Roblox RBLX Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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DATE

Thursday, April 30, 2026 at 4:30 p.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Founder and CEO — David Baszucki
• Chief Financial Officer — Naveen K. Chopra

TAKEAWAYS

• Revenue -- $1.4 billion, up 39% year over year.
• Bookings -- $1.7 billion, up 43% year over year, described as “roughly twice what [Roblox has] shared with investors as [its] long-term growth trajectory.”
• Operating Cash Flow -- $629 million; Free Cash Flow -- $596 million, rising 4,240% year over year, respectively.
• Monthly Unique Payers -- 31 million, increasing 52% over the prior year.
• DAUs -- 132 million, up 35% year over year; growth outside the U.S. and Canada was 40%, with Japan at 96% and India at 84%.
• Hours of Engagement -- 31 billion, advancing 43% year over year; international growth at 50%, with Japan hours up 101% and India hours up 91%.
• Over-18 Cohort -- Represents 26% of DAUs who have age checked; in the U.S., DAUs and hours for the 18 and up group grew over 40%, with ages 18-34 growing over 50% and monetizing at 1.5x under-18 users.
• Age Check Penetration -- 51% of global DAUs age checked; U.S. at 65%, Australia at 70%.
• AI Adoption by Top Creators -- “Nearly half of the top 1 thousand creators on Roblox now leverage either Roblox Assistant or MCP (model context protocol) to compress dev timelines.”
• Novel Games Initiative -- DevEx rate for age-checked 18+ users in the U.S. will increase to 37.8% from 26.6% starting June 8 for in-experience spend; approximately 100 novel games are being onboarded to the jump-start program.
• Guidance Revision -- Full-year revenue growth guidance lowered to 20%-25%; bookings guidance reduced to 8%-12% (previous bookings guidance was 22%-26%).
• Top 10 Content Concentration -- Games outside the top 10 saw 43% growth in engagement and 41% growth in spending, accounting for 65% of growth.
• CapEx Outlook -- “We have not changed our expectations for CapEx this year,” and GPU expansion in data centers is seen as adequate for 2026 needs.

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RISKS

• Management lowered revenue and bookings guidance, citing headwinds due to safety measures: “we are lowering our guidance for full-year top-line growth to account for a continuation of these safety headwinds that we have experienced to date.”
• DAUs did come in weaker than anticipated, with top-of-funnel sign-up friction attributed to reduced communication and app store rating declines from age check changes.
• CFO Chopra said, “The reduction in our bookings expectation will also impact margins this year,” driven by fixed-cost deleveraging and incremental DevEx investments.

SUMMARY

Roblox (NYSE:RBLX) reported historically high growth in revenue, bookings, and cash flow but revised full-year top-line and bookings guidance downward, directly linking the change to ongoing user acquisition and engagement headwinds from the global rollout of age-based safety protocols. International markets, especially Japan and India, contributed outsized DAU and engagement gains, with over-18 users monetizing at a significantly higher rate than younger cohorts. A long-term strategic shift favors broadening age verification, communication safety, and incentivizing adult content creation, including materially higher DevEx payout rates for older U.S. creators. New AI-powered development tools and the forthcoming Roblox Reality project are positioned as core to expanding high-fidelity content and platform scalability but are expected to incur new, usage-based fees upon launch.

• Outside the 10 largest games, smaller titles drove the majority of platform engagement and spend expansion, indicating less concentration risk and greater content diversity than prior periods.
• Management expects sequential decline in DAUs between Q1 and Q2 but projects a return to growth in Q3 as rollout timing and product enhancements offset earlier safety-driven friction.
• First-time implementation of global age-based chat gating and content restrictions produced measurable decreases in platform sign-ups, notably impacting organic app store acquisition funnels.
• Leadership confirmed the jump in margin pressure is partially linked to accelerated investment in supporting the 18+ creator community, with an intent to fund margins from future operating leverage.
• The Roblox Reality initiative is not planned as a free service, with future photorealistic, multiplayer-enabled experiences funded through subscriber or usage-based payments, mitigating real-time inference cost exposure.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• Bookings: The value of virtual items and services purchased by users, distinct from GAAP revenue due to recognition timing.
• DevEx: Roblox’s Developer Exchange program, allowing creators to convert earned Robux (in-game currency) into real currency at a set rate.
• Age Check: Roblox’s proprietary user age verification system, now required for chat and expanded to drive content and account controls.
• MCP (model context protocol): An AI-powered set of development tools that speeds up game creation workflows on the Roblox platform.
• R15 Avatar Framework: Roblox’s 15-jointed avatar model enabling more lifelike movement and interaction, required for “novel games.”
• SLIM: Roblox’s technology for bandwidth and asset streaming optimization to enable consistent experience quality across devices.

