Roblox Posts Breakout Q4 After Chasing Older Core Gaming Market

The gaming platform Roblox has been there as its over 100 million active users grew up.

Now, the company wants to grow up, too. On Roblox’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings call Thursday (Feb. 5), executives stressed to investors that the youth gaming platform is now maturing into something more durable: a scaled, cash-generating infrastructure for human co-experience, with early signs of operating leverage and an increasingly explicit ambition to compete for a meaningful share of the global gaming economy.

“We estimate our 18 and over cohort is growing at over 50%, and this cohort monetizes 40% higher than younger cohorts,” Roblox CEO David Baszucki said during the call.

Roblox bookings for the quarter were $2.2 billion, representing a 63% year-over-year increase and exceeding analyst estimates.

“We have seen over the last few years the definition of what is a game expand,” Baszucki added.

In Q4 2025, Roblox generated $1.4 billion in revenue, up 43% year over year, and $2.2 billion in bookings, up 63%. Average daily active users reached 144 million, a 69% increase, while hours engaged climbed to 35 billion, up 88% year over year, according to earnings material released by the company.

The majority of that growth came from international markets, where DAUs (daily active users) rose nearly 80% year over year in the fourth quarter.

The company’s stock jumped around 20% in immediate after-hours trading.

See also: Roblox Uses AI to Filter Billions of User Interactions in Real Time 

For much of its public life, Roblox has been difficult to categorize. Investors alternately treated it as a game studio, a social network, or a speculative bet on the “metaverse,” a term the company itself now largely avoids.

As heard throughout the investor call, Roblox’s internal language increasingly centers on what it calls its “flywheel”: a reinforcing loop in which user growth drives creator earnings, which drives better content, deeper engagement, higher monetization and ultimately more capacity for reinvestment.

In line with that strategy, Roblox continues to treat creator payouts not as a cost to be minimized, but as a strategic lever. In Q4, developer exchange (DevEx) fees grew 70% year over year to $477 million, reflecting both platform growth and an 8.5% increase in the DevEx rate announced in September. For the full year, the top 1,000 creators earned an average of $1.3 million, up more than 50% from the prior year.

This matters because Roblox’s content model depends on sustained creator participation at scale. Management has been explicit that it expects DevEx rates to rise over time, viewing higher creator earnings as one of its highest-return investments.

The company added approximately 60 million daily active users in 2025.

Notably, management announced that 2026 will likely be the last year it provides full-year guidance, citing the increasing unpredictability of viral dynamics, AI-driven creation and demographic expansion.

Read more: Roblox’s 150 Million Daily Users Still Haven’t Translated Into Profitability

Underlying Roblox’s strategic shifts is a technology roadmap designed to support more complex, competitive game genres traditionally dominated by consoles and PCs, and also with the older users aged 18-34 that the platform is deliberately repositioning itself to serve.

The company has deployed more than 400 AI models across creation, discovery, safety and social interaction. Internally trained foundation models draw on an unusual dataset: billions of hours of 3D human interaction, voice communication and avatar movement. This data advantage underpins tools like Roblox Assistant, Avatar Auto-Setup and Cube, which collectively compress development timelines and lower the barrier to sophisticated game creation.

By integrating these tools directly into its existing virtual economy, Roblox aims to ensure that its platform remains the primary destination for user-generated content (UGC), even as AI reduces the technical skill required for development.

At the same time, a potentially watershed moment in the platform’s legal history occurred in December, when dozens of individual lawsuits were consolidated into a federal Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) in the Northern District of California around the company’s alleged failure to protect minors from exploitation, grooming and sexually explicit content.

On Jan. 30, a hearing was held to appoint plaintiffs’ lead counsel and establish a structure for discovery. The litigation is also drawing in other technology giants, with Discord, Meta Platforms and Snap Inc. filing corporate disclosures as part of the broader inquiry into how platforms and messaging apps can be abused.

Parallel to the federal MDL, several state attorneys general have initiated independent legal actions. In response, Roblox accelerated the rollout of several safety features in late 2025 and early 2026.

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