Roblox Corporation

by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you would like to withdraw your question, press the star one again. Thank you. I would like to turn the call over to Stephanie Notani. You may begin your conference.

Thank you, Kathleen. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our Q&A session to discuss Roblox's Q1 2025 results. With me today are Roblox co-founder and CEO David Buzucki and CFO Mike Guthrie. Our shareholder letter, press release, SEC filings, supplemental slides, and a replay of today's call can be found on our investor relations website. Our commentary today may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risk, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. A description of these risk, uncertainties, and assumptions are included in our SEC filings, including our most recent reports on Form 10K and Form 10Q. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We disclaim any obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAP and non-GAP measures can be found in our press release and supplemental slides. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dave.

Hey, thank you, and good morning and welcome today. I want to share our results and highlight surpassing our guidance that we provided in our Q4 earnings call and also surpassing what we shared with you in our 2023 Investor Day Goals. So, let's dive in first with some numbers that are in our letter, and then I'll share some more commentary as well. We saw high growth rates in many, if not all, of our operating metrics. Q1 revenue was $1.035 billion. That was up 29% -on-year. And ahead of our guidance of $990 million to $1,015 million, or $1.015 billion, our Q1 bookings were $1.207 billion. That was up 31% -on-year. And that was ahead of the high end of our guidance, which was $1.125 to $1.15 billion. Q1 DAUs, $97.8 million, just shy of $100 million DAUs, up 26% -on-year. And let's dive into a couple of the areas we've been talking about growing ever since our S1. First, U.S. and Canada still growing with solid DAU growth of 22%. APAC, 40%. Japan, one of the largest gaming markets, growing 48% -on-year. And India, growing 77% -on-year. We'll talk a bit about some of the performance things we're doing on our APA and the ecosystem to support that. And on demographics, very large opportunity for us over 13. 13 and up DAUs grew at 36% -on-year. And now our DAUs are at 62% over 13. On hours, we hit 21.7 billion hours in Q1. That's up 30% -on-year. Similar to the DAU trend, U.S. Canada, 27%. APAC, 40%. 44% growth. Japan hours, 50% -on-year. India hours, 78% -on-year. 13 and up, 40% engagement growth -on-year. And on the hours, very similar to DAU, 64% of the hours in 13 and up. Continuing on our effort for thoughtful cost management, combined with our growth in Q1, our cash from operations was $443 million. That was up 86% -on-year. And that's 17% above the high end of our guidance, which was $380 million. Pre-cash flow in Q1, $426 million, up 1.23%, 18% above the high end of our guidance. Just a little dive on some of the operational efficiencies we've been focusing on. Trust and safety, up 8% -on-year. 13% of revenue, 11% of bookings. I want to highlight as we generate this operational efficiency, quality continues to go up. AI continues to be a key component of our efficiency there. And we're getting better on all fronts. AI-driven moderation has really driven the quality of our system, both for content, safety, and communication safety. Our personnel costs, exclusive of stock-based comp, were $238 million. Want to highlight these are growing less fast or slower than bookings in revenue, at 23% of revenue and 20% of bookings. And we're getting great leverage here, and more leverage to come as we start to continue to accelerate our coding efforts with AI. On the, at the very same time where we would like to see more money moving, in addition to our bottom line, is creator earnings. DevEx was up 39% -on-year in Q1 at $281 million. That's 27% of revenue, 23% of bookings. Our creators are on track for earnings over a billion this year, for the first time ever. And want to dive a bit into our investments on creator success and making them more successful. We highlighted a few of them. Differential Robux pricing is really working. We shared some of the results here in our letter, and the creator community is really getting into this. Also, the inexperienced price optimization that we rolled out is giving us roughly 4% more in median creator earnings for creators who are participating. We're now at 35% of top 100 experiences by spending using price optimization. We've seen some experiences do as well as 15% improvement in earnings, including slap battles. And really, really satisfying thing here. When we started running this optimizer, prices went down, not up, which is really just a great testament for helping creators find more revenue in really an engagement and spending positive way. Also, last week, regional pricing recommendations for game passes. This means that dynamically, users in, for example, India or Brazil will see different prices than they would if they're in the UK. Our early testing is showing really promising results. We've only released it for game passes. Stay tuned. We're going to be adding in-game and avatar marketplace items. Going over to search and discovery, we want to highlight, we really tried to surface diversity in content in a fair way. This is really, really important because 90% of the traffic on Roblox originates from our homepage, so this is a really crucial channel. We said publicly, and I would say not just on Roblox, but across the industry, a belief and commitment to transparency in search and discovery algorithms. We have started outlining how retention, engagement, monetization, and intentional co-play are signals. We've gone so far as to make these signals available as much as possible on our analytics dashboard for creators. So transparency, but giving feedback to creators so they can see how they're doing on these signals. We have a lot of creators of all sizes. We're trying to really drive search and discovery not just with short-term optimization, but factoring long-term ecosystem health, which is really long-term enterprise value, into our search and discovery and recommendation algorithms. I'll share a few results. Our top 100 creators now earned $6.7 million on average in the last 12 months. That's up 35% versus the 12-month period ended March 31, 2024. The top 100 creators earned over a million in the last 12 months. That means a creator number 100, if we stack rank them by earnings over the top 12 months, creator number 100 earned over a million. We have over 100 creators and studios supporting themselves, which is a great diversity of content. Discovery efforts are really helping. 