With scale comes complexity. Growing pains, after all, aren’t just for human adolescents — businesses can have them too.
Especially businesses whose target audience and customer cohort is largely made up of adolescents, like Roblox. The company’s Thursday (Oct. 30) third-quarter earnings call revealed a business that is simultaneously expanding at breakneck speed and wrestling with the realities of sustaining that growth.
Roblox is no longer the whimsical gaming startup that turned a generation of kids into amateur game designers. It’s becoming a global economic engine redefining how people socialize, create and transact in digital spaces.
The company’s Q3 2025 results marked an inflection point. Revenue rose 48% year over year to $1.36 billion, while bookings surged 70% to $1.92 billion, signaling stronger monetization and sustained user engagement. Average daily active users (DAUs) hit 151.5 million, up 91% from a year earlier, and hours engaged climbed 70% to nearly 40 billion.
These are extraordinary figures for a company that already commands a massive global footprint. They confirm that Roblox’s bet on long-term user retention, anchored in user-generated content and an evolving creator economy, is paying off.
However, despite the top-line momentum, the company posted a net loss of $257 million for the quarter. This juxtaposition, robust growth paired with persistent red ink, has consistently been what defines Roblox’s current era.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
Read more: Roblox Says Viral Hits Drive Double-Digit Growth
Setting Sights on User Engagement Without Borders
The geographic spread of Roblox’s growth offers insight into its cultural and strategic trajectory. Once dominated by U.S. and Canadian users, Roblox is now unmistakably global. Asia-Pacific (APAC) and “Rest of World” regions posted the fastest growth rates in both users and hours engaged.
APAC’s engagement metrics grew at triple-digit percentages across several categories, while the company’s ABPDAU (average bookings per daily active user) rose across all major geographies, particularly in North America and Europe, suggesting higher spending intensity among mature users.
At the same time, the company’s demographics continue to evolve. The under-13 cohort remains sizable, but Roblox’s fastest-growing audience segment is now aged 13 and up, which expanded by as much as 80% year over year in some regions. This aging-up trend is reshaping everything from monetization models to brand collaborations. The platform’s pivot toward “Moments,” its initiative around time-based social events, aims to capture older teens and young adults who crave more sophisticated, expressive digital experiences.
Read more: Profitability Still Out of Reach for Gaming Giant Roblox
The Cost of Scale and AI
Behind Roblox’s impressive topline sits a cost structure under pressure from expansion. Developer exchange fees — the payments Roblox makes to creators — represent over 30% of bookings, up from the mid-20s a year earlier.
Looking ahead, Roblox projects Q4 2025 revenue between $1.35 and $1.4 billion, implying 37% to 42% year-over-year growth. Bookings are expected to reach as high as $2.05 billion, a potential 51% jump from Q4 2024.
However, management anticipates a net loss of up to $375 million in the fourth quarter as spending ramps to support creator tools, AI research and infrastructure. That’s because Roblox’s strategic bets center on artificial intelligence, not as a novelty but as a structural enabler. The company envisions “4D creation,” a system in which AI assists users and developers in building, animating, and personalizing experiences. The technology extends beyond creative generation to include moderation, safety and recommendation algorithms.
Executives have long described Roblox as “a civilization of creators,” and AI could dramatically lower the barriers to participation. By automating complex development tasks and improving asset discovery, Roblox aims to expand the pool of creators and, by extension, the platform’s content diversity. The company’s recent partnerships, including with Google for advertising scale, underscore a push to integrate machine learning throughout the user and monetization funnel.
The company’s approach increasingly mirrors that of mature platform economies: investing in infrastructure, fostering regional markets and standardizing digital labor frameworks. The concept of “creator economics,” once niche, has become a cornerstone of Roblox’s investor narrative. With over 150 million daily users generating and consuming content, Roblox has effectively become a marketplace for digital labor and culture — where engagement translates into earnings, and creative output becomes currency.
