Roblox Stock

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Regina, and I will be your conference operator today. Welcome to Roblox's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Jaime Morris, Roblox's Head of Investor Relations. Jaime?

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us to discuss our Q2 2026 results. With me today is Roblox's Co-Founder and CEO, David Baszucki, and our Chief Financial Officer, Naveen Chopra. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our commentary today may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements.

A description of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions are included in our SEC filings, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events and we disclaim any obligation to update these statements, except as required by law.

During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics can be found in our shareholder letter and supplemental materials, which are available on our Investor Relations website.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Dave.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Today, I'll start with a few remarks about the quarter, and then I'll turn it over to Naveen to discuss results and guidance and then I'll conclude with some important updates about how we plan to achieve our long-term goals.

We remain steadfast in our goal to capture 10% of the global gaming market and an even greater share of the U.S. market. Against the backdrop of the incredible growth we delivered last year, in Q2, we delivered healthy year-over-year growth in users, hours and cash flow. And well bookings [ Gravel ] within our guidance range it was below our internal goal, which we will discuss in detail on today's call. Before I hand it over to Naveen, I want to give some updates on the business.

First, let's talk about safety. In the first part of this year, we made the decision to age check everyone on our platform and to limit chat only to those users who have aged check. We've made significant progress in the quarter. As a result, age check penetration has increased to 57% globally and in the first countries where we rolled it out, Australia is approaching 80%, and the U.S. and U.K. are at 70%.

With the under 18 segments, we're making enormous progress with the U.S. under 18 at 75% and in addition, of course, to our filters, industry-leading safety, we don't allow image sharing in chat and in conjunction with age check, we implemented age-banded communication.

We've also introduced new comms products. We'll share a bit more about that. And on the content side in June, we successfully rolled out age-based Roblox Kids and select accounts. We believe accurate age data amplifies our conviction in the long-term growth potential for the platform.

On the discovery side, in the last few months, we shared with our community our strategic decision to focus our discovery algorithms directly on measured long-term retention. We have seen this impact monetization primarily in the U.S. under 13 cohort and this has been exemplified by a lower frequency of impressions with games that emphasize short-term monetization rather than long-term retention.

It's still early, but our data shows a positive lift in quality, stickier engagement games and the benefits of higher retention, we believe, outweigh the near-term impacts we're seeing as improved retention and engagement compound into future growth.

I'm going to now turn it over to Naveen to address some specifics and then I'll be back to talk about our future plans.

Thanks, Dave. I'm going to share a few details about the quarter and then also discuss updates to our outlook. For the quarter, revenue grew 36% to $1.5 billion and bookings grew 8% to $1.6 billion. As Dave mentioned, this was at the low end of our guidance, and we'll discuss more about that in a moment. We finished the quarter with 123 million DAUs, up 10% year-over-year and hours grew 5% to $29 billion.

In addition to building on the existing scale we have in the United States, we continue to see strong year-over-year growth in many international markets. For example, DAUs in Japan grew 67% and DAUs in India grew 64%. And similarly, ours growth in Japan and India was 61% and 59%, respectively.

We also saw users in Russia come back online as we were unblocked there late in the quarter. On the bottom line, operating cash flow was up 60% year-on-year to $318 million and free cash flow of $294 million was up 66% year-over-year.

From a content perspective, our platform is getting more diversified, while maintaining a steady velocity of new content. Case in point, 3 years ago, our top 10 games accounted for about 30% of all the hours engaged on Roblox. Today, the top 10 games account for approximately 20% of ours.

And in terms of user metrics, new user sign-up activity improved throughout the quarter, benefiting from seasonality and the reinstatement of Roblox in Russia. Retention of existing users remain stable and engagement hours were in line with our expectations.

Monetization, however, as measured in bookings per hour was below our forecast, particularly with under 13 cohorts and was the primary factor impacting our bookings performance. We attribute the unforeseen monetization shortfall to a greater-than-expected shift of engagement from high monetizing 2025 vintage viral games to a combination of new and evergreen experiences with lower hourly monetization.

This underlying mix shift was compounded by changes in our recommendation algorithm, which optimizes for long-term retention and is, therefore, providing more impressions for highly retentive games at the expense of near-term monetization.

