A better way to grow? | This Week in Business

11.08.2023 - 15:53 / gamesindustry.biz

You ever see something so awful that your first instinct is to show it to someone else, so they can share in how awful it is? Even though you know it's probably just going to make their day worse?

I sure hope so, because that will make me feel a little better about showing you this:

That's from Roblox's latest quarterly earnings report. I have seen companies shade every other line of the tables in their investor relations materials for readability in the past, but I've never before seen someone do it for unreadability. White text on a light blue background? That stands out as much as a GameStop employee who hates their job.

While that table left the biggest impact on me, it wasn't the only part of Roblox's earnings report that got a raised eyebrow.

QUOTE | "Given the geographic and age diversity of our userbase, along with investments in our product, we are confident that we are building a platform that could, over time, grow to support one billion DAUs (daily active users)." – Roblox lays out a longer-term target for the platform.

STAT | Less than 66 million – Roblox's DAUs for the most recent quarter, a number that has nearly doubled since the beginning of the pandemic. At this rate, we're only about four more pandemics away from Roblox hitting 1 billion!

Obviously, Roblox will have to grow immensely to reach its goal. And considering the company has never had a profitable quarter because it spends so much of the money it brings in to fuel additional growth, I'm not terribly optimistic the business will actually make money anytime soon. In fact, Roblox shares my position on that point.

QUOTE | "Since our investment decisions are generally based on levels of bookings, we expect to continue to report net losses for the foreseeable future even as we anticipate generating net cash provided by operating activities." – Roblox in its earnings report.

For the purposes of this discussion, bookings is basically sales, and Roblox's loss-leading growth strategy has certainly worked to grow sales over the years.

But with a live service game where people can technically spend limitless amounts of money, there are two paths to growing sales: you either attract more players (obvious, acceptable), or you take more money from the players you have (greedy, exploitive).

So even though Roblox has been accused of those latter traits plenty in recent years, its growth plan looks more like the former once you put aside that whole child-labor-paid-in-company-scrip thing.

The placement of that year-over-year growth % line does a good job of obscuring the fact that Roblox's average bookings per DAU have been down year-over-year in seven of the past eight quarters, with the lone exception rounding down to 0%