24% of the top 100 experiences by spending in March were created in the last 12 months, which is amazing content velocity. Let's look at the top 10 creators. They earned $36 million on average in the last 12 months. That's up 28% versus the 12 months ended March 31, 2024. We highlighted at RDC, I guess it was just last year, the goal of having a Roblox studio valued at a billion dollars. We're seeing a lot of M&A action in the Roblox ecosystem. You can read about it on the news. We're really proud that we're starting to see this kind of growth on the platform. We've shared publicly our goal and our belief is we're going to see 10% of the gaming market by consumer spending on the Roblox platform. We're growing faster than the gaming industry as a whole because we are a platform. We have a lot of headroom. We've also shared that one of the tools we're going to use to do this is a real focus on genres. Watching how we're doing in sports and racing, how we're doing in role playing, how we're doing in battle genres and tracking these and making sure our platform from a technology point of view, search and discovery, economics point of view, can support awesome properties on that. I do want to share in the three genres we're tracking, we've seen 69% year on year growth in these three genres that I just mentioned. Couple highlights about LiveOps. We're continuing to run LiveOps events. The most recent event was the Hunt Mega Edition and Mega stands for a million. We had 10 finalists compete for a million dollars in cash on April 4th at our headquarters. There were over 183 million visits to our hub during this event. I would invite you to track down this event and watch it if you want. It's really fun to watch top flight, super high quality pro gamers playing a fashion game like Dress to impress competitively. That's a fun highlight. On brands and ads, we announced our partnership with Google to help scale ads in formats like video and rewarded video. That integration is underway. We've also added additional tech and analytics providers, double verify, IAS, Cantor and Nielsen. We continue to be really excited about creating an ecosystem where our creators have a wide range of monetization opportunities, including premium, including paid access, including ads. On brand activations, we're seeing more and more licensing type deals. NASCAR teamed up and did an activation with Driving Empire, PGA Tour, Ultimate Golf Simulator launched. We've seen European Soccer League show up with, and I want to pronounce it right, Bundesliga. We've also seen people using our platform to reach out to young people. The Ad Council did a program with Love Your Mind to support teen mental health with resources from Headspace. And Aloe Yoga also updated their experience that's focused on mental health and physical well-being. I'll look around and see if we can announce there's a fun food activation on the platform. I'm looking whether we can announce it. So, yeah, Chipotle is also activated with a repeat of their great partnership. On the AI side, we're live now with Cube3D. We've built our own foundational 3D model and trained it on over 1.5 million licensed and publicly available data sets in the Roblox ecosystem. We now have 1.5 thousand experiences that are playing around and experimenting within experience generative 3D AI. And this is just the beginning. We have shared publicly that we're moving forward to full 3D scene creation. And we're also enabling over the next few quarters what we call 4D generation. 4D generation means not just creating props and static assets, but creating native Roblox 3D immersive assets that are functional, that include embedded code. And the example there is cars where you can walk up, open the door, hop in the car, drive the car, and get a heads-up instrument display in the car, as well as avatars and other interactive elements. We have also done, we are live now with a beta of a text generation API in our system using an LLM. Creators can also use this directly in experience to power NPCs that are conversational and AI characters. And we're now over 300 Roblox-created ML models that we're running in our system, where we got that start way back four years ago with our first few models in trust and safety. We are running this with a focus on low latency real-time inference at low cost. And then highlighting on safety and civility, really our top priority since we started. We launched in April the latest iteration of our open source AI voice classifier model, which is even more accurate, runs more efficiently. This is open source. And I want to highlight a personal anecdote. When I now go to GDC, I bump into companies and I've heard them say, we're using your model, which is awesome. We added three powerful parental controls in April to give parents even more control of how their children spend time on Roblox. And we joined the Roost Consortium to contribute more of our open source work to that for this industry-wide initiative to improve civility and safety. So a lot of great opportunities in front of us. And with that, I'll hand it over to Mike.

