Roblox shares opened at $65 each on Wednesday, about 44% higher than the company’sreference price.
Roblox Corp. joins the ranks of closely held companies turning to public markets to support growth. The San Mateo, Calif.-based videogame provider’s stock will begin trading March 10 on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RBLX. The shares are trading through a direct listing, bypassing the traditional route of an initial public offering.
Roblox’s reference price was set at $45, in lieu of a formal IPO price, and is based on recent private-market transactions.
Roblox isn’t a traditional videogame company and is using a nontraditional process to potentially reach investors as the pandemic has driven people to spend more time and money on gameplay. Here’s what you need to know about the company and its plans for a direct listing.
Roblox said in the latest update to its prospectus that it paid developers $328.7 million last year, up almost 200% from 2019. That far outpaced the company’s sales growth of 82% last year, when it booked $923.9 million in total revenue.
More than 1,250 developers earned at least $10,000 in the digital currency Robux, which can be converted to cash. Over 300 earned $100,000 or more.
Roblox is telling prospective shareholders to get comfortable with its hefty payouts. In its investor presentationlast week, the company said it plans to shell out even more to creators to incentive higher-quality content and fund bigger teams of engineers, designers, artists and producers.
What is Roblox?
Roblox is a free online platform that features tens of millions of multiplayer games made by its own players with tools the company provides. The games range from obstacle-course challenges and iterations of capture the flag to contests based on popular characters such as Peppa Pig and Sonic the Hedgehog. Company officials have said they are interested in increasing the use of Roblox for things such as virtual concerts and meetings.
Who plays Roblox and how?
Roblox is accessible on computers, consoles and mobile devices. The company said it had roughly 33 million daily users last year, of whom more than half are under the age of 13. Players in Roblox appear in the form of customizable avatars.
Roblox’s Covid boom
Roblox has been a huge beneficiary of the Covid-19 shutdowns, which forced kids out of the classroom and away from their friends. With no school to attend and birthday parties canceled,kids turned to Roblox, where they can socialize virtually, navigating theme parks, attending concerts and playing action games while also staying in touch using its popular text chat feature.
Daily active users jumped 85% in 2020 to 32.6 million. The number of hours that players spent on the app more than doubled to 30.6 billion.
That unexpected and unprecedented growth has created some challenges around its developer community. The company has had to contend with an influx ofspammers and scammers who are out to take advantage of some of the millions of kids who are ready and willing to spend their parents money on Robux.
In-game pop-ups lure users with the promise of free Robux if they fill out a survey, only to reroute them to other sites where there’s no Robux and even more spam. In some cases, Roblox developers unknowingly install a malicious plug-in from the game development studio, infecting their own game.
“Because of the popularity of our platform, we believe that we are an attractive target for these sorts of attacks,” Roblox said in its prospectus. The company said it’s investing to make sure outside parties can’t access user data and to prevent phishing, spamming and malware as much as possible.
Roblox’s second-biggest expense, behind developer fees, is infrastructure, privacy and safety. Those costs jumped 69% last year to $264.2 million.
