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Ask any 10-year-old what they’ve been up to during the pandemic and you’re likely to get a consistent answer: playing video games on fast-growing gaming service Roblox, which is listing its shares publicly on Wednesday.
That’s because Roblox, despite lacking cutting-edge graphics and many tie-ins to superhero movies, has become one of the most popular places for kids 13 and younger to gather together online. Roblox says three-quarters of U.S. kids ages 9 to 12 use the platform to play games, but also to chat and show off their skills.
Additionally, users can create new games on Roblox, using the free software the company provides. So far, 8 million people have.
Now the seventeen-year-old company is moving to set the stage for its next wave of growth by going public via a direct listing of its shares. With Roblox’s rapid growth and strong gaming brand, the deal is among the most anticipated of 2021 among investors.
Still, the gaming market is crowded, creating huge challenges for Roblox in the years to come. Microsoft’s Minecraft provides a somewhat similar service for kids to build their own games, while companies like Unity Software offer tools for building games on multiple platforms.
Furthermore, Roblox could be squeezed financially if Apple and Google—on whom it depends for distributing the mobile version of its app—demand a bigger cut of its mobile gaming revenue. In the short term, that danger seems unlikely given the current federal antitrust scrutiny of the two tech giants, but it could resurface farther down the road.
Roblox games are free to play, but they can include in-app purchases for items to use in games, like a magical sword or fast race car. Users can also design virtual gear to dress up their online representations, known as avatars, and sell the digital wares to others. All transactions are made in “Robux,” the company’s own digital currency that can be converted back into real money. Roblox gets a cut of all the action, its primary source of revenue.
A hobby to make money
Zack Ovits, an 18-year-old college freshman, got hooked on making Roblox games with a friend when he was just nine. Now he’s collaborating with developers from around the world, whom he’s met on the platform, to build commercial games and tools for other game designers. “I love it,” says the teen, who, on Roblox, goes by the name boatbomber. “It’s my hobby that happens to earn me money.”
Of course, kids 9 to 12 aren’t known for having a lot of spending money for buying new outfits for their avatars and other in-game items. Roblox saw $924 million in revenue last year, almost double the $508 million in 2019. But at the same time, losses ballooned to $253 million in 2020, up from a $71 million loss in the previous year.
To keep growing and justify a stock market value that could exceed $40 billion in its direct listing, bringing in more older customers will be key. Potential investors are concerned about young people accounting for around 55% of Roblox’s 32.6 million daily users, notes Tom Wijman, games market lead at game research firm Newzoo.
Not helping matters is that Roblox has warned new privacy laws being considered in some countries would limit some of the gaming features it offers, like selling items to minors, which could reduce growth and increase costs. The company already employs more than 2,000 people to police the service and delete inappropriate content. “The company’s ability to target older audiences while retaining its aging younger ones will be critical for Roblox’s future growth,” Wijman says.
That’s exactly the plan that CEO and founder Dave Baszucki laid out last month at a virtual meeting with Wall Street analysts and fund managers. “All ages are already on Roblox, and more and more people of all ages are coming to our platform,” the CEO said from an office decorated with toys including the Lego Hogwarts Castle from its Harry Potter series. On Roblox’s gaming service, he’s known as “builderman,” with his own in-game avatar.
Direct listing
Roblox initially intended to go public last year via a traditional IPO. But after some other startups experienced massive stock price pops on their first day of trading, Roblox pulled back to avoid leaving so much money on the table. It also had to clarify some of its accounting for the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Now the plan is for a direct listing on Wednesday under the symbol RBLX. The initial trading will be from current shareholders immediately selling up to nearly 200 million shares the company has issued previously. That’s similar to other direct listing deals like those from Spotify, Palantir, and Slack.
Roblox was valued at almost $30 billion in its last private fundraising and could double that if it follows the pattern set by other recent buzzy tech IPOs. On the other hand, tech stocks have been struggling for the past week, which could dampen investor enthusiasm.
Whatever the case, the direct listing could make Baszucki, who owns shares with 70% of the voting power of the company, a billionaire many times over. The 58-year-old grew up in Minnesota, studied computer science and engineering at Stanford, and built a computer simulation for physics students called Interactive Physics as his first software business.
The CEO and his team have many ideas for expansion and attracting older customers. The company is already working on improving the quality of game graphics to make them more lifelike and attractive to adults used to more realistic adventure and battle games. Adding machine-learning translation of certain game elements will help the service expand more quickly into new countries (currently most translation is done manually by developers). And Roblox’s leaders are also thinking about how to add more kinds of virtual experiences that users could share beyond games alone, like models of historical cities or even imaginary places from works of fiction.
Baszucki says his ultimate vision is to turn Roblox into a vast science-fiction virtual reality paradise. Known as the “metaverse,” after the phrase used in a 1992 novel by Neal Stephenson, Roblox’s online gaming space would be transformed into a virtual world with endless real estate, enabling users to experience and build what they want and that would be seen via virtual reality headsets. Instead of just reading a book about ancient Rome, future Roblox users could visit the historical city re-created in the metaverse and take a stroll around, Baszucki explained to analysts.
“When we think about what we’re doing at Roblox—we’re shepherds of the metaverse,” he said.
Many longtime Roblox users share the same dream. They are schooled in the concept of the metaverse from books like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which coined the term, or Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, which was made into a movie in 2018. “I’m pretty sure Roblox is going to become the real-world version of the OASIS from Ready Player One,” says Jayden Charbonneau, a 21-year-old game developer who has been on Roblox for almost a decade.
An easy A-plus
Charbonneau also collaborates with other developers whom he met on Roblox. Most taught themselves how to program in Lua, the free open-source language popular on the Internet that undergirds all of Roblox’s games. Following a common tech company playbook, Roblox has also added its own extensions to Lua so games written using its tools only run on its system, not any from rivals.
In one of Charbonneau’s recent games, Visions of a Perspective Reality, players must avoid obstacles and navigate the course by switching back and forth from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional perspective on the action. It won an award for most creative gameplay at Roblox’s developer conference last year.
The huge crew of loyal users who grew up on Roblox and want to make the metaverse a reality could be Baszucki’s secret weapon. College freshman Zack Ovits, who hopes to keep developing Roblox games professionally, is taking his first formal computer science class in college this year. “It’s amusingly below my current level because it’s an intro course,” he says. “Thank you, Roblox, for giving me an easy A+ in that class.”
As Roblox makes its stock market debut, it will be hoping for similar A+ loyalty from investors.
Correction: This article was updated on March 10 to correct the award won by Jayden Charbonneau’s gameand to correct the age of Roblox.