Thanks, Dave. Just a couple of comments on Topline and on Cashflow and Margins. First thing that I found interesting in the numbers this quarter, I'm particularly pleased with, is that a year ago, our bookings and bookings growth was very concentrated at the top and a smaller number of experiences. We've dramatically expanded that this year over the last year. And if you looked at just experiences numbered 11 to 50 on our platform, a year ago, they were growing at about 5%. And this year, year over year, they're growing at over 100%. So that means more developers in the platform and frankly more genres, which is very important as we strive to get 10% of the gaming market. And a great data point is that just over 100 developers over the last 12 months have earned more than a million dollars. So there really are a lot of developers flourishing on the Roblox platform. Number two, we're very pleased with the performance in the US and Canada. Last year, or last quarter rather, we had a few questions about, which we explained about growth rates there, but we had very high growth in DAUs, very high growth in hours of engagement, and about 31% growth in bookings in the US and Canada. So great performance in the first quarter. In Europe, when you look at the geographic output, you'll notice that DAUs and hours are growing more slowly than other regions and overall, but bookings Europe is growing just perfectly in line with the rest of the world. That's still because Turkey's still offline, and so that's affecting our DAUs and hours, but not having a big impact on bookings. So we're doing incredibly well and very consistently across the globe. On margins, we're just really pleased with the margin growth in the business and the cashflow generation in the business. Since we had investor day, late 23 over the last six quarters, we have just dramatically outperformed the notion of 100 to 300 basis point improvement. We're just well, well above that. In this quarter, adjusting for a working capital benefit that we got in Q1, operating cashflow grew at over 70% year over year. Free cashflow more than doubled year over year, over $400 million for the quarter. At the same time, we are hiring and we are retaining great people. We only diluted the business by about .2% year over year, which means our per share metrics are very strong. We think that's great for investors. So with the kind of top line growth we're driving, the kind of cashflow growth we're driving, per share metrics with a small amount of dilution look really fantastic. So all in all, the financials look great. The balance sheet is incredibly strong. We have $4.5 billion of growth cash, $3.5 billion of net cash. That number has grown dramatically over the last two years. So the liquidity of the company is really strong. So with that, we'll end our comments and open it up for questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you have dialed in and would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad to join the queue. And if you are called upon to ask your question and listening by a loudspeaker on your device, please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. Your first question comes from the line of Matthew Cost of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Great. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe, Dave, I just want to double click a little bit on the commentary about genres and sort of breadth of growth and kind of 10 through 50 in the top developers. I guess it seems like that's a really important driver now and you're having a lot of success. What are you doing and what can you do to keep that ball rolling to make sure you're seeing more genre expansion, more growth from the smaller developers? Obviously, it's something that happens naturally. But what steps should we be watching for you to take as the company to help keep that momentum going? And then I have one follow up. Thank you.

