Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...By Cecilia D’Anastasio, Bloomberg
Roblox Corp. shares tumbled by as much as 26% as trading got underway in New York, the largest intraday decline in roughly 4½ years, after the gaming company reported second-quarter daily active users that missed analysts’ expectations.
The decline reflected the ongoing impact of new child-safety measures.
The San Mateo-based video game company’s 123 million daily active users fell short of analysts’ estimates of 128.7 million. Bookings, a measure of sales, came in at $1.56 billion versus Wall Street’s expectations of $1.6 billion.
Roblox also provided guidance for the current period that was weaker than expected, projecting third-quarter bookings to decline 14% to 18% to $1.58 billion to $1.65 billion, falling short of estimates of $1.87 billion.
Roblox shares were down about 40% so far this year as of the market close on July 30.
Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra said on a call with analysts Thursday that investments in AI-powered initiatives are expected to result in higher infrastructure costs and that the company would be withholding full-year guidance amid increased variability.
Recent changes designed to improve the safety of young players, such as age-verification tools, have crimped customer engagement. In May, the video-game company, which is popular with younger players, lowered its forecast for full-year bookings, attributing the change to an “aggressive push to enhance safety.”
For years, Roblox has faced scrutiny over predators who use the platform to groom children, culminating in multiple lawsuits from state attorneys general. To reduce the threat, Roblox began implementing dozens of safety changes, including verifying users’ ages, which wound up negatively impacting growth. The company is betting that the changes will bring in more people to the platform over the long term. Roblox may soon be subject to stricter scrutiny and monitoring requirements under the European Union’s content moderation rules after surpassing a threshold of 45 million monthly users in the bloc, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday.
The EU’s executive arm will designate Roblox as a “very large online platform” in line with the Digital Services Act, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News. The designation is set to come as soon as August, the person said, asking not to be identified because the decision was confidential.
The company attracts new players with hit games produced by third-party developers, and analysts have pointed out that there is no easy way to anticipate when a new popular title will launch. In 2025, Roblox’s user engagement soared, in large part, thanks to hit games Steal A Brainrot and Grow A Garden, which generated huge amounts of traffic and broke industry records. Since then, no new games have managed to reach the same levels of popularity.
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