And in Q2, the bookings impact of this trade-off on younger users was greater than we anticipated. Although these discovery changes add to the variability of our business, our testing suggests that the long-term benefit to retention will more than offset the short-term monetization hit. Particularly as we continue to improve the algorithms by doing things like using ACC data to better target recommendations by region and age cohort, which, over time, should help mitigate the monetization headwind we saw in Q2.

Another albeit less significant factor in the monetization shortfall was the impact of our decision to disable the sale of cross-experience game passes. Looking ahead to Q3, we expect sequential DAU trends to benefit from seasonality, the unblocking of Roblox in Russia and our discovery changes.

But monetization weakness is likely to continue. And as a result, we forecast Q3 bookings to be between $1.58 billion and $1.65 billion, which, given the tough comparisons translates to a year-over-year decline of 14% to 18%. From a margin perspective, the reduction in bookings will result in fixed cost deleveraging.

Additionally, investments in AI-powered initiatives like build, Roblox reality and moments are expected to result in higher infrastructure costs. For Q4 increasing variability and continued updates to our platform lead to a wide range of potential outcomes. And therefore, we are not providing revised full year guidance at this time.

While our expectations for the remainder of the year have changed significantly, we have conviction that we're making the right trade-offs to continue our role as an industry disruptor. Investments in AI, content diversification, long-term retention and safety, though creating near-term friction position us to maximize our share of the global gaming market.

With that, I'll pass it back to Dave to talk about some of our future plans.

Thanks, Naveen. Since we started the company, we've been on a mission to support play around the world, and we believe the world needs more play. We can all see it right now given in light of really everything going on in the world. And this fundamental need is part of what gives really all of us conviction in Roblox's ability to deliver long-term growth in excess of 20%.

We set our goal of expanding play everywhere with a targeted 10% of global gaming running on Roblox. And in the U.S., we've shared that our goal is to go well beyond 10%. Today, we estimate that 20% of USA under gaming revenue flows through Roblox. We've done this through the power of our platform and the creativity and diversity of user-generated content and in this cohort, we validated the power of our ability to unify discovery, economy, tools, engines, safety and cloud infra.

While we did experience softness in our younger users monetization this quarter, we believe our monetization system is fundamentally strong and will compound over time with additional levers, including subscription and advertising revenues.

We've established unlike really any other company at our scale, our commitment to setting the global standard for safe digital engagement and with younger users, in particular, long term, we believe this is a tremendous benefit to have such strength among younger cohorts, and this will contribute, we believe, to fuel long-term growth.

The 18 and over market is 80% of the $200 billion global gaming market, and we believe we're uniquely poised to expand play in this 1 and over market in the same way we have for under 18. Today, in the U.S., our '18 and up cohort represents nearly 1/3 of our now age checked daily active users and our U.S. 18 to 34 cohort daily active users and hours are growing at approximately 40% year-on-year.

And our 13 up cohorts around the world continued to show strong growth. In addition to our viral growth worldwide in under 18, we have the opportunity to power 18 and up growth with increasing paid acquisition as we continue to improve product market fit.

And besides safety, the majority of our product and technical investments supporting growth in 18 and up also benefit younger audiences. We've recently launched 3 initiatives that will support our continued growth in the 18 and up market segment.

First, as we shared, we're removing self-imposed limits on the types of games we support on Roblox. Second, we've redefined our app to align with physical play including discovery. And third, we're reconnecting with our core promise that anyone can be a builder.

First off, we want all types of gaming on Roblox. We're not that far away from having the technology in place to support the vast majority of games that people play online. On one end of the spectrum, we believe players are looking for multiplayer experiences that will ultimately mirror physical reality.

Even since our start, we've had the goal of photorealism and unlimited multiplayer scale and with our announcement of Roblox reality, we're well on our way to being the first company to bring photorealistic multiplayer to life and to the masses. We see a future where games really will become indistinguishable from movies for certain types of games.

And we can see this quality today in offline AI video tools we believe we'll soon see this in real time with robots reality. Now gaming is also simultaneously spontaneous and single player and 2D for many people and up until today, we've been focused on 3D, and we've held back on initiatives to support high-performance 2D tooling and gameplay.

