“Roblox” needs to grow up

If you have a kid, there’s a good chance they’re on “Roblox.” In the past few years, the Lego-inspired video game — where users can create and play each others’ “experiences” — has grown beyond a popular video game to become a genuine social network. The Roblox Corporation’s own figures for last year reported that 68.4 million daily users — over half of them under 17 — spend an average of 2.4 hours a day in the game, playing, socializing, and spending in-game currency (called Robux).

The company’s latest quarterly earnings report shows seemingly promising data that investors are buying into: daily active users are up to nearly 89 million and the company beat earnings expectations, sending the stock up to the highest level since February 2023.

The game has soaring ambitions: 1 billion users and 10% of all gaming revenue. But looking at Garbage Day’s data, “Roblox” has a big problem. It isn’t growing up with its users — unlike, for instance, competitor “Fortnite,” which has become a bona fide cultural force. And if it can’t level up like that, there’s no chance it can get bigger than it already is. 

“Roblox” was launched in 2006 and slowly built an impressive young audience, but user figures lagged behind its closest competitor, “Minecraft,” until 2019. The next year, pandemic lockdowns led to player numbers increasing more than 35% over a few months for the game, which has always marketed itself as educational. That huge boost helped Roblox Corp. go public in 2021. Since then, the company has put more emphasis on how young players can earn real money in the game. In an interview with Eurogamer, studio head Stefano Corazza called it a “gift” to pay minors to develop games on the platform.

Roblox games can span a range of genres, from elaborate role-playing environments to platformers to shooters, but the games can only stray so far from the simple, blocky, kid-friendly style of the game’s default assets. The most popular shooter game, “Phantom Forces,” features dozens of real guns and equipment, but they’re all rendered cartoonishly enough that the game is rated for ages 9 and up. Meanwhile, the most popular game overall, the suburban “Sims”-esque role-playing game “Brookhaven RP,” has been played 55 billion times.

But in the last year and change, “Roblox” has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. A report from earlier this month found that the platform is a hotbed for child predators, exposing millions of young users to inappropriate material and harmful behavior. The game says it moderates content and promotes child safety, but has been accused of exploiting children for their labor with no accountability. And despite the game’s success, Hindenberg Research reported this month that “Roblox” has significantly inflated its popularity to investors.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, “Roblox” is trying to change its narrative. It’s become clear in the last year or so that the platform is working hard to not be associated with little kids anymore. It’s partnered with Gucci, Givenchy, and Ikea, and a blog post from CEO David Baszucki last year said they were working on new features for users over 18 to create “experiences for older audiences.” So far, the closest they’ve come is the release of video ads that can be viewed only by users over 13.

“Roblox” developers understand that they’ve successfully captured enough of a young audience that the only way to grow is up. One executive said they “need to increasingly bring users of all ages” to the game, and when Baszucki announced his ambitious goal of 1 billion users, he referenced the growing percentage of users over 13 as the main source of that growth. “...perhaps a more telling stat would’ve been the percentage over 18,” Rich Stanton wrote in PC Gamer. That’s the audience they need, and, as far as we can tell, they aren’t interested. Last year, Baszucki highlighted Drinks On Tap, a virtual bar, as an example of a popular adults-only game. The game has over 11 million total visits, but this is small potatoes by “Roblox” standards, where the cutoff for the “Most Popular” list is over 30 million visits.

It’s notoriously difficult to collect data on social-media users under 18, especially when many platforms have age restrictions to create an account. But there is some broad-strokes data available. Last year, the Pew Research Center found that over 90% of American teens were on YouTube — a number so staggering that Google and Meta struck a deal to advertise Instagram to teens on Youtube, in violation of both companies’ policies. After YouTube, the most popular network was TikTok, with 63% of teens, followed by Snapchat and Instagram, with 60% and 59%, respectively.

If you were to use YouTube as a reflection of what American teenagers are interested in, you’d expect “Roblox”-related channels and videos to show up in the top gaming content on the platform. Except that’s not really happening. In the two years that Garbage Day has been tracking YouTube data, there hasn’t been a single channel that gets millions of subscribers strictly from making content about “Roblox.” It’s not totally invisible on the app — many popular YouTubers, like MrBeast, IShowSpeed, and JT Casey, have played the game in a video or on a livestream — but “Roblox” is nowhere near the main attraction. In fact, it's not even close to as prevalent as something like “Minecraft,” which has singlehandedly helped relatively small channels like MineZzz and IlloJuan grow faster than juggernauts like MrBeast.

“Roblox” also lags far behind “Minecraft” on X, Instagram, and Snapchat, both in the popularity of their official accounts and in hashtags associated with the game. On Instagram, it’s behind hashtags for games with much smaller userbases, like “League of Legends,” “Grand Theft Auto,” or “Call of Duty.” The only place where the game has any kind of traction is on TikTok, which tends to skew even younger than YouTube. 

Between June and August, #roblox was the most enduringly popular hashtag in the US, used in millions of videos that amassed a total of over 15 billion views. (This figure is an estimate, since TikTok quietly stopped reporting overall video views in July.) But things changed in September. #Roblox went from well over a million video views to just over 500,000. Why did these TikToks lose so much engagement in the US between August and September? Well, let’s try to think if anything happens around this time to American children that begins taking up a lot of their time and attention.

This doesn’t mean that “Roblox” isn’t popular with American children. It is exclusively popular with American children. And that’s a big problem for a company that has its sights set on a billion users. That kind of unprecedented growth would require complete saturation, drawing in millions of adults with no interest in a kid-friendly experience — something both “Fortnite” and “Minecraft” have been successful in doing. But both the game’s own player figures and a wider look at its social-media presence suggest that the interest isn’t there.

Which wouldn’t be a problem for a brand-new game. But “Roblox” turned 18 last month, making it old enough to lose interest in itself.

Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. We’ll be sharing some of our findings here on Sherwood. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.