Full Conference Call Transcript

David Baszucki: Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. We continue to make progress towards our target of capturing 10% of the global gaming content market on our platform and an even greater share of the U.S. market. In Q1, we had revenue of $1.4 billion, which grew 39% year over year; bookings of $1.7 billion, which grew 43% year over year; and I will note that is roughly twice what we have shared with investors as our long-term growth trajectory. We generated $629 million in operating cash flow and $596 million in free cash flow, up 4,240% year over year, respectively.

Monthly unique payers increased to 31 million, up 52% compared to a year ago, and we had strong payer growth in international markets with continued solid growth in the U.S. and Canada, up 19% year over year on a larger payer base. We also saw year-over-year user and engagement growth: DAUs of 132 million, up 35% year over year, and DAUs outside of the U.S. and Canada grew 40%. DAUs in the U.S. and Canada grew 17%; DAUs in Japan grew 96% year over year in Q1; and DAUs in India grew 84%. Hours of engagement were at 31 billion, up 43% year over year. Outside of the U.S. and Canada, hours grew 50%.

Hours in the U.S. and Canada grew 21%. Hours in Japan grew 101% year over year in Q1, and hours in India grew 91% year over year. For our 18 and up numbers, as of Q1, over-18 users represent 26% of DAUs who have age checked. In the U.S., DAUs and hours for the 18 and up cohort grew over 40%; within that, our 18 through 34 cohort grew over 50%, faster than any other age cohort. Additionally, in the U.S., the over-18 users spend 50% higher than our under-18 users. As we expected, DAU growth, while very healthy at 35%, has declined from the roughly 70% growth rates we saw in the past two quarters.

User acquisition and engagement were also impacted by our global rollout of age checks to access chat in January. At Roblox Corporation, we are committed to setting the global standard for healthy, safe, and age-appropriate digital engagement, and we are building a platform for all ages as part of the core vision to connect a billion users with optimism and civility. As part of this commitment, in Q1 we became the first large online gaming platform to introduce age checks to access chat on a global basis, and we are the first large platform with a major announcement in our plans to introduce age-based accounts, which leverage our age-check technology, and we expect this to roll out globally in June.

Because we have globally introduced AgeCheck, we have been able to introduce kids accounts within our core app. These proactive measures are setting a new industry benchmark, and we have been incorporating input from policymakers and regulators around the world. Note that not all of our users have age checked, even as the percentages continue to grow. In the United States, we are at 65% age checked. In Australia, where we started a bit earlier, we are at 70% age checked. This is in addition to our robust text filtering technology that we are continuously improving, and also our open-source voice safety tech. We are now better able to understand the impact in the short term of age checking.

For communication engagement, we have had a follow-on reduction in the percent of users communicating on our platform, because people who have not age checked are not allowed to communicate. In addition, along with age checking, we have now banded communication so we no longer allow adults to communicate with users 16 and under, even with our existing industry-leading filters and with no image sharing. We believe this reduction in comms does affect both people who have age checked as well as those who have not, because those who have age checked do have fewer people to communicate with.

Also, as we push towards 10% of gaming, we believe our discovery algorithms should be focused primarily on driving incremental long-term platform retention over short-term monetization, especially to grow our 18 and up user base. We are implementing this transition now. As we continue to adjust to local customs and regulations, we do foresee some restrictions of content to both non–age-checked users relative to their age range and also as part of region-specific content guidelines.

We believe, as a result of age check, reduced communication, and discovery that we have weighted more towards monetization, we have seen a reduction in app store ratings, and we believe this may be contributing to a reduction in organic sign-ups that typically flow from app stores. We believe the strategic upside of everything we are doing is significant and the right thing to do for the long-term health of the platform. Kids accounts and select accounts offer the long-term opportunity of increasing safety and civility, which in turn drives organic engagement growth, in line with our mission to connect a billion users with optimism and civility.