Going forward, we're doubling down on our support for everything from 2D puzzle games to strategy. With Roblox Reality and a focus on 2D performance, we're expanding the bookends of what we believe will be possible on Roblox. This week, we've announced a unified vision of our app that includes bringing video discovery and creation front and center to all users.

We've announced this week, we're integrating moments into our homepage for 16 and up users, and we've begun testing for 16 users in Canada, New Zealand and Singapore. We're expanding the moment feed to include short-form influencer video in addition to game captures, and we believe, ultimately, moments will be available for all with appropriate and safe educational content for younger players.

Ultimately, we'll expand moments with tiles that let users watch creators or view live gameplay in real time, so you can see what your friends are playing. Our early tests show substantial gains in moments user retention, and we're very optimistic about moments.

We'll ultimately be moving to full 3D games in the moments tab, and this will become integrated with games created through build. Together with build, this means you can watch a game in action and then play it with one tap creating really a unique path all the way from discovery to this new wave of content from build.

On the communications side, continuing our dialogue from last quarter, we're committed to leveraging our world-class industry-leading safety infra to build the highest quality integrated voice, video and text comms on the Roblox platform. We've already shipped global chat and quick words.

And today, a significant portion of our users still do utilize off-platform communication tools. our road maps to provide users the option to video chat with friends or stream with their Roblox Avatar.

Because all comms that originate within Roblox will company users as they move between games, they deliver a safer, richer, more immersive connection than any off-platform alternative.

And as a first step in Q3 will be deploying inexperienced friend chat, which brings real-time text messaging directly into any robots game. Creating a game is much more complicated than writing code. Games are built with code, images, graphics, audio tracks, 3D sees, avatars and of course, with enormous creativity --we believe we have a unique opportunity to accelerate game creation based on integrated and vertical stack.

Last week, we announced Build, an extension of our vision that everyone in the world can be a game builder and we're leveraging our internally generative AI models to create a conversational interface. So anyone who can imagine something can describe it and shape it with others and then ultimately bring it to a playable experience to life and minutes.

For the creators that are already building with us -- we believe this will be about practical leverage, helping them build faster and to reach the right audience more effectively.

Build will be fully integrated with Roblox Studio and the AI powering build will allow users to start an experience and build and ultimately finish it in Roblox studio.

We're already live in New Zealand with Build. I just want to highlight we're seeing a large number of creations flowing through the system already, Literally, people fulfilling our vision of you make the game.

Now just as coding, it's not just the model, but we believe with Build, it's the integration of a harness, tools and skills. And ultimately, our vision is many models unified in 1 harness using our cloud back end in infra to come full circle. The other cool thing about build is it really integrates with what we said about removing the bookends.

Many people who are using Build will want to build 2D experiences or 3D and build will leverage this with our back end to support everything in between. Given our discovery focus on long-term retention, we're comfortable that we're in a position to appropriately surface the high-quality creations with build even as the quality of creation increases.

We're really navigating a period of normalization, we believe, following a year of massive growth. We have tremendous scale and engagement, which presents us with a unique opportunity to amplify our long-term potential. To capitalize on this momentum, we're doubling down on our vision that the world needs more play.

And we're bringing to life really the original vision of our company which is you make the game by expanding our global audience, broadening our content offering and deepening engagement for our users and creators. I've never been more excited about our mission and more excited and confident in the road ahead.

With that, we'll pass back to the operator for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from the line of Matthew Cost with Morgan Stanley.

I guess you've done a really helpful job on this call laying out what's the long-term vision of what you're trying to build with the algorithm changes and the Kids and select accounts you've done a great job of explaining what that's meant to get to over the long term.

I guess between here and there, what are you watching? And what should investors be watching to help determine when the engagement headwinds from those changes have peaked? And then sort of connected to that, when we think about the expectation of user growth sequentially in the third quarter, is that just a function of seasonality?

Or are there any improvements in the trajectory as you've exited the second quarter?

I have a list, Naveen, do you have a listed? Do you want me to go first? Or do you want to go first?

You can go first, and I'll catch the last couple of parts to that question.

