Of all the metaverse contenders, this one at least has the numbers.
Every so often, Roblox releases some numbers and you remember just how massive it is. We all know the platform is huge among a younger demographic but the last time I wrote about the numbers in February this year, they were so big the only comparison that made sense was Canada. No wonder the CEO looks set to pocket $234 million over the next five years.
As a public company Roblox regularly issues metrics, and has just done so for September. We're gonna need a bigger comparison country because the daily active user count for the game has now hit 57.8 million, which marks an incredible 23% rise year-over-year. Other games are not as forthcoming with such numbers but this easily outstrips Minecraft (140 million monthly users), Fortnite (where numbers peak at 10-15 million whenever the game hosts one of its big live events), and the whole League of Legends franchise (180 million monthly users, as of October 2021) .
This is complete beermat maths, so don't go citing it, but based on these figures and a 30 day month Roblox would have 1.734 billion users and all those other games combined would be about 400 million.
Here's an official Roblox Corporation figure though: "Hours engaged were 4.0 billion, up 16% year-over-year." Four billion man hours a month in this place.
The report goes into some detail on the financials, with the estimated revenue for this month being between $212-219 million. This is more-or-less equivalent to last year's figures, so while the numbers are going up the average spend is slightly decreasing (this month, anyway). Roblox Corporation puts some of this down to the strengthening of the US dollar against the euro, British pound and other currencies.
One final interesting metric is what Robox Corporation calls a "paying user life estimate", which is an average of how long an account will be active within Roblox and spending money. The figure is "calculated based on historical monthly retention data for each payer cohort to project future participation on the Roblox Platform." Based on this the company had previously put the figure at 28 months; it's now revised this down to 25 months.
Is Roblox the biggest game in the world? If you think it's a game then I'd say it is. Probably the most interesting element of Roblox is how it may fit into the much-vaunted metaverse future because, while others may look (a lot) fancier and seem more obvious contenders, this has the sheer numbers to succeed. Even if, sometimes, they don't turn up. Roblox still has issues (it feels like every couple of months there's a new report about scammers targeting kids, and sometimes worse), but it has a userbase that simply towers above its competition and, while Zuckerberg messes about with legs, is quietly taking over its own corner of the digital world.
