Roblox (RBLX) is hitting a growth spurt, and the company is looking to take its game into the adult world.
“We’ve found that our age-checked 18-and-up segment is growing at over 50% year on year, which is a real great signal for future growth,” Roblox CEO David Baszucki told Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid.
For years, Roblox has been the digital playground where kids spent weekends — and their parents’ money. But the company’s latest earnings report suggests that a demographic shift is underway.
The platform beat analyst estimates across the board, with Q4 bookings hitting $2.2 billion, a 55% year-over-year increase. For the full year, the company is projecting sales growth between 23% and 29%, a signal that its controversial age-verification strategy might actually be working.
Launched in January of this year, the mandatory process uses facial recognition via a partnership with cybersecurity firm Persona. Once a user is verified, Roblox can group that player by age, creating a walled garden that makes the platform more palatable to advertisers and older users alike.
The stock has surged over 13% on the news as investors cheer a platform that is finally diversifying beyond the under-18 crowd. But for the 30-something skeptic, Roblox still has to prove it sees an opportunity worth their time.
For the higher age demographic, Baszucki said the platform is “reiterating the cultural phenomena” it uses with the under-18 segment, noting that gamers respond well to “cultural hits” like “Dress to Impress” and “Grow a Garden.”
Looking ahead, however, the platform expects to see more “genre expansion” in its 18-plus segment, particularly in categories like role-playing games (RPGs) and sports games, which tend to monetize at a higher rate, per Baszucki.
The company is also wielding AI as a shield against Big Tech encroachment. While competitor stocks were rattled by the rollout of Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Genie — an AI tool that can generate playable environments from images or text prompts — Baszucki remains unfazed. He claims Roblox is running more than 400 internal AI models to accelerate its creator economy, not replace them.
“We think AI is going to expand what creators can do on our platform,” Baszucki said. “It’s going to expand the definition of what is gaming and communication and what is content and interesting things to consume.”
Baszucki said that although some of the technological advances from competitors are “very exciting and important,” he argued they are not multiplayer technologies. A core component of Roblox’s technological moat is its ability to support massive multiplayer experiences in real time — something a single-player video generator like Genie can’t yet replicate.
