Roblox lost $1.35b last year

The popular and controversial game has revealed net losses of over $1 billion last year, despite an increase in revenue and bookings.

Roblox, the popular and controversial sandbox game played primarily by children, has released its 2022 financial report, showing a massive loss for the company of over $1 billion.

The company says it had a net loss of $1.35 billion AUD in 2022, a huge increase over its 2021 loss of $730 billion AUD. That’s despite an increase in revenue and bookings over the same period the year prior.

Roblox says that it brought in $3 billion AUD in revenue, an increase of 16% compared to 2021. It also says bookings increased by 5% to $4.2 billion AUD in the same period (thanks GamesIndustry.biz).

Roblox said that the sharp increase in losses were due to higher expenses as the company expands its operations for future projects. It also said that similar results were likely in coming years, after a change in how the company calculates its bookings as part of its earnings each quarter.

Roblox is made up of a collection of community-created games. Picture: Roblox

“Regardless, since our investment decisions are generally based on levels of bookings, we expect to continue to report net losses for the foreseeable future even as we anticipate generating net cash from operating activities,” the company said in its earnings report.

The company will also stop producing monthly reports for its metrics after next month, it announced, instead sticking to quarterly reports. It says that this is due to monthly numbers being “often more volatile”, which it says drives “more short-term market reactions”.

Despite the losses, investors did not seem to be deterred, with the company’s share price increasing in value from $36.95 USD to $44.54 USD per share following the publication of the report.

Roblox is extremely popular among children, in part due to being available on mobile devices. Photo: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The report also showed that Roblox had 58.8 million daily active users in Q4 2022, with big partnerships like one with the NFL and in-game concerts helping drive users to the platform.

It’s not been without controversy, though. A mum recently warned of “awful” content aimed at children in the game, after discovering a number of sexually suggestive and violent community-created minigames playable by children as young as five years old.

A 2022 study also showed that Roblox was the most hated app in 21 countries. The study used a sentiment-tracking AI program to aggregate data from Twitter showing which apps were talked about most negatively on the platform.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.