Roblox Keeps Bringing In The Dough, As Teens And Adults Outperform Younger Players

Roblox is still going full steam ahead, as this week's reveal of the corporation's Q2 2021 financial data shows. Overall revenue continues its meteoric rise, not showing any signs of slowing down since its pandemic-fueled takeoff a year ago. Q2 2021's revenue was $454.1 million, up 17% from Q1 and up 127% from Q2 2020, when Roblox brought in "only" $200.4 million.

The developer's four primary "expense buckets" -- cost of revenue, developer exchange fees, personnel costs, and infrastructure/"trust & safety" -- have also seen steady increases, increasing by 118% since Q2 2020. While that may not please stockholders, it's actually refreshing to see a company increase its capabilities by investing in itself rather than hollowing out all expenses so as to deliver greater returns to investors and executives.

(Speaking of building itself up, Roblox has acquired group chat platform Guilded, which is billed as "focused on building a platform to connect gaming communities." It will operate as an independent product group within the Roblox framework, though there's no mention of exactly how it will be incorporated into the game platform.)

Roblox's daily active users (DAU) has flattened again, after showing significant rises in Q2 2020 and again in the last quarter. That figure stands at 43.2 million players, up slightly from 42.1 million in Q1. Just two years ago, it was 17.1 million, which is still a number that most game companies would love to have. Overall, those players stayed engaged for 9.7 billion hours during the quarter, with average bookings of $15.41.

There are a lot of other breakdowns of players by various metrics that you can see in the financial report here, but there's just one I'll highlight. For the first time -- at least in the two years that the charts go back -- there were more hours engaged by players over the age of 13 than under 13: 4.9 billion to 4.758 billion. (Another 0.08 billion, or 80 million hours, are classified as "unknown.") Maybe there's something to that notion that Roblox could be an adult meet-up spot.