Roblox Q3 Revenue Rises 16% as Bookings Fall 12% to $1.7 Billion

Roblox Corporation released its third quarter 2026 financial results on 29 oktober 2026, reporting revenue of $1.572 billion, up 16% year over year, and bookings of $1.697 billion, down 12%. The company said bookings surpassed the high end of its guidance range even as they declined against what it described as extraordinary growth in 2025.

The results were published in Roblox’s third quarter shareholder letter, furnished as an exhibit to a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on 29 oktober 2026. The company said third quarter bookings were up more than 50% on a two-year basis. Roblox scheduled a conference call and Q&A session for 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time on 29 oktober 2026, according to its results announcement.

Consolidated net loss for the quarter was $230 million, compared with $258 million in the third quarter of 2025, and net loss per share was $0.32, compared with $0.37. Adjusted EBITDA was $138 million, compared with $46 million a year earlier, a figure that excludes $49 million of legal settlement expenses related to settlements and settlement negotiations with certain states and territories regarding youth-related consumer protection and digital safety matters. Operating cash flow was $395 million, compared with $546 million in the prior-year period, and free cash flow was $364 million, compared with $443 million. The company said free cash flow reflected lower than expected capital expenditures in the quarter, with a significant portion of spending shifted from the third quarter into the fourth.

Engagement and Monetization

Daily active users totaled 138 million in the quarter, down 9% year over year but up 12% quarter over quarter, while hours engaged reached nearly 34 billion, down 15% year over year and up 17% quarter over quarter. On a two-year basis, the company said, daily active users and hours were up 55% and 63%, respectively.

Average monthly unique payers totaled 30 million, down 16% year over year, while average bookings per payer rose 5%. Bookings per hour grew approximately 4% globally and 2% in the U.S. and Canada.

Roblox said users aged 18 and over represented 29% of global age-checked daily active users and 37% of U.S. age-checked daily active users in the quarter, up from 27% and 33% in the second quarter of 2026, and it described the over-18 group as its fastest-growing cohort. The company said U.S. users in that cohort monetize 50% or more above under-18 users. Roblox ran more than 200 user-acquisition campaigns over the summer, with marketing spend targeting over-18 users up nearly 3x from the same period a year earlier.

Year-over-year daily active user growth reached 12% in France, 13% in Germany, 33% in Japan, 37% in India, and 30% in Saudi Arabia. The company said approximately 20% of the U.S. under-18 gaming market runs through Roblox and that about 30% of U.S. 13-to-17-year-olds use the platform daily.

By the end of the quarter, 64% of global daily active users had completed an age check, with penetration of total users reaching 80% in Australia and 75% in both the U.S. and the U.K. Users who sent a chat message or connected to voice grew 24% quarter over quarter, and users sent an average of 1.6 billion in-game chat messages per day.

Costs and Share Repurchases

Cost of revenue grew 7% year over year to $318 million, while Developer Exchange fees declined 6% to $403 million. Infrastructure and trust and safety expenses grew 24% to $258 million, an increase the company attributed to AI-related investments, including training and inference costs. Personnel costs excluding stock-based compensation grew 12% to $281 million, driven by higher headcount.

Total cash, cash equivalents, and investments were $6.2 billion as of 30 september 2026, a year-over-year increase of $1.0 billion. Roblox repurchased 4.4 million shares for approximately $200 million during the quarter, with approximately $2.4 billion remaining under its current repurchase authorization as of 30 september 2026. Fully diluted share count was 755 million, up 2% year over year.

AI Creation Tools and New Initiatives

Roblox said more than 80% of the top 100 games on the platform, ranked by hours engaged, used AI tools over the past month, that daily asset uploads to the Roblox cloud tripled month over month, and that two games created almost entirely with AI, Break and Steal an Egg and Huss Valley, broke into the platform’s top 20 ranked by concurrent players during the quarter.

Build, the company’s prompt-to-game creation tool in alpha release in New Zealand, Singapore, Serbia, and Thailand, has been used by more than 500,000 users, who have published over 70,000 games. Roblox said more than 75% of Build users had never opened Roblox Studio, and it plans a broader rollout later in 2026 with a free base tier remaining alongside paid options for additional prompt capacity.

The shareholder letter also describes two new initiatives. Under Roblox Everywhere, creators will be able to self-publish standalone games created on Roblox to the app store of their choice, and the company said it expects to launch a first phase, publishing select top games, in the first half of 2027. The Universal Player initiative aims to enable importing existing console, PC, or mobile games onto Roblox. The company also said it plans to make Roblox Reality, which uses video world models to deliver photorealistic multiplayer games, available in early access in the first half of 2027, and to roll out Web Play, starting with Google Chrome, which will let players join a game through a direct link with no app installation required.

On monetization features, Roblox said more than 70% of the top 100 games ranked by Robux spent ran Sponsored Ads in the quarter, and it plans to launch skippable pre-roll video ads. Roblox Plus, launched in April, has scaled to millions of active subscribers who average twice the playtime and seven times the Robux spend of non-subscribers, the company said. The letter restates Roblox’s vision of capturing 10% of the global gaming market.

For the fourth quarter of 2026, Roblox guided revenue of $1.47 billion to $1.58 billion, representing growth of 4% to 12% year over year, and bookings of $1.89 billion to $2.0 billion, a decline of 10% to 15%. The company said the bookings guidance assumes a seasonal decline in daily active users between the third and fourth quarters, and that it applied a slightly wider range given the significant proportion of bookings typically generated in the last week of December. Revenue is expected to grow even as bookings decline because most bookings are recognized as revenue over the estimated average 27-month lifetime of a paying user, the company said.

The fourth quarter guidance includes a consolidated net loss of $363 million to $423 million, Adjusted EBITDA between negative $70 million and negative $10 million, operating cash flow of $190 million to $275 million, capital expenditures of $380 million, and free cash flow between negative $190 million and negative $105 million, reflecting the capital spending shift from the third quarter. Roblox said it expects fixed cost deleveraging relative to the year-ago period and will continue incremental investments across the core Roblox App, the Universal Player, and Roblox Everywhere.