Yes. Matthew, great question. I think a couple of things to watch. In our U1 segment, we've laid out on this call really where we're going, and that includes we believe, finally, we'll be fulfilling that original vision of you make the game. Not every user can figure out how to use studio or make a game.

What we see already in New Zealand is more people per day on build than on studio. And we do think, ultimately, AI creation of gaming is going to be something that sits side-by-side playing games.

So I think watch for frequency in under 18, we also expect to be fairly generous in the amount of AI or tokens in the build process. But for those users that are using build all day long, we will, within our Roblox Plus subscription, add the ability to increase will be called token somewhere else. We'll have our own name for it. watch our subscription for under 18 as well.

And then I would say also as we roll out continued comms platform watch for that, over 18, we're laser-focused on a couple of cohorts in that and the growth rate in those cohorts.

And we're laser-focused on the type of content that's being created by our creator ecosystem that we believe will be more and more retentive in those cohorts. So I would watch the growth rates in over 18. I shared a bit of what they are today because those point to 80% of the market that we can -- we believe we can do the same thing and as we've done under 18.

And then just -- just a couple of the things you asked about, Matt, in terms of sort of the near-term friction and then DAU trends I just would clarify, you talked about near-term engagement friction. That's really not what we're seeing. We're actually pretty happy with the engagement trends that we've seen.

I talked about some of the health that we've seen in sign-ups, retention, et cetera. So engagement looks good. The weakness that we saw that was inconsistent with what we expected when we put our original plans together for the quarter was really around monetization.

And that is going to continue as we continue to evolve some of what we're doing around discovery and recommendations. The DAU trends themselves, seasonality is definitely a big factor there. We're going to get a full quarter benefit from having Russia back online and so those are probably the 2 big ones that I would highlight with respect to DAU trends.

Our next question will come from the line of Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo.

Two, if I may, please. Could you maybe first touch upon the updates to the Discovery engine? You did a good job of explaining that in the letter, but maybe if you could talk about when you expect to see some of these longer-term -- the longer-term retention benefits filtering into both engagement gains and also potentially monetization gains. Just if you could walk us through kind of maybe the time line and your expectations there.

And then second, if I may, please, Naveen, could you just talk about as we're going through this transition and the push for over '18 and new content. Could you talk to us about any changes you might expect in the cost structure?

How either from either a Devex standpoint, from a tech standpoint or platform standpoint, how might the financial profile of the business look in success 12 to 24 months out relative to the prior 12 to 18 months.

I'll start with the discovery algorithms. I touched on as we continue to refine discovery, what any discovery algorithm is really trying to do is connect users with experiences that both drive long-term enterprise value and simultaneously give signals to creators of what types of experiences are rewarded with discovery.

So it's a complicated process. It involves both feedback to creators as well as feedback to users. And watching social if we've implemented and improved our algorithms over the last few months, there's been a resounding support in the feeling that moving more and more to evergreen type games, games that keep players around for a long-term essentially the exact opposite of what might be called not that we're saying we had it, but more click baby or kind of cash grabby type games.

We want to be as far in the evergreen segment as we can. We made the decision as we started going down this next gen to go longer into the time frame to measure signals longer.

We made the decision to use that feedback loop to update the algorithm even as we're running additional tests. And we've really churned our discovery system from something that's baked in to something that in a way is constantly self-improving and self estimating our best guess at what user game pairs will drive the best long-term retention.

We're balancing that more and more with what we think is the optimal mix of long-term retention and long-term monetization -- and in our experiments, as Naveen said, we can see shorter-term reductions in monetization, but then crossover points and longer-term improvements. We're not going to share exactly what the crossover point is, but this is the reason we implemented and have gone with this.

So it's directly measured retention. It's less projecting. It's more direct measure of both retention and monetization. And one other thing is we introduced build and we expect the volume of creations to grow much higher on Roblox, we believe this algorithm is very resilient to both finding great new build games that will be playable by all and simultaneously not flooding users with games that might have an AI kind of name to them that aren't as long-term retentive.

All right. And then, Ken, with respect to your question on the cost structure. There's a couple of important things to highlight here. First, our view of the long-term margin potential of the business really has not changed, meaning the kinds of things that are going to drive margin expansion over time, are still in place.