We are unique among large platforms in our focus on the safety of users who are under 13, especially given the reality that a large number of young people under the age of 13 have access to phones and to other large platforms, and these platforms typically are not designing safety systems for those under 13. However, as a result of this, we do expect to see continued short-term bookings headwinds, and this will lead to a revision in our full-year guidance. Naveen will discuss more in his remarks. Now to address the short-term friction, we are taking a number of steps across several key areas.

Age checking is our vision of the future, and we believe this tech will continue to scale across the industry. We expect to see continued adoption by other companies in the gaming, social networking, social media, and AI chatbot spaces. Through Q1, 51% of global Roblox Corporation DAUs have age checked. As we work to set the global standard in safety, full adoption of age check will take time.

We expect our new age-based account framework to drive an increase in age check penetration rates, and we are focusing on additional means to drive our percent of users that have age checked to a level that long term we hope to bring above 90%, which will unlock our ability to significantly improve our native communication features. Communication engagement is fundamental to our user engagement and retention, and following the global rollout of age check to access chat, we see new opportunities to enhance communication features and boost engagement through our higher-confidence user age data. Over the next few months, we are rolling out several enhancements designed to increase communication adoption and improve the chat experience on Roblox.

This includes global chat, which allows players across multiple servers in the same game to communicate in a single shared room, which we believe will increase in-experience chat density, and we are integrating party chat directly into the in-experience chat window, which we believe will remove the need for users to leave an experience to coordinate with friends. We plan to expand party chat between trusted friends—when appropriate age and necessary parental consent is granted—to include voice and avatar video, and we are not sharing a ship date for this. We have also planned a system for preset messages that will enable all users to easily coordinate gameplay.

Collectively, these investments, paired with our incentives for age check, will be engineered to drive on-platform communication beyond our pre-check levels and deepen user connection. We continue to evolve our discovery system. Last year, we enhanced the discovery of long-tail content and improved content diversity. We are now focusing on high-quality games with deeper long-term engagement, and we are currently experimenting with enhanced discovery algorithms designed to optimize for 28-day retention and beyond. Some of our creators have already taken notice, as I tweeted this week, and we are implementing changes to level the playing field for high-quality, long-term experiences. We continue to see an acceleration of AI toolchain use by our top creators.

Nearly half of the top 1 thousand creators on Roblox now leverage either Roblox Assistant—our own AI entry point—or MCP (model context protocol) to compress dev timelines. In addition to our own Assistant AI, our creators are using tools like Quod Code, Cursor, Codex, and other third-party tools tightly with Roblox Studio. These technologies are being used to support creators on everything ranging from light assistance to fully vibe-coded content. We ultimately believe gaming is a much more complex space than the coding space, and we are driving to achieve iterative Wiggins-loop-style programming because games are not just based on code, but 3D assets, NPC AI, core gaming loops, and live ops, among others.

We want to get to the point where devs can have Roblox Studio working overnight on their game and come back in the morning and see those improvements. We want to do for game creation what tools like Codex, Cursor, and Quod Code are doing for coding—radically accelerating speed—and we believe we are uniquely poised to innovate and solve this given the integrated architecture we have from our cloud to our engine to our developer tools to our native AI. In April, we called that the month that Roblox Studio went agentic. Creators can now engage in focused conversations with our Assistant about the design, implementation, and test plan of new features.

Assistant executes a plan, launches a suite of building agents to test, and delivers new features with minimal creator engagement. On the 3D side, to complement coding, we are introducing new mesh and procedural model generation capabilities to allow creators to build richer worlds, and we have introduced an NPC testing agent that can navigate complex 3D worlds and execute gameplay actions as part of game development. The vision for NPCs at Roblox goes beyond NPCs you might interact with in-game or NPCs used for safety; a key part of that vision is testing.

We believe NPC testing agents can be part of a foundational model that we are building to help creators iterate quickly on their games using NPCs in addition to humans for testing. All of this is to enable small teams to produce super high-quality content very quickly. We believe AI will fundamentally accelerate gaming, and we are in a unique position to lead in this transformation. Yesterday, we shared on our blog our vision for the future of integrated AI and gaming and the creation of photorealistic multiplayer gaming and creation that is easy for anyone to participate in. This is our most ambitious technical innovation to date. We call it the Roblox Reality Project.

