Roblox to stop giving annual forecasts from 2027
Company says margins will not grow this year due to higher investments
Age verification features impacted bookings and engagement
By Zaheer Kachwala
Feb 5 (Reuters) - Roblox RBLX.N forecast fiscal 2026 bookings above Wall Street expectations on Thursday, signaling another year of strong growth in player spending and engagement as the videogame platform aggressively looks to capture 10% of the global gaming market.
Amid strong competition for user attention and dollars, Roblox has pursued several avenues, including advertising and e-commerce, to retain and grow its large user base. Its average daily active users grew 69% year-over-year to 144 million in the fourth quarter.
The company said margins will be flat to slightly down this year due to investments in safety initiatives, upgrading server infrastructure to accommodate its growing platform and higher payouts to spur the developer community.
Roblox said that 2026 will be the last year it will provide a full-year forecast and will only give quarterly projections from next year onwards.
"The difficulty of predicting and forecasting the business is in large part driven by the virality of content," Roblox Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra told Reuters.
"We had no way of predicting what 'Grow a Garden' or 'Steal a Brain Rot' was going to do in 2025 ... At the end of the day, it's going to be a function of, you know, a whole bunch of viral hits that we don't control," he added.
Roblox last year implemented facial recognition and rules requiring users to verify their age to chat with other players as it faces heavy scrutiny from American states and international governments for not doing enough to protect children on the platform.
Chopra said there has been a mid-single-digit impact on engagement growth and a low-single-digit impact on bookings growth as a result of the feature.
Roblox forecast fiscal 2026 bookings between $8.28 billion and $8.55 billion, above estimates of $7.87 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.
It reported fourth-quarter bookings of $2.22 billion, beating estimates of $2.05 billion.
(Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)
((Zaheer.Kachwala@thomsonreuters.com))
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