Obviously, continued bookings growth generates fixed cost leverage we continue to expect to see mix to lower-cost platforms that will help COGS and Devex increases are something that we do intend to continue to pursue but those ultimately are a function of us realizing fixed cost leverage in other parts of the business.

So that's point one. Point 2 in, call it, the near to medium term, the investments that we're making in a lot of AI-powered product enhancements, I do expect to result in some elevated levels of infrastructure expense. But it's important to realize -- but unlike our inter expense historically, this is more of a fixed cost because historically, infrastructure investments have been a function of hours and users on our platform.

These infrastructure costs are largely being driven by model training. And so we're moving aggressively in that direction. But over time, we expect, given the sort of more fixed cost nature of that as bookings grow, we'll start to see leverage on those infrastructure investments as well. But as you saw in the Q3 guidance, there is going to be some pressure in the short to medium term as a result of the incremental cloud GPU capacity that we need there.

Our next question will come from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

I appreciate all the comments about the progress you're making towards being 10% of the gaming market or maybe even more in North America. How do you think about the competitive landscape continue to evolve both within gaming but also among younger users where they're sort of conflicting narratives about being online versus off-line gaming versus non-gaming in terms of time spent and how you think continually about positioning yourself relative to the gaming landscape and even a more broader definition for the competition for time and engagement.

I really think the broader definition is a bigger thing than Roblox, and it is our vision that the world needs more play and play is something that people do with each other. It's something that involves not just playing but creating it involves being with others, communicating with others being yourself and watching them.

And really as we've redesigned our app and brought the build as well as moments to the homepage, it's really part of that vision of mirroring the physical world with what's happening in our digital world of supporting play.

We think -- we think just like in the real world, where play involved sometimes creating the game, I'm optimistic that we're going to see a volume of creation with build unlike any volume we've ever seen with Roblox Studio while at the same time pro devs and devs making extremely complex properties will utilize all of the capabilities of build as they move to large teams and studio to build much more complex type creation.

So I do think what is gaming is changing. I think we're going to enter an era just like 10 years ago where most of us didn't know how to edit video. And now all young people, essentially, many of them know how to edit video on their phone.

The same thing, I think, is going to happen in gaming where really with AI acceleration, everything from 2D puzzle games to complex 3D multiplayer games are going to be created on mobile, enhanced in roadblock studio.

And that's going to really change the whole landscape, I believe, of what gaming is. So I do think the use of today are changing, I think, play as universal and I believe we're moving towards that original vision of really everyone on our platform is a creator and a builder.

Our next question will come from the line of Chris Schoell with UBS.

Great. Naveen, we've seen you announce the buyback since the last earnings call. Just as free cash flow for the business scales in the coming years, can you remind us how you think about capital allocation and how you'll prioritize buybacks with organic investment in M&A? And what impact does any -- if any, does the stock performance have on your willingness to maybe lean in further on the buyback relative to alternative uses of capital?

Yes, sure. I think it's -- we're pretty clear with respect to our capital allocation strategy, meaning the first and foremost for us is making sure that we have the ability to aggressively invest in organic growth.

That largely takes the form of R&D, people, tokens, infrastructure, things of that nature, we try to be very diligent and very efficient with all of those investments, but we also recognize we live in a very rapidly changing world right now.

And we're going to keep a lot of dry powder to make sure that we can be highly nimble with respect to organic investment. That being said, when we look at our balance sheet and our free cash flow trends, we have a lot of firepower to do both what I just said with respect to organic investment, but also to support a buyback and potentially M&A.

Our M&A historically has been largely focused on acquiring technical talent, and we have ample ability to continue to do that but also potentially bigger things in the future to the extent there's strategic or industrial logic to it. In terms of stock price performance affecting how we think about the buyback, 2 comments on that.

One, the way we have structured our buyback, which is largely to offset dilution from employee equity grants thus result in us effectively buying more stock when the stock price goes down and buying less when the stock price goes up.

So there is some sort of natural adjustment built into the mechanism. We do have the ability to accelerate that or supplement it, and those are obviously things that we'll continue to evaluate.

Our next question will come from the line of Omar Dessouky with Bank of America.

