Shares in Roblox popped by over 20% after posting a strong set of financials late last week. CEO David Baszucki also talked up future Roblox content as being driven by its AI tools and monetised harder by serving older players better.
In the earnings call that followed the Q425 results, Baszucki once again stated that Roblox’s goal is to take up 10% of the gaming market globally. It currently represents 3.4%, according to the company. “We have even more ambitious goals for the US market,” he said.
He also talked up the size of the opportunity among players 18 and over, a cohort that’s “growing at over 50%” and “monetizes 40% higher than younger cohorts”, according to Baszucki.
The company stressed that it is continuing to get as many players age-verified as possible, and that this has helped Roblox understand better who its players are. There are, perhaps unsurprisingly, fewer older players on the platform than it thought, it said.
To keep those players engaged, Baszucki says Roblox is pushing its game-creation tools to further “facilitate growth of high-monetizing genres popular with older users, such as shooters, RPGs, and sports and racing.”
And after Google’s Project Genie world model tech caused a stock slide across the games business, Baszucki said Roblox has plans of its own in this space.
“World models are interesting…we do think they have an opportunity for walking around and painting a world, for example, a really interesting opportunity to think about where does video end and snapshots end and interactivity begin…we have developed our own models there.”
Elsewhere on the earnings call, CFO Naveen Chopra was less bullish on the ongoing implementation of advertising into Roblox. Chopra noted that while he expects “pretty healthy growth” for the category, advertising revenue is still “modest” and “not a major contributor to the top line.”
Speaking to CNBC after the results, Roblox boss Baszucki said that the UGC platform currently uses “over 400 internally created AI models” to help players create Roblox experiences.
Its new ‘4D generation model’ will also allow players to start building things with a prompt, he added: “I believe what you’ll be able to is vibe code the next Grow A Garden over the weekend,” he said, though he dismissed the notion that all of the new AI coding tools coming online represent a threat to Roblox’s business overall.
