Roblox’s daily active users (DAUs) jumped 19% year over year, and 2023 is already seeing strong growth tailwinds.
That’s per the company’s fourth-quarter 2022 earnings call Wednesday (Feb. 15), the results of which sent the virtual gaming platform’s own stock soaring to double-digit percentage heights.
For investors, it represents a welcome contrast to the company’s earnings rout last November.
“[The year] 2022 was [one] of innovation and invention for Roblox,” said David Baszucki, founder and CEO of the company, on the call. “With 65 million daily active users in January, we are driving towards our vision to reimagine the way people come together by enabling deeper forms of expression, communication and immersion.”
The virtual platform’s global player community collectively visited more than 15 million experiences within the Roblox metaverse in 2022, while developers and creators published more than 15,000 experiences each day of the year on average.
To support this “creation flywheel,” the company has been investing in advancements to Roblox Studio, its development software for building and publishing 3D content and virtual assets, according to a blog post.
“This vision of everyone doing things together has enormous headroom,” Baszucki said to investors on the earnings call. “We believe this is the next generation of communication following from audio calls, texting, messaging.”
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Users are consistently spending more money on Roblox’s platform, the company told its investors, with the fourth quarter of 2022 seeing the highest amount of returning payers recorded, as well as seeing Roblox add the most payers than ever before, with the exception of the first few months of the pandemic.
In order to transact in the game, Roblox users must buy the platform’s native virtual currency, Robux.
Per the company’s earnings call, each of its geographies reached new peaks in payer conversion during the fourth quarter.
“More than 90% of items published in Marketplace are now made by creators, getting us even closer to the point where all content within Roblox is fully user-generated,” Baszucki said on the call. “We’re continuing to improve user discovery in Marketplace, so people can find items they want in a way that will redefine the user journey. We envision a future where select items are offered on a limited basis, and other items are more widely available, so people can find a breadth of items they love.”
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“In July 2022, we rolled out a number of advancements to our material system to enhance the visual quality of the full library of existing materials and make them look and feel even more realistic than before,” the company told investors. “Materials on Roblox are akin to materials in the real world. They’re used to not only define the surface appearance of a 3D object but also its physical properties, which in turn influences how the object behaves. Our material system will help our creators more easily realize their aesthetic vision.”
Business is accelerating — there’s more content and better content around the world — it’s simple stuff, Baszucki added.
Fielding an investor question around ChatGPT and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) tools, the Roblox CEO said that he sees “a lot of headroom” around automation that will scale well beyond a linear type rate.
The metaverse platform’s user audience segment aged 17-24 grew more than 31% and accounted for nearly a fifth (22%) of DAUs over the fourth quarter.
More than half of Roblox’s users are now 13 and older, showing that the platform has been able to age-up its historically younger user base.
The company indicated plans to launch in-experience AI creation tools and a range of innovations around avatar creation, as well as customer service.
Roblox said that its metaverse platform is focused on reinventing social interactions.
To that end, the virtual world now allows “people verified as ages 13 and older can use Chat with their voice to speak aloud with one another,” per the blog post. “This functionality is built to mimic in-person conversations and is based on avatars’ proximity to each other — meaning you might whisper to a friend nearby or raise your voice to carry across the room. Almost a million Roblox experiences have already enabled voice communications.”
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