I think you guys explained clearly why you gave your third quarter guide. But I was hoping that you could give us perhaps some guardrails around the fourth quarter and full year, given that you're not guiding the full year anymore.

Number one is '26 still a growth year. Would you be comfortable telling investors that 2026 bookings will be higher than 2025 bookings in total? And when we think about those factors that caused you to give your third quarter guide, how is the fourth quarter -- how are those factors going to improve or trend in the fourth quarter.

What's getting better in the fourth quarter versus the third quarter? Just to kind of help us put some guardrails around what the fourth quarter could look like.

Yes, I'll take that, Omar. As I said, we're not going to provide guidance for the fourth quarter right now simply because of all of the moving pieces that I think we articulated both in our letter and some of our comments. We feel good about where things are trending in the long term.

We are navigating, as Dave said, both normalization from last year and also a number of platform changes across discovery, safety and now launching some very meaningful new products with things like build and moments. And the reality is it's very early days for many of those new initiatives.

There's no model that we can look at that's going to say is exactly what they're going to do over the next 3 to 6 months. And we want to make sure that we're moving as quickly as we can on all of those initiatives. So you have to assume that the things we do in Q3 and Q4 are going to be consistent with what we said we want to accomplish over the long term, but we can't give you any more specific guidance than what I've shared.

Our next question will come from the line of Clark Lampen with BTIG.

Maybe, Naveen, sort of the first and 2 questions, if I may, would be in the shareholder letter, you mentioned you were comfortable based on the internal testing that longer retention would ultimately overcome a reduction in hourly monetization.

Could you elaborate a little bit more on that or maybe what you had seen when you had run those sort of comparisons? Second one is very quick, just on Morpheus, could you help us think about either the magnitude of financial commitment or potentially help size the IPS headwind that we might see this year?

Yes. So on the first one, I think Dave talked about this a little bit, too. So maybe just to put a little bit of a finer point on it. We've been running a lot of experiments and continuing to evolve these algorithms.

And what we have seen when we sort of AB test them relative to people on, call it, older discovery algorithm, is that very quickly, there is a change in user retention, which ultimately that's a compounding effect for our business because ultimately, more users is what drives the robot flywheel that also shows up relatively quickly in incremental hours of engagement.

However, there is a pretty immediate hit to dollars per hour. That's sort of the monetization metric that we look at. And we do believe that based on the curves that we've seen with, call it, a few weeks of data for each of these experiments, that those lines cross, meaning the benefit of the incremental retention will more than outweigh the short-term hit to bookings.

We're not going to put a specific time line on that right now, in part because we're continuing to evolve those algorithms. And our focus right now is actually on finding ways to improve the algorithms such that we can reduce the near-term bookings impact while retaining the retention benefit. And there are some promising irons in the fire on that, but too early to say exactly what the impact will be.

Go ahead, David.

I was just going to add the longer out we look at signals and directly measure them. The longer we pick up not just early revenue but longer revenue in conjunction with that retention, we are trying to optimize a blend of long-term retention and long-term monetization that's directly measured as opposed to overly extrapolating from short-term monetization signals that may be chatty and potter out. .

And then, Clark, with respect to the second part of your question, on the magnitude of the in for investments and sort of the headwind of that great. I think you asked the question in the context of Morpheus is one small part of many different AI initiatives that we have going on. So I'm going to answer the question sort of bigger picture.

And probably the simplest way to think about it is if you look at our margin guidance for Q3 and you look at the margin compression relative to the year ago period. I would say that about half of that is just fixed cost deleveraging coming off the back of the bookings reduction and the other half is related to these investments in AI.

And those are the things that power new features like Build and moments, a lot of the improvements we're making on safety as well as training models for things like robots reality. So all really important, exciting stuff that requires incremental investment.

And I want to highlight with Morpheus the significance of what we're working towards. Our goal is to provide photorealistic multiplayer gaming which does not exist in the world today. On one end of the spectrum, we're starting to have off-line video models that start to approach a 4K movie, on the other end, 3D gaming technology is getting better and better and better, but it's not quite photo realistic.