This patent-pending architecture integrates hyperscale multiplayer simulation with our current Roblox cloud engine, photorealistic rendering, and persistent world state into a hybrid, unified architecture built on our global edge cloud and infrastructure. The goal of Roblox Reality is to enable creators to construct interactive environments that are high fidelity and drive this new technical frontier—the introduction of the first easy-to-use multiplayer photorealistic platform that we are uniquely poised to build. More details are on the blog post if you want to read up on it. In general, on the AI side, to wrap up, we have over 400 models running over 1.5 million inferences per second on-prem and on our cloud.

This powers, in addition to creation and Roblox Reality, everything from discovery recommendations to communication safety, marketplace recommendations, and 3D generation. We are now investing in four in-house proprietary models for 3D generation, NPC behavior, our newly shared video super upsampler initiative, and coding assistance and generation. Finally, we have announced several initiatives on our novel games initiative. As we shared, there is a very large opportunity for us in the over-18 cohort. Over 18 represents 20% of the DAUs who have age checked, and once again, in the U.S., DAUs and hours within our 18 through 34 cohort grew over 50% year over year.

Today, we announced an increase in the DevEx rate for age-checked 18 and up users in the U.S. Starting on June 8, creator earnings for in-experience spend generated by age-checked 18 and up users in the U.S. will increase to 37.8% from 26.6%. What makes this possible is age check. Games that do this must meet our definition of novel games, which means they will utilize our R15 avatar framework. We are also now working with several well-known game studios to bring reimagined versions of their beloved mobile games to Roblox, with more details on this in the coming months. We have announced an internal jump-start and incubator program to support existing creators with novel game creation.

The initial response to this has been strong, and with our existing creators, with our white-glove service, we have roughly 100 novel games being onboarded into the program. In Q1 we delivered a large number of technical milestones designed to enhance realism and expand creator capabilities, in parallel with the longer-term Roblox Reality project. These support high-quality, immersive experiences that scale dynamically from 2 GB Android devices all the way up to high quality on a gaming PC. We have introduced our new R15+ avatar framework with dynamic heads. This provides a foundation for more lifelike avatars on the platform, including recently released avatar makeup.

Together with deep tech like instance streaming, mesh streaming, texture streaming, server authority, and SLIM, these updates remove barriers our creators have seen in creating more original experiences for older users. We are committed to the long view. Our confidence in the future of gaming on our platform has never been higher. With that, I will turn the call over to Naveen.

Naveen K. Chopra: Thanks, Dave, and good afternoon, everyone. I am going to share a few observations about Q1 and then discuss the changes to our guidance. With respect to Q1, as Dave highlighted, we saw strong top-line growth of 43% in bookings. I think that demonstrates the ability of our platform to grow at a very healthy rate without the benefit of viral hits. We also saw an improvement in content diversity. Games outside of the top 10 saw a 43% growth in engagement and 41% growth in spending, and as a group, those outside the top 10 accounted for 65% of the growth in spending.

We think this is a healthier level of concentration than what we have seen in the recent past. DAUs did come in weaker than anticipated—we will talk about that more in a minute—but very importantly, user metrics like engagement and monetization remained stable relative to the year-ago period. As Dave pointed out, we made a number of important safety-related changes to the platform, starting with the age gating of communications in January. On our last call, we noted that we expected some headwind to engagement and bookings as a result of the rollout of age checks. We now better understand the second-order impacts of reduced communications engagement on things like word of mouth and organic content growth.

Additionally, the monetization bias of our recommendation engine likely negatively impacted app store ratings and ultimately sign-ups. We do have additional safety features, including kids and select accounts, rolling out later this year. Those have huge long-term benefits. We have always viewed safety as a compounding moat for Roblox Corporation, and these features are an important ingredient to that. But it does mean continued friction in the short term until we get the benefit of continued adoption of age checks, the planned updates to our communications features that Dave described—which we believe will improve chat vitality and chat density—and discovery enhancements that result in better content recommendations.

As a result, we are lowering our guidance for full-year top-line growth to account for a continuation of these safety headwinds that we have experienced to date. Our revenue guidance for the full year will now be 20% to 25%, and our full-year guidance for bookings growth is 8% to 12%. That guidance is based on the expectation that DAUs will continue to contract between Q1 and Q2 and then return to sequential growth in Q3. Consistent with our prior guidance, we do not assume any major viral hits in those numbers. The reduction in our bookings expectation will also impact margins this year.

