Ignacio Castaño🍉Uh, is that accurate?
https://bird.makeup/users/ballmatthew/statuses/1823333922626814017
https://bird.makeup/users/ballmatthew/statuses/1823333922626814017
Josh Simmons@castano probably not really accurate, I guess they're using Roblox's entire r&d budget as an "expense" and doing some handwaved maths based on that? (Though ofc it's totally true that platforms (like Roblox! And EGS) make big dollarydoos and spend basically nothing, it's why everyone, and especially tim, wants to be a platform)
Steve Anichini@castano Roblox is public so you can see it's financials yourself. It isn't profitable, nor has it ever been while it's been public*.
This guy's particular chart is a lot of guesswork because Roblox does not break out revenue or cost per platform in their quarterly reports, not anywhere I can see.
*This last quarter is the first one where its revenue grew faster than its expenses, my quick math is they would need 6 more quarters like this one to be profitable.
Arseny Kapoulkine@castano @ballmatthew The “losses” are accounting BS due to revenue deferral. But otherwise yeah creator cut and app store fees are similar in magnitude, see pie chart on https://create.roblox.com/docs/production/earning-on-roblox
Krzysztof Narkowicz@zeux @castano Matthew just posted the full piece on Roblox and he has a good explanation why losses are real. Interesting perspective how thin are the margins compared to more traditional FAANG: https://www.matthewball.co/all/roblox2024
Roblox is Already the Biggest Game In The World. Why Can't It Make a Profit (And How Can It)? — MatthewBall.co
With 380MM MAUs, Roblox probably counts more players than the entire AAA gaming ecosystem, is more played than Disney+ is watched, and is starting to rival smaller social networks in scale. But Roblox has yet to profit. How can it become a business comparable to its operating scale?
@k_narkowicz @castano I’m not sure how much I should comment on this but my (naive) understanding doesn’t align with a few points he has. It’s very possible he is right but it would be nice to see a more substantiated analysis. But yes, it’s drastically different from a typical FAANG company. Although some of them compensate with a few tens of billions in ai capex now ;)
@k_narkowicz @castano (Just to be clear parts of this analysis are solid, just not everything checks out for me so I am not sure to what extent the conclusion is right.)
@k_narkowicz Interesting read. Thanks for sharing!