.
To make up for those losses, one might think the company would turn to advertising. But for now, executives insist they’re taking things slow.
“We remain very bullish about the long-term opportunities there,” said Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra on the company’s third-quarter earnings call, referring to advertising. “But we are cautious about them in the near term, because we want to make sure that we get it right.”
As Roblox’s audience “ages up” into the 13+ and 17+ brackets, the platform will gain room for more advertising integrations, mature content, and social gameplay. “Their average user age is higher than it used to be,” said Alicia Reese, senior vice president of equity research at Wedbush. “They’ll be able to advertise to their older players, and there are a lot of opportunities to do that in a thoughtful and careful way.”
BMO’s Pitz also noted that Roblox’s new short-form video feature, Moments, could open the door to more advertising revenue in the future. The feature aims to compete with YouTube and TikTok, where clips of creators playing Roblox have already drawn trillions of views and millions of ad impressions. For now, Moments is only available to users aged 13 and up, leaving roughly 40 percent of Roblox’s audience — the under-13 group — excluded.
The social media app Snapchat, now trading at $7 a share from a record high of $83, offers a cautionary tale of the perils of a young user audience and possible shortfalls of advertising revenue. Like Roblox, Snap built a massive user base among teens and tweens, only to find that engagement doesn’t always equal cash flow. When the app was on the rise in 2021, Snapchat brought in similar revenue as Roblox at $4.1 billion with an overall net loss of $488 million. But as the company quickly scaled, its losses scaled with it, ballooning to $1.4 billion by 2022 — with little increase in revenue.
Both companies, Snap and Roblox, bet that the attention economy would become profitable, but Roblox’s even younger audience makes that path riskier, forcing it to balance its growth with more guardrails. Advertising to young children is also a regulatory challenge. In Texas, a 2024 law now requires verified parental consent for minors to purchase digital items like Robux, adding yet another potential drag on bookings.
Recent data from the company seems to support the thesis that kids are “aging up” with Roblox and that more older users are playing on the platform — over the past year daily active user growth for those over 13 was roughly twice the pace of users under 13.
For investors, an older user base means more disposable income to spend on virtual goods and power-ups, but for parents and regulators it raises alarm.
Roblox has noted this tension themselves, writing in their 10-K filing that features appealing to “an older, age verified audience, such as less highly moderated or unmoderated chat and the introduction of experiences with mature content” might not take off because it could simultaneously “create the perception that our Platform is not safe for younger users.”
Currently, the company is enrolled in a PR battle over accusations from state attorneys generals that it’s become a “perfect place for pedophiles.” They are also facing a surge of civil suits alleging it failed to protect minors from predators and inappropriate content. Even if cases are settled, the resulting negative publicity could damage Roblox’s reputation and user trust.
Roblox did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding their legal or financial troubles.
Moreover, any legal battles will also cost the company millions of dollars. Roblox is already spending nearly 50 percent more year over year on administrative costs, with most of that being due to “associated with ongoing litigation.”
The company has continued to roll out dozens of AI-powered safety features including improved content moderation, as well as a third-party run facial age estimation tool. But for Giselle, real moderators who you can talk to over artificial intelligence feels like it would make the games safer.
While the company faces mounting legal and regulatory pressure, the global gaming industry it wants to capture 10 percent of is in flux. Legacy players like Amazon and Microsoft have laid off thousands from their gaming divisions this year, while Electronic Arts announced plans to go private.
In this shifting landscape, there’s risk and reward here for Roblox. Despite challenges, analysts project Roblox could turn a profit by 2028, citing its steady user growth and early lead in creator-driven gaming.
If Roblox can stabilize its legal challenges, get spending under control, and convert its maturing user base into paying customers, it could emerge as one of the defining platforms of this new era. Wall Street seems willing to bet on the “if.”
Despite being blocked from playing some of her favorite games due to age restrictions — and remaining skeptical of the company’s ability to take on creeps — Giselle says she intends to keep playing as she grows older, underscoring step one of Roblox’s core strategy.