As you would expect, much of that is related to fixed-cost deleveraging given the change in our bookings expectation, although roughly a quarter of the margin reduction relative to our prior guidance is related to the incremental investments we are making in the 18 and over DevEx increase. Even though those investments are incremental to our prior margin expectations for this year, in future periods we plan on them being funded by the capture of additional operating leverage. Even more importantly, we are highly enthusiastic about what they can unlock in terms of long-term growth, which continues to be our North Star. With that, we will open the line for questions.

Operator: We will now open the call for questions. At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We request you limit yourself to one question and rejoin the queue if needed. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Eric James Sheridan: Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe a two-parter, if I can. With respect to incenting the development out of the 18-plus community, could you go a little bit deeper into what signal you were getting in terms of that type of content from developers and what it might mean for the long-term health and compounded growth for the business? And second, with respect to the change on DevEx, can you help us better understand why that was the right number to move to in terms of higher DevEx? Thanks.

David Baszucki: Great question. There was a big invention on Roblox Corporation a while back when we moved from a platform without Robux and DevEx to DevEx, and we saw immediately that the incentive of creating a closed-loop ecosystem—where Robux could be used by our users, devs could build interesting experiences, and they could then cash those out—created a virtuous cycle that has been somewhat of a machine driving Roblox Corporation ever since. We have seen massive organic behavior from that virtual economy. We have been very careful in increasing the creator DevEx rate over time, but we have slowly increased it, as we did at RDC recently.

The 18 and up market—now that we have age check, we can know quite accurately who is a real 18 and up player—and in addition, that market globally is roughly 80% of the global gaming market, which is astounding given our low, although quickly growing, penetration. Those users also, as we shared, monetize at 1.5x where we are today, and that is a big part of our future in addition to our existing under-18 base. We know systems drive behavior. We want to see novel games on our platform. We want to make it very profitable for creators to make amazing content. We want them to trust our discovery systems that will organically reward experiences with long-term retention.

This is a continuation of Roblox Corporation being a systems company, focusing on this big area we are moving towards.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Cost with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Matthew Andrew Cost: Thank you. Naveen, could you dive one step deeper into the reduction in the guidance? You gave a lot of helpful detail about the behavior of people related to age check. Is the entire guide down driven by the change in behavior versus the severity that you have observed because of age check, or are there other material factors worth calling out? That is question one. And second, on Roblox Reality, are there any increased cloud expenses or CapEx that you are expecting to support that going forward? Thank you.

Naveen K. Chopra: Yes, thanks, Matt. With respect to the change in guidance, I would characterize it as largely safety related. There are a number of aspects to that, as we spoke about. It is age checking, it has a follow-on impact to communications, and that affects both users that have age checked as well as those that have not. There are a number of things, as Dave laid out, that we are doing from a product perspective to reignite communications engagement on the platform. We also believe that some of the dynamics we saw around discovery being more monetization biased than we would like plays into that. Content recommendations were probably not as optimal as we would like to see them.

So it is the combination of those dynamics, but largely driven by what we are doing from a safety perspective. In terms of Roblox Reality, Dave?

David Baszucki: First off, Roblox Reality will not be free. The type of technology we are showing combines the Roblox hybrid engine and cloud, which, if you look into our financial statements, you can see we run at less than a penny per hour roughly. Simultaneously, building close-to-photoreal or photoreal experiences—especially when multiplayer—is very difficult and takes enormous production budgets. Part of what Roblox Corporation is about is democratizing creation for everyone. We believe this is the ultimate combination of both traditional 3D networked multiplayer gaming engines like Roblox, which is somewhat unique given its cloud, with the future research we see in video models moving more and more towards real time.

We have the opportunity to build a very Roblox-specific video world model that we call a super upsampler that can key both on video as well as 3D spatial information to do what we believe will be a beautiful job of upsampling with developer prompts. We are right on the edge—in the whole AI space—of running real-time photoreal video models to 2K at 60 hertz, and that is why we say this is an up-and-coming project. When we launch this, it will not be free. This will use cloud compute. We will have some kind of way of subscribing or paying for this, and because of that, we think we will offset the real-time inference side of it.

On the training side, we may have additional needs. I do not think we are fully showing them this year.

