Roblox Users Miss Estimates Despite Hit Game, ‘Steal An Egg’

• RBLX
  -1.54%

(Bloomberg) — Roblox Corp. reported third-quarter users that missed analysts’ expectations amid questions about whether a new hit game could reverse a recent slowdown in user engagement triggered by more robust child-safety measures.

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The video-game company’s 138 million daily active users fell short of analysts’ estimates of 145.8 million. That’s a 9% decrease year-over-year. Bookings, a measure of sales, came in at $1.7 billion, compared with Wall Street’s expectations of $1.63 billion.

Roblox shares have lost about 37% of their value this year. In July, Roblox said that investments in AI-powered initiatives were expected to result in higher infrastructure costs and that the company would be withholding full-year guidance amid increased variability.

The shares fell as much as 12% in after-hours trading Thursday.

For years, Roblox has faced scrutiny over predators who use the platform to groom children, culminating in multiple lawsuits from state attorneys general. To reduce the threat, Roblox began implementing dozens of safety changes, including verifying users’ ages, which wound up negatively impacting growth in the first two quarters. The company is betting that the changes will bring in more people to the platform over the long term.

The company attracts new players with hit games produced by third-party developers, and analysts have pointed out that it’s difficult to anticipate when a new popular title will launch. In 2025, Roblox’s user engagement soared, in large part, thanks to hit games Steal A Brainrot and Grow A Garden, which generated huge amounts of traffic and broke industry records. During the first half of 2026, no new games managed to reach the same level of attention.

Then over the summer, a new title called Steal An Egg caught fire with Roblox players, accounting for as much as half of the platform’s concurrent users on some days, according to Freedom Capital Markets analyst Nick McKay. But optimism over the game’s overall impact on Roblox could be “overdone,” he cautioned, because its popularity might be coming at the expense of the vintage viral games, such as Steal A Brainrot.

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