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Roblox drops after saying plans to prioritize safety impact may weigh on growth next year

The gaming platform reported its third-quarter earnings before the market opened on Thursday.

Max Knoblauch

Gaming platform Roblox, one of the industry’s biggest “black holes,” reported its third-quarter earnings on Thursday morning. Shares climbed 8% as investors digested the results, before turning negative and dropping more than 9%.

Third-quarter bookings, or the amount users spend on Roblox, rose about 70% year over year to $1.92 billion, beating Wall Street’s expectations ($1.7 billion per Bloomberg-compiled data) and better than the company’s guidance range of between $1.59 billion and $1.64 billion.

Roblox boosted its full-year booking guidance of between $5.87 billion and $5.97 billion to between $6.57 billion and $6.62 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet expected about $6.2 billion on the year.

“While the path may not be entirely linear, we are increasingly bullish about our ability to capture 10% of the $180 billion global gaming content market on Roblox and, ultimately, become one of the great global consumer internet platforms,” per management.

The reason for that less-than-linear path and the stock’s premarket reversal appear to be tied to Roblox’s safety plans. The company has been the target of several child safety lawsuits. Roblox gave updates to its safety goals, saying that it plans “to require facial estimation for all users accessing communication functions, and to limit communication between adults and minors who do not know each other in real life.” According to Roblox, these new policies “may negatively impact platform engagement in the short term”:

“As we look to next year, our long-term objectives have not changed, though we recognize that tough comps and valuable new safety features will factor into reported growth in 2026. With respect to margins, we will continue to prioritize investments to support genre expansion and long-term growth. As a result, our operating margin could decline slightly year-over-year due to the combination of higher DevEx rates and the impact of infrastructure and safety related investments catching up with rapid bookings growth in the back half of 2025.”

An average of 151.5 million daily users played Roblox on the quarter, up 70% and easily beating expectations of 132.2 million users. In the same period last year, the company reported 88.9 million daily users.

Roblox paid out $427.9 million to creators in the quarter, up from $231.5 million in the same quarter last year. Through September, payouts have now reached more than $1 billion in 2025. The platform has shattered concurrent player records with popular games like “Grow a Garden” and “Steal a Brainrot” this year. Earlier this month, Morgan Stanley called Roblox a clear leader in next-gen entertainment, making parallels to YouTube.

Read More: He didn’t set out to create a kids company. Roblox’s “Builderman” wound up with one anyway.

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Chipotle beats Q4 estimates, but sinks on underwhelming full-year guidance

Chipotle reported earnings results that beat Wall Street estimates, but gave underwhelming full-year guidance.

For the last three months of 2025, Chipotle reported:

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $0.25, compared to $0.24 analysts polled by FactSet were expecting.

  • Revenue of $3 billion, a bit higher than the $2.9 billion the Street was penciling in.

  • Comparable sales decline of 2.5%, less than the 2.9% decline the Street was expecting.

For the full-year 2026, Chipotle expects:

  • Comparable sales to be flat, compared to the 1.7% growth analysts were expecting.

Chipotle has struggled to spark sales over the past year and has previously pointed to a strained consumer as major headwind. The company fell more than 9% in after hours trading shortly after the report was released.

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Take-Two raises its net bookings outlook, reaffirms November release for “Grand Theft Auto 6”

“Grand Theft Auto” and “NBA 2K” maker Take-Two reported results for its fiscal third quarter on Tuesday. Its shares climbed about 4% in after-hours trading.

The company posted net bookings, or the amount customers spent on its products, of $1.76 billion, up 28% in the same quarter last year. Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet expected $1.58 billion. In November, Take-Two guided for Q3 net bookings of between $1.55 billion and $1.6 billion.

Take-Two hiked its full-year bookings outlook to between $6.65 billion and $6.7 billion, up from a range of $6.4 billion to $6.5 billion. The new outlook compares to Wall Street’s $6.47 billion estimate. The gaming giant trimmed its full-year net loss guidance to between $369 million and $338 million (prior: between $414 million and $349 million).

In its last quarter, Take-Two pushed back the planned release date of “Grand Theft Auto 6” from May 2026 to November 19, 2026. The company reaffirmed that date in Tuesday’s report. The game’s last trailer came in May 2025.

Shares of Take-Two and other major gaming companies have been sinking since late last week as investors react to early showcases of Google’s Project Genie, which allows users to generate interactive, “playable” worlds with a text or image prompt. As of Tuesday’s close, Take-Two has shed nearly $6 billion in market cap since Project Genie was released.

Analysts have called the market reaction unjustified, saying that the tool doesn’t allow for meaningful interactivity or replay-ability. According to mBank analyst Piotr Poniatowski, Project Genie is — at the moment — essentially a “one-minute-long walking simulator generator.”

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Nvidia slumps to fresh lows after Jensen Huang affirms plans to invest in OpenAI

Nvidia is on track for its worst loss since late November, with shares extending losses after CEO Jensen Huang said the chip designer’s plan to invest in OpenAI is “on track.”

“There’s no drama involved,” he told CNBC. “Everything’s on track.”

With all due respect, there’s definitely some drama:

On Friday, the WSJ reported that Nvidia’s plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI had stalled; shortly thereafter, Huang said the letter of intent announced by the two sides in September was “never a commitment,” but that the company still planned to participate in OpenAI’s upcoming funding round.

Then, a whopping eight sources told Reuters that OpenAI is “unsatisfied” with Nvidia’s latest AI chips, and particularly, their inference capabilities.

CEO Sam Altman took to X to call the reporting around his firm and the most valuable publicly traded company in the world “insanity.”

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