Epic Games, the creator of "Fortnite" as well as the Unreal Engine, a widely used game development tool, raised venture funding last August at a $17.3 billion valuation. The video game industry in general has seen interest soar over the past 10 months. And those kids aren't only using Roblox to play wildly popular games with names like "Jailbreak" and "MeepCity." It has also become something of a social network, a place where locked-down 10-year-olds might host a virtual birthday party.įor teen game developers, meanwhile, Roblox has emerged as a place where they can make a whole lot of money. Last year, the company claimed that about half of all American children under the age of 16 are on its platform. Users spent 22.2 billion hours on its platform during the first nine months of last year, up 122% year-over-year. Roblox had 31.1 million daily active users as of the end of Q3 2020, up nearly 82% from the same period in 2019. And the company's growth curve started to go vertical last year, when the pandemic caused millions of socially distancing children to turn to Roblox as a new platform for fun and social interaction. That began to change in 2017, when the San Mateo, Calif.-based company brought in $25 million at a $500 million valuation, according to PitchBook data.
Most of its titles are aimed at younger users, employing a blocky animation style reminiscent of Lego or "Minecraft." Over the next decade, it raised a few million in venture funding, but there were few, if any, signs that the company was a budding colossus. Roblox was founded in 2004 as a self-contained platform for game developers and gamers. The new deal is an unusual solution to the puzzle of how best to go public, with Roblox choosing to raise one last batch of cash privately rather than take advantage of a very recent change in SEC rules that will allow companies to raise capital in direct listings for the first time.
Roblox's sky-high valuation represents a more than seven-fold increase from last February, before the onset of the pandemic, when Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million investment in Roblox at a $4 billion valuation, according to PitchBook data. Roblox raised $520 million in new funding at a $29.5 billion valuation and announced that it will go public via a direct listing instead of a traditional IPO, joining names like Spotify, Slack and Palantir Technologies on the short list of VC-backed companies that have opted to eliminate underwriters and list their shares directly. This week, the social gaming company revealed its solution.
Just a few weeks later, it delayed the listing until 2021, seemingly because the massive first-day pops recorded by Airbnb and DoorDash in their respective IPOs had raised concerns about leaving too much money on the table. The Roblox game "Jailbreak" has been played more than 4 billion times.
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