We believe a hybrid approach, which is both 3D synchronization in the cloud with and kind of user super up sampling to get to photorealistic is the ultimate way to do this. And the cost of infra here will initially be offset by subscription. Games will run both in regular Roblox mode as well as in super up sample Morpheus video photo reality mode, and we will initially expect to charge subscription to access that.

Our next question will come from the line of Clay Griffin with MoffettNathanson.

Dave, I'm curious to get your thoughts on how you see the 2D content that you're enabling with some of the announcements that you've made today. And typically, we'd like to think of mobile as more of a single player experience in many cases.

So do you envision 2D Mobile content being sort of an acquisition funnel for players that are outside of your platform today? Or do you think that there's demand for that type of content on the platform today?

And how do you think about what might make 2D continental Roblox differentiated from the typical to the mobile experience today?

Yes. I think when we take a step back and go to that original vision of you make the game, there's a really good conjunction, we believe, between what we're doing with Build and with what we say about removing the bookends of the type of content we want on our platform.

When we start putting Build in front of people, they don't constrain themselves to saying, I want to build a 3D multiplayer [indiscernible] course or I want to build a puzzle game where you do this or I want to build a multiplayer obstacle course game.

So there's really a great intersection in supporting all that people want to build on build. The other thing is, I think many people don't differentiate necessarily between a 2D single player game, a 2D multiplayer game, a 2.5 orthographic game a 3D multiplayer game they just think of play.

And as we get into more and more older cohorts, some of those cohorts have an ample appetite for 2D but we believe huge advantages in any experience that's built on Roblox, runs in multiple languages, runs around the world is socially enabled is backed by our economy is backed by our infra and can intermingle throughout them.

So we see this really as just approaching having a wide range of gaming on the platform. And ultimately, it works with build and that we're not going to limit what people can build when they go and imagine creating a game and showing it to their friends.

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Marok with Raymond James.

Maybe one, can you please talk a bit about the differences in monetization patterns between under 13 players and other cohorts that may have driven an outsized impact this quarter.

Was it specifically related to the viral hits from last year or is it a general rule that these younger users are maybe more volatile in their monetization patterns?

Yes, I'll take that. I think it's more the former, meaning if you just look at sort of the percentage of hours consumed on the platform last year that was coming from these very large and high monetizing viral hits it was very concentrated.

And those games did appeal, in particular, to younger users. And so when we have seen this mix shift from -- with those games getting replaced by, call it, games with more normal levels of monetization that shows up most significantly with these younger users. I don't think there is anything sort of structure with respect to changes in younger user behavior.

It's really just the games that are popular at this point in time, don't have that sort of very elevated level of monetization that we saw last year.

Our final question will come from the line of Aaron Lee with Macquarie.

Appreciate it. Maybe just to touch on incubator and the 18+ initiatives. It seems like that's progressing nicely. Can you just talk about like what you've learned through this process so far? And maybe how that informs how this program could evolve going forward? Or any other initiatives in the pipeline to really drive this business forward?

Yes, I'll comment on it. We have a lot of content coming not just from incubators, but also studio partners and our existing community. We do see ultimately as a UGC platform, the power of that -- but we do also see the ability almost from a sales engineering or an expansion of how we see DevRel to be very intimate with the top creators on our platform and to be very intimate with them as we help guide them to what performs well on our platform.

We really have a focus on a lot of the tech we've recently introduced with our incubators. We've introduced the ability for much higher performance avatars for much higher performance worlds that run very well on low end to Android as well as on high-end PC.

We've introduced a compositing technology called Slim that allows very complicated avatars to run at high performance on phones. So all of this working with these partners, we believe, is a huge technical opportunity for them to build games for us and of course, they're also working on our DevEx premium of 50% for games consumed over 18.

So really, it's not just the incubator. It's many of our corporate studios. We're working with as well as our existing developer community, and we're seeing great quality coming out of them.

That concludes the question-and-answer session. And I'll hand the call back over to Dave Baszucki for closing comments.

Once again, thank you for all the great questions. It really is an exciting time for us as we move towards fulfilling that original vision we had when we started the company, if you make the game and really for everyone around within Roblox helping to support more play everywhere around the world. Thank you again for your questions and attention.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.

Hello, and welcome to the Roblox Corporation Annual Meeting of Stockholders. Please note that this meeting is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to turn the conference over to the company.

