Roblox continues to grow revenues, deepen losses
UGC platform expects more of the same in 2024, losing as much as $1.4 billion on revenues as high as $3.4 billion
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Roblox today reported its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2023, showing the user-generated content platform continues to grow its revenues as well as its losses.
The Q4 numbers
- Revenue: $750 million, up 30% year-on-year
- Bookings: $1.13 billion, up 25% year-on-year
- Net losses: $325 million, compared to $288 million in the same quarter last year
The full-year numbers
- Revenue: $2.8 billion, up 26% year-on-year
- Bookings: $3.52 billion, up 23% year-on-year
- Net losses: $1.16 billion, compared to $934 million last year
The highlights
Roblox's financial results show the story around the company hasn't changed much. It continues to grow, with the company breaking $1 billion in bookings for a quarter for the very first time in Q4, but it also continues to post significant losses.
"We finished 2023 with another strong quarter of growth as we continue to drive innovation and new experiences across the Roblox platform," Roblox founder and CEO David Baszucki said.
"We enter 2024 with even more conviction of being able to achieve our long-term goal of attracting over 1 billion daily active users with optimism and civility. We continue to benefit from the strong network effects in content, social connection, and communication, as well as our investments in immersive experiences, advertising, and AI."
Roblox still has a ways to go to hit 1 billion daily active users. In the fourth quarter, daily active users grew 22% year-over-year to a new all-time high but still totaled just 71.5 million.
The company said that growth was driven largely by older users and international markets.
The number of people paying Roblox also grew in Q4, with 15.9 million monthly unique payers spending an average of $23.65 on the platform each month, a new record average bookings per monthly unique payer stat for Roblox.
Roblox also said its expansion onto Meta Quest and PlayStation during the quarter helped it attract new users, and noted that its spending on personnel and certain infrastructure/trust and safety had been reined in somewhat, with the former growing slower than bookings, and the latter shrinking in absolute numbers.
"In general, we expect these trends to continue," the company said. "We believe the amount of high quality content on Roblox will continue to grow; more users will become payers and payers will generally spend more as time goes on; and we will benefit from the growth of both Meta Quest and Sony Playstation. In addition, we expect to scale our brand-related microtransaction and advertising business over time as more companies invest in building presence on Roblox."
Looking ahead, the company projected revenue for 2024 to be up 18% to 21% to between $3.3 and $3.4 billion.
Meanwhile, it expects net losses to deepen at the same rate, ending 2024 with net losses between $1.37 billion and $1.4 billion.
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