Hey, great question. I want to highlight besides RPG, sports, racing and battle, we do track all of the genres in the gaming space. And there's a bunch of genres in addition to this around avatar, sim, social, whatever, where Roblox is amazingly powerful and well on its way to having more than 10% of that genre running on our platform, either by ours, Bookings or DAU. We've taken genre as a way of breaking down the whole gaming space and looking at it over the next five to six years to build a little bit of a roadmap of what Roblox might look like when 10% of the gaming space is running on our platform. And we have identified these three genres, RPG, sports, racing and battle as key genres to highlight both the work we have to do, but also the opportunity. A huge part of this is tech. We believe the core way the gaming space is running today is a little bit in the stone age. And we think more and more in the future, developers will create a single build that will both perform very well on very low end Android in difficult, I'd say networking environments, as well as have that exact same experience go high res on a great gaming PC, have that experience launch immediately rather than download and have that experience really have all the benefits of a platform like Roblox, dynamic economy, dynamic pricing, built in safety and civility, built in AI and all of that. So for RPG, sports, racing and battle, we're really looking at do we have the tech on the platform? And we shared it at RDC. Do we have the tech to build an amazing battle royale that runs great on a two gig RAM Android device? Do we have the tech to build a super competitive sports game with great avatars on a gaming PC? Do we have the tech to ultimately build and run a thousand player experience? We're also looking at economics. We've shared initially for higher priced experiences, paid access, we're going to give a higher rev share. Stay tuned on that. And then on search and discovery, we're more and more rolling out ways for people to gather more users both on and off platform. Long term, we think in addition to the great tech, we want the economics to be hyper competitive. It's why we get excited when creators make more money on the platform and stay tuned on that. So economics, technology, search and discovery, all of them along with of course partnerships to make that possible.

Great. Thank you. And then just going to Mike on the differential pricing initiative, I guess it said in the so far been neutral to slightly accretive to margins. What innings are we in for consumer adoption of kind of those desktop payments and gift card payment options? As we move into later innings, will it become more clearly accretive to margins as you guys see it? And then do you have any view on the announcement last night from the Epic lawsuit and any ability that might have to open the aperture for you to do even more on the direct payment front? Thanks.

Matt, thanks for your question. Since we just launched differential pricing, I guess to stick with the metaphor, it has to be the top of the first inning. I don't know how many outs there are in the inning, but it's pretty early. We have done testing before we launched and thus far, as we said in the letter, the results are good, but it's very early. It's logical to us that this is what we would see, but until we see it in practice, we of course don't know for sure. So far, so good, but very much early days.

Yeah, and just on the Apple side, I would highlight currently without any messaging in our mobile apps, we do see the Roblox community amongst themselves becoming aware that they get more Robux on web with gift card and through credit card. And so this is so far happened organically. We're staying tuned to see what happens with the court ruling.

Great.

Thank

you so much. Thanks.

We'll move next to Jason Vaginette of Citigroup.

I just had one quick question. Obviously, investors are very nervous about macro and we don't have a lot of history with your company in terms of how it might fare in a downturn. So I just love to get your perspective on sort of the pace of innovation. Do you think that could just sort of power through any sort of potential macro weakness or do you think investors should sort of think about the consumer potentially weakening and therefore spending moderate a bit?

I'll go first, then Mike, you go. What's interesting about this is we were live and past results is no predictor of the future, but we have been alive in prior economic downturns. I think we were, I'm looking around the room, I think it was 2007 or 2008, where we were alive and we saw minimal impact during that. From a high level, Roblox is something where the majority of the people on our platform don't spend money and then for others, these are small incremental amounts. These aren't cars and houses and vacation homes. So that makes me a bit optimistic. The notion of using innovation to power through, I think that's a statement rather than an assumption. And I would say we would detangle that, I think, without innovation we're a very powerful platform, even in the midst of these economics. We see innovation as the way to drive towards 10% of the gaming space. And we do think that's important because that's what we want to get, but I wouldn't say raw innovation is needed to power through macro.

Yeah, truthfully, I don't have much to add to what Dave said. Every investor will make their own macro determinations and investors will map businesses against that environment and decide who they think will do well against that. At this point, we obviously, given the quarter that we just produced in the growth, so far we're doing quite well and we're relatively low cost entertainment, but that's where we are today. It doesn't mean that's where we're going to be in four quarters. I agree with Dave's comments.

Yeah, we don't import physical components to assemble Roblox.

Understood. Great call, thank you guys. Thanks, Jason.

We'll move next to Clark Lampen of DTIG.