Naveen K. Chopra: Just to put a finer point on the expense side, we have not changed our expectations for CapEx this year. A lot of what we are doing in terms of landing GPU in our data centers will cover what we will need this year. There is some cloud training that we will be doing. That is now factored into the updated margin guidance. As this technology continues to develop, we will use a combination of cloud as well as our own data center capacity to execute both training, and as Dave said, inference will be funded by usage.

Operator: Next question, please. Your next question comes from the line of Ken with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Kenneth James Gawrelski: Thank you. Two, if I may. Naveen, I am puzzled. Ninety days ago you had bookings guidance of 22% to 26%, and you gave the first-quarter guide, which you came near the high end of, and now the guide is meaningfully cut for the full year. How much of this is impacts that you are seeing already in the Q2 period versus expectations of changes rolling out in the June period? And secondly, for Dave, philosophically, on the changes you are making in terms of what content can be discovered by younger users—there are changes that involve embargoing some content—how does that fit with your notion of democratizing publishing, content, and discovery?

It feels like a tension between content safety and moderation and democratizing the platform. Where do you see the balance of those today?

Naveen K. Chopra: Hey, Ken. I will start on the first one and then hand it over to Dave. We launched AgeCheck in January, and as we said, we expected to see some headwind in hours and DAUs. What we did not fully understand until we had the benefit of three to four months of experience is how that impacts the platform more generally with respect to communications engagement and the knock-on impacts from that. A couple of important things: when we look at what has happened over the last few months, engagement has remained strong, monetization has remained strong, and retention has remained strong. What we have seen is challenges at the top of the funnel—new users coming in.

When we think about the rest of the year, we are not going to see the bookings impact of that right away, hence the performance in Q1. But we do know that the fact we had more sign-up headwind over the last few months is going to put pressure on bookings over the remainder of the year. However, when we start to get back to sequential DAU growth in Q3, given the strength of monetization and engagement, we feel confident that we will be able to drive the bookings growth that we are guiding to, which—given the comps in the back half of the year—equates to relatively low single digits.

We are not trying to do something heroic in the back half. It is largely driven by a return to DAU growth.

David Baszucki: Great question on democratizing creation. Two metrics you can look at for Roblox Corporation over many of the past years: first, total dollar value creators participate in—DevEx every year—which is growing rapidly; second, the growth rates of creator 1, 10, 100, and 1 thousand. Consistently, the total amount goes up, and the growth rate of creator 1 thousand is faster than 100, 10, or 1. That is a metric to measure democratization, and I believe that will continue. Relative to what we have done with kids and select accounts, we believe we are striking a very good balance, and we have the ability to strike this balance because we age check.

Other platforms that do not age check have a wide range of users signing up at various ages. We know what age everyone is, and it allows us to align the appropriate content with them. We are doing that with kids and select accounts. The corpus of that content will be very large. It will cover a significant proportion of what they play today, and it will allow creators to participate in a UGC space for 16 and up to introduce innovative concepts, while we are careful with what content reaches under 16. I am optimistic you will continue to see democratization.

Operator: Thanks, Ken. Your next question comes from the line of Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Cory Alan Carpenter: Thanks for the question. Two related ones. Naveen, you mentioned a few times the expectation to return to DAU growth in Q3. I understand it is a seasonally strong quarter, but you are also rolling age-based accounts out in June. What gives you confidence in the return to DAU growth that quarter? And, probably unrelated, could you elaborate on the changes you are making to address communications friction points and the timeline for rolling those out? Thank you.

Naveen K. Chopra: Thanks, Cory. The reasons we are speaking to DAU growth in Q3 are a few things. Number one, as you pointed out, it is a seasonally strong quarter, so we expect tailwinds. Number two, we will have a number of the product changes that Dave will touch on rolled out by then. Number three, regarding the impact of kids and select accounts during that period, we do not expect that to be as dramatic as what we did in January with respect to communications. When we started age gating access to communications, it was a binary experience—users lost complete access to comms—and that had knock-on impacts on overall vitality, sentiment, and app store ratings.

What we are doing with kids and select accounts will have some impact, but it is not as big a change because kids or people who have not age checked will still have access to 20 thousand games that represent more than 97% of engagement on the platform from those cohorts. It is not nearly as drastic as age gating communications.

