- Roblox, the platform for user-generated games.
- It is planing to go public through a direct listing of its shares on March 10.
- Roblox is a San Mateo, California-based company.
- It lost $253.3 million on revenues of $923.9 million for the year ended December 31.
Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system. It allows users to program games and play games created by other users. Founded by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004 and released in 2006, the platform hosts user-created games of multiple genres coded in the programming language Lua.
For most of Roblox’s history, it was relatively small, both as a platform and a company. As both co-founder Baszucki’s lack of interest in press coverage and it being “lost among the crowd” in a large number of platforms released around the same time. Roblox began to grow rapidly in the second half of the 2010s, and this growth has been accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic
Roblox plans To Go Public Through Listing Of Its Shares
The platform for user-generated games will go public through a direct listing of its shares on March 10. The company also reported that it lost $253.3 million on revenues of $923.9 million for the year ended December 31. The San Mateo, California-based company originally planned for an initial public offering last fall, but it postponed that plan and raised $520 million in funding from private sources instead at a valuation of $29.5 billion. And now it shifted plans from an IPO to the direct listing, where the company’s shareholders will sell shares but the company itself will not raise any new capital.
Roblox’s plan to list earlier was held up by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It asked for accounting changes on the sale of virtual currency, Robux, which is how the company generates revenue from its users. Players purchase Robux and spend the money on games generated by users themselves. Roblox keeps 30% of the revenue and shares the bulk with developers.
Roblox Revenue Increases In 2020
The company said revenue grew 82% last year to $923.9 million for the year ended December 31. Bookings more than doubled to about $1.9 billion. But the company lost $253.3 million in 2020, wider than the $71 million lost in 2019, thanks to a big increase in expenses for infrastructure, sales, safety, marketing, and research and development. Roblox said that, as of December 31, there were over 20 million user-created experiences on Roblox. The daily active users rose from 17.6 million on average in 2019 to 32.6 million in 2020.
The community of active developers is above 8 million. Over 1.25 million developers earned Robux on the platform. About 4,300 earned more than 100,000 Robux. Over 1,250 earned more than $10,000, and 300 developers earned more than $100,000. Hours engaged on Roblox grew 45% from 9.4 billion in 2018 to 13.7 billion in 2019 and grew 124%, to 30.6 billion, in 2020.