Thanks very much. Dave, I wanted to follow up on the comment that you just made in response to Jason's question. You mentioned that the majority of people on your platform don't spend money right now. You guys have done, I think, a very good job over the last year or so of improving engagement rates across the aggregate user base, North America, I think, being a very good example of that this past quarter. You've also expanded the array of monetization options, AI capabilities, new ad tools that are very native to the sector. I'm curious, I guess, where you see the biggest opportunities of improving passive hourly monetization ads. I know are not going to be huge this year, but maybe remind us, what's on the table for the next couple of years and where there could be bigger unlocks.

When we look at our bookings per hour, we see that as a very healthy number. We've generally seen by region and by age that scale with growth. And so we always first go back to growth rather than increasing bookings per hour. And we think there's enormous opportunity for DAU and hourly growth. Some of this, I believe, will come naturally as we analyze many of the genres on our platform, irrespective of how we are monetizing the genres I mentioned, RPG, sports and racing and battle, typically amongst older users, as people would look at bookings per DAU or bookings per hour. And don't hold me to this, do your own research. I think you would find those typically monetized even higher than we monetize. So I think what we'll see is as we go after these genres and we move to some of the targets in these genres, we'll see a natural ability for the creators on our platform to monetize better.

And Clark, just to add to that. And Clark, just sorry, just to finish up. Market is large as gaming at $180 billion, even in a market that was flat to even contracting, we're still around 3%, a little under 3%. So in this quarter with 31% growth, we are continuing to grow market share. That market share is still very, very small in a very, very large market. And the track record of growing that market share over the last few years hasn't been very good. And in this quarter, we're starting to see genres and, as we said, more developers really making a very good living on the platform. I think the dynamic for continuing to grow share is very, very good here.

Yeah, and I would say just to add to that doesn't mean we ignore bookings per hour. It means we focus first on genre expansion and DAU hour expansion. In the backdrop, we already mentioned three on the call. Automatic price optimization improves bookings per hour. Regional pricing, we're not sharing any numbers in the early developers, improves bookings per hour. And finally, as we move our really payments, more of them to higher leverage type payments also improves our ability to move that money back. So both, I think the big one is moving genre expansion and just growing. But in addition, we do focus on bookings per hour.

Can I ask just as a very quick follow up on the sort of direct payments push right now, has that in any way changed the way that you guys look at the opportunity with gift cards? Or is that sort of really just augmented the push with a more elegant, I guess, mechanism for users re-upping the Roblox balances?

The Roblox user base is very communicative and savvy. And the more we move to giving Robux proportionate to the amount of raw cash we can put into our system, the more they tend to become aware of that and nudge in that direction. Our gift card business is very, very healthy. And consumers are becoming more aware that with gift cards, they do get 25% more Robux than they might get from a mobile native payment. Thank

you. We'll move next to Corey Carpenter from JP Morgan.

Thanks. Good morning. On advertising, you mentioned earlier that the integration work with Google is underway. Just hopefully you could talk about what that rollout looks like and if that's something that you'd expect to be perhaps a meaningful contributor to bookings this year. And then also in the shareholder letter, you talked about being in a position to reinvest a little bit. Could you just talk about your biggest priorities on the investment side and where you plan to reinvest in the second half of the year? Thank you.

I'll go first on any bookings is meaningful to us. Advertising is already from that definition contributing meaningful as far as when we break it out. I'll leave that up to Mike. We are seeing growth in all the various advertising channels. On the reinvestment, when we look at where we spend money, we would like payment processing to go down. We would like personnel costs to be balanced and grow slower than bookings in revenue become more efficient as we accelerate it. We would like our infrastructure trust and safety costs to go down relative to bookings but at the same time get more efficient and our safety to get continue to increase quality and performance from AI. That leaves the two things we would like to go up, which is payments to creators and we said over a million and slow improvement in our margins. That's the breakdown on those five. Mike, you can talk about if and when we break out ads.

Yeah, we said we'll probably do that when we feel like the number is big enough that it really moves the needle. Today's point, of course, any revenue is meaningful but it's not a very big business today. The core business is doing so well, it's growing so quickly. Dominating the financial performance of the business right now. That's really where we should focus. Obviously, it's going to be we're excited about where we are with ads. We're excited about our partnership with Google. As soon as we have really good data to share with people, we will.