David Baszucki: On the comms roadmap: some things are in the pipeline and live in experiment. Global chat is live in an experimental mode with a subset of users. This gives a feeling of chat density even if a subset of people are not age checked and not on comms, because it allows people playing the same experience to connect with people on nearby servers. Preset messages support common Roblox gameplay coordination without requiring full chat and can be safely used across age bands—this is coming soon. The bigger initiative is to move party chat fully natively within experiences, with common functionality friends use when playing Roblox—text and voice—side by side, potentially on a second device.

We are not giving a date on this. This is the third top priority on our comms roadmap.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jason Bazinet with Citi. Your line is open.

Jason Boisvert Bazinet: I had a quick question on the over-18 DevEx incentives. When you roll out incentives like this and the developer community responds and then users respond, how long does that gestation period take?

David Baszucki: Great question. This goes back to a board-level discussion prior to doing DevEx at all, when Roblox Corporation was a hobby for many and there was no way to make a living on the platform, much less create a studio making $10 million, $20 million, or $50 million. When we introduced DevEx and Robux, the quality of experiences on Roblox Corporation increased much more quickly. Creators were able to make it a full-time job and dedicate themselves to it, which is why we now have thousands of people who make their living on Roblox Corporation. Over time, we have continuously made incremental updates to the DevEx rate—it started low and has climbed, including at RDC.

We have substantial evidence that when creators can trust they will make a certain amount of revenue from their experience, they will put more effort into creating quality experiences. We have seen this pay off time and time again in higher-quality content that creators can trust to build.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Marroque with Raymond James. Your line is open.

Andrew Marroque: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Could you give a bit more detail on the shift in discovery algorithms you mentioned—going from shorter-term monetization factors to longer-term health factors? How might that be evidenced from a user perspective, and how does that encourage increased chat density over time? Thank you.

David Baszucki: From a user perspective, this is something we and our creators can intuitively see on the home page—the quality and types of experiences and their ratings. We have made great leaps in discovery using ML to predict many factors for each user-game pair. Now that we have developed this capability, and given the potential for 18 and up, we determined we want to drive user growth of that segment, even if we slightly less weight short-term monetization. Our creators welcome this because they want to invest in long-term, high-quality properties, and it can be frustrating to see shorter-term monetization-type games that are not built for longevity. Intuitively and systemically, we believe this is the right thing to do.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Omar Dessouky with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Omar Dessouky: In Q3 2025, your European and U.S. daily active users were about 60 million. In the first quarter, it is 51 million. You characterized the viral surge of the third quarter as a big user acquisition event, and that a lot of your users look the same. Would you still consider that a high watermark you can get back to if you get through the growing pains you talked about today, or does this change your view on retention?

Naveen K. Chopra: Hey, Omar. First, to put the DAU trend in context for Europe and the U.S., there are roughly 4 million DAUs that came out due to the Russia block. That is important to note. On the broader question, we expect that we will return to DAU growth as we get through some of the safety friction on the platform. We have said the users we acquired through viral games last year had similar retention characteristics to the platform at large, and that continues to be true. As I mentioned earlier, the nature of this friction is that retention has remained strong.

The reason DAUs have come in weaker than we expected is largely top of funnel—sign-ups—which we believe is related to communications friction and how that has been reflected in organic growth through the app stores.

Operator: Thanks, Omar. We will take one more question. Your next question comes from the line of Brian Pitz with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Brian Joseph Pitz: Hey. Thanks for taking the question. Dave, you talked about working with some well-known studios to bring their mobile games into the Roblox ecosystem. On the conversation of higher DevEx for the over-18 cohort, what are your expectations for how the revenue share with those creators might compare to the broader mix-shift revenue share on the platform?

David Baszucki: We do everything linear, and we do it as a system. We have never cut a custom revenue-share deal. We have had discussions in the past about accelerators and de-accelerators, but DevEx is consistent across everyone. The benefit of raising it for 18-plus is those studios will receive that as part of it. One of the most attractive things to studios—whether traditionally mobile or PC game creators—is the unique architecture of Roblox Corporation: the same build, the same game, whether it is PC, tablet, console, or phone, dynamically scaling with tech like SLIM, texture streaming, and mesh streaming. There is the ability to unify a single build for both platforms, which is very attractive to many studios we talk to.

David Baszucki: I am getting the cue, so we will wrap up here. I appreciate all of your questions and feedback, and I will kick it back to Naveen for closing remarks.

Naveen K. Chopra: Thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. We look forward to speaking with you next quarter.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.

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