Roblox user numbers fall as it bets on generative AI to win growth back
Daily users dropped below forecasts, and the company is pinning its recovery on AI creation tools and cross-platform play.
Roblox reported quarterly results showing daily active users down 9 percent year over year to 138 million, below the 145 million analysts expected, and hours engaged down 15 percent to 34 billion, though hours beat estimates. The company attributes the drop largely to a strong prior-year comparison and is betting on generative AI to recover growth, saying over 80 percent of its top 100 games by hours engaged used AI tools in the recent period. Its Build prompt-to-game tool, launched in July in limited alpha markets, has seen more than 500,000 users publish over 70,000 games. Roblox also announced Roblox Everywhere and a Universal Player, aimed at making games playable across other platforms and importing existing games onto Roblox. Separately, the company called an AI agent's scraping of 145.5 GB of 3D assets from Open3DLab, including adult content, a mistake and said that material would not be used for AI training going forward.
Why it matters
For players and creators, the shift means more games may be built with AI assistance, and existing games could become playable on other platforms and imported onto Roblox. The company's admission that an AI agent scraped 145.5 GB of 3D assets, including adult content, shows how data-sourcing questions are now tied directly to its growth plans. Whether the AI push wins back the users it has lost is not yet clear from the figures reported.
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