We'll move next to Shredda Kajuriya of World Research.

Okay, thank you for taking my questions. Let me try two, please. Could you please talk about the rate of margin improvement through the year? How should we think about it as we go through the year? Then the second is just on AI power tools. You've talked about this in the past that developers use. How should we think about the flow through or the benefits that you are seeing from that? Is that just time saved for developers? Are you seeing economic benefits and where should we be seeing them? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for the question. On margins, let me just take a step back. Over the last five quarters, margin improvement in the business has gone 260 basis points, 710 basis points, 1,010 basis points, 510 basis points, 750 basis points. We've had a pretty dramatic increase in margin. We've guided this quarter to 314, actually, basis point improvement in our guide at the high end of the guide. We've given you guidance for the full year, so it's pretty easy to do the math. Basically, the way we, with guidance for the full year, on top line, we baked in the beat on bookings and we basically kept the margins for the full year the same. So you can do, again, you can do the math on the back half of the year. I'm more than happy to say we will not continue to improve 700 basis points year over year, so it's not going to happen. What you will see from us is growth rates in cash flow in excess of growth rate in bookings for quite a while, which is very positive. But we have so outperformed our guidance back from late 23 on margin that we've delivered multiple years of improvement in a single quarter. Last Q3, for example, over 1,000 basis points. It's like three years plus at the high end. So we've pulled that in fairly quickly and pulled that cash flow in very fast. But you can do the quick math on the back half of the year.

On acceleration of human potential with AI, I'll share it in three separate areas. Both Roblox engineering creators on our platform and then users on our platform. For both Roblox engineering as well as creators on our platform, we view AI as a human acceleration tool that will allow individuals to do more. I was making the metaphor I used to use a calculator. This is a very powerful calculator that can leverage people a lot more than a calculator. But I do believe we'll continue both internally as well as on our creator platform to see higher quality and more output and more creative output while still having humans in the loop. And I believe long term we will see people coupled with the AI they use as the overall output of that person. And so we're making available code generation, 3D object generation on our platform. Stay tuned because what I shared in my prior comments is our goal is full 3D scene creation. Describe the environment you would like, describe the objects in it and generate that whole thing. And coupled with 4D generation, non-static objects, interactive things, cars, humans, animals, things that you really can interact with rather than static objects. And then finally in the third segment for the experiences and games on Roblox, there's a bit of unpredictability here in what are people going to build when they have native embedded 3D generation and text generation in their experiences. My hope is we're going to see generative 3D fashion experiences, for example, where people describe what they would like to wear and other things within games so everyone on Roblox can be more creative.

And just for the operator, we have time for one more call.

Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Mike.

One more question.

We'll move next for the last question, which is Ken Gowielski of Wells Fargo.

Thank you for the time. Appreciate you sending me in. Just one for me, can you talk a little bit about the status of the Shopify partnership and also just more broadly opportunities on the e-commerce side to drive e-commerce outside of maybe even the curated experiences that are on the platform today, but to kind of broaden the aperture a little bit on the e-commerce side. How important and how strategic is that to the business in the longer term? Thank you.

Well, I think it's augmentative and important at the same time. It's part of a vision, not just of getting to 10% of the gaming space, but ultimately getting to a billion daily active users on the platform. And we've shared that as we move to 10% of the gaming space on the platform, we roughly estimate that could be around 300 million daily actives. Our goal is a billion. And as we go to a billion, we do believe in addition to the physical shopping that we do, the 2D shopping we do by ourselves, the fun that we've seen in a lot of fashion and clothing oriented experiences on the platform will continue to expand to the purchase of physical items as part of that. The Shopify integration is early. We do not yet have a full on simulation of Stanford shopping center on platform where one can walk around with a friend, try stuff on and buy it. But we do see that as an interesting opportunity. We also see physical shopping as a way to fully attribute on experience advertising and close the loop on that. So it's important, but we're still in the early phases of this.

Well, thank you for joining us today. And that concludes our conference call.

Thank you. And that does conclude today's conference call.

Thank you for your participation.