Fresh from attracting more than 33 million people to a virtual performance by Lil Nas X, gaming platform Roblox has filed for its IPO, revealing lots more information about its business than has previously been published.
For example, it outlines how many ‘experiences’ there are on Roblox (more than 18m, of which more than 12m were played in the last year); how many daily active users it has (17.6 million); how much revenue it’s making ($488.2m in 2019 and $588.7m in the first nine months of 2020); and its profitability (or lack of: net losses of $97.2m in 2018, $86m in 2019, and $203.2m in the first nine months of 2020.
The S-1 filing also reveals that in the last 12 months, more than 960,000 developers earned money from the games they’d made on Roblox, although in terms of professional incomes, more than 1,050 earned more than $10k, and nearly 250 earned more than $100k in that period.
The Lil Nas X show was the latest sign of Roblox’s ambitions to do more with music – see our interview with its music boss Jon Vlassopulos for more on that. There’s an interesting nugget in the S-1 about music: Roblox is already monitoring uploaded content for copyright infringement in the US via “the services of a third-party audio monitoring service”, specifically to exclude recordings owned or controlled by major labels.
Oh, and also: “Certain record companies and music publishers also maintain that we are subject to liability for infringing content that was previously uploaded to our platform and have stated that they may seek damages for such infringement.” It’s not just Twitch facing this kind of challenge then…
