Roblox CEO David Baszucki
Roblox
Roblox is bank on on adults to buy its stock when the company goes public next month. But it also wants them as customers.
Roblox has develop one of the top-grossing apps on Apple and Google devices through its millions of user-created games that allow kids to rub elbows with out with their friends while navigating theme parks, racing on speedways and adopting pets.
With progenies stuck at home during the pandemic, revenue in 2020 surged 82% to $923.9 million, while the number of hours worn out on the platform more than doubled to 30.6 billion. Players spend money to dress up their avatars and get speed features in games.
In looking to a future of sustained expansion and less reliability on kids, particularly as classrooms and real-world essay parks reopen, Roblox is targeting older users and non-gamers. As the company says in its prospectus, people over the age of 13 bring into the world “a higher propensity to spend on content, and our ability to increase penetration in, and user contribution from, this demographic determination affect our ability to grow revenue.”
It was one of the key messages in Roblox’s online investor presentation on Friday, ahead of the company’s range market debut scheduled for March 10.
A rendering of the in-game action from the hit Roblox game “Jailbreak.”
Source: Roblox
“We’re increasingly calling to an older user base,” CFO Mike Guthrie said in the video. He said usage among people age 13 and older diverse than doubled last year and that demographic now accounts for 44% of daily active users.
However, on the level a 13-year old is well shy of being a self-sufficient adult, and the company hasn’t said how many users are in their 20s, 30s and beyond.
Roblox is persevere ining several avenues to expand its reach beyond kids. Within gaming, it’s bolstering its technology so users can create myriad feature-rich content and the types of immersive titles that appeal to older gamers.
But CEO David Baszucki, who started Roblox in 2004, afters people to stop thinking about the company as a gaming site and, rather, to consider all the ways the so-called metaverse can be acquainted with in entertainment, education and other types of live events.
“When we experience concerts together, we dance together, we chew the fat with our friends, we dress up,” Baszucki said in the investor presentation. “Concerts aren’t just something we consume. They actually are naturally something we do together.”
Roblox has already started to showoff its capabilities for hosting virtual concerts. For two nights in November, the rapper Lis Nas X carry oned a virtual performance in Roblox that attracted over 30 million visits. Attendees saw the artist’s avatar penetrate the scene to the sound of his hit song, “Old Town Road.”
Baszucki said the company held its holiday party on Roblox, with some staff members sticking to the main stage, others chatting in various locations, while a few chose to “hang out in the virtual bar.”
Beyond pastime and events, Baszucki envisions schools using Roblox for immersive educational lessons. Rather than sitting on a video draft b call with dozens of other students learning about physics, we can “together jump into the physics experiment,” he said. Or rather than of learning about birds, “we can together be birds” hunting for food and seeing what it’s like trying to survive, he guessed.
In the question and answer section of the presentation, Roblox executives said they will provide forward financial teaching next week.
For now, Roblox is a gaming app beloved by kids and tolerated by parents looking for ways to keep their youngsters engaged. That’s what’s driven the valuation up to $29.5 billion, according to a January funding round.
Roblox puke $201.4 million in research and development last year, up 88% from 2019, in part to move into new genres of products. Whether older users prove willing to pay for those virtual experiences in the same way they pay for their kids’ diversion is a big question for investors as they consider how to value the stock.
In the risk factors section of its prospectus, the company says one key consideration that could harm future growth is if “we do not develop and establish the social features of our platform, allowing it to more broadly useful to the entertainment, education, and business markets.”
WATCH: How Roblox became a massively popular gaming platform worth $30 billion