Good morning. I'm David Baszucki, Chair of the Board of Roblox Corporation, and it is a pleasure to welcome you to Roblox 2026 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I will act as Chair of this meeting. I've asked Mark Reinstra, our Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary, to serve as Secretary for this meeting, record the minutes and conduct the formal portion of the meeting, including the opening and closing of the polls on all matters to be voted at this meeting.

We're holding our annual share -- Annual Stockholders' Meeting virtually this year as authorized by the Board and permitted under Nevada law and Roblox's bylaws. Participation through the meeting platform constitutes presence in person at the meeting for purposes of Nevada law. Please note, this meeting is being recorded. We will conduct the business portion of our meeting first and answer questions at the end of the meeting. Please note, we will not be making any presentation on the business or financial condition of the company at this meeting. It is now shortly after 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time on May 28, and this meeting is officially called to order.

Here with me today are 6 members of our Board of Directors: Gregory Baszucki, Christopher Carvalho, Dennis Durkin, Jason Kilar, Anthony Lee and Andrea Wong. Also attending this meeting are representatives from Deloitte, our independent auditor, Dan Lee and [ Kaitlyn Lieberman ].

Now over to Mark to conduct the formal portion of the meeting.

Thank you, Dave. The agenda and rules of conduct are accessible by clicking the Documents tab on the top right of your screen. In order to ensure the business of the meeting proceeds efficiently, we ask that you observe those rules. The annual meeting is being held in accordance with Roblox articles of incorporation, bylaws and Nevada law.

During the formal meeting, we will address the matters described in the definitive proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 16, 2026. I have an affidavit confirming that the notice of meeting, proxy statement and proxy card were mailed and made available on April 16 to stockholders of record as of the April 1 record date.

These records will be filed with the minutes. I have been appointed to act as Inspector of Elections. I have signed an oath to carry out my duties with strict impartiality in accordance with the best of my ability, which will be filed with the minutes of the meeting. As required by Roblox's bylaws as Inspector of Election, I will ascertain the number of shares outstanding and the voting power of each and determine the shares represented at the meeting the validity of proxies and ballots, the count of all votes and ballots and the final voting results, and I will certify those determinations for the meeting records.

We have present in person, including those participating remotely or by proxy, holders of a majority of the voting power of shares issued and outstanding and entitled to vote at this meeting, which constitutes a quorum. Therefore, the meeting is duly constituted, and we may proceed with the business of the meeting. We will vote by proxy and in person electronically. The meeting platform is designed to verify the identity of each participating stockholder and proxy holder and to give stockholders a reasonable opportunity to participate in the meeting, vote on the proposals, communicate during the meeting, and read or hear the proceedings as they occur.

Each holder of Class A common stock is entitled to 1 vote for each share held of record at the close of business on the record date. Each holder of Class B common stock is entitled to 20 votes for each share held of record at the close of business on the record date. If you've already voted, no further action is needed. If you would like to vote now or change your vote, please click on the Vote My Shares tab on the right, top right of the screen and follow the instructions there. Stockholders who wish to submit a question during the meeting should click on the questions tab at the top right of the screen. Type your question into the text box and then click the submit button.

Today's votes will be combined with those already received, and I will share preliminary results before we adjourn. It is 8:05 Pacific Time on May 28, 2026, and the polls for each matter to be voted on at this meeting are now open.

The first item of business is the election of directors. The company's Board presently has 8 members and is divided into 3 classes, each with a 3-year term. There are 3 Class I directors, 3 Class II directors and 2 Class III directors. As detailed in the proxy statement, the Board has nominated David Baszucki, Gregory Baszucki and Dennis Durkin to serve as Class II directors, all of whom are currently serving as directors because no additional nominations were submitted by stockholders in accordance with our bylaws, I declare the nominations closed.

Election of each director requires a plurality of the votes cast, meaning the nominees who received the largest number of votes cast for their election will be elected. Withheld votes, abstentions and broker nonvotes are not considered votes cast for a nominee and have no effect on the outcome. The Board recommends a vote for each nominee and all proxies solicited by the Board will be voted in accordance with the instructions of the stockholder, provided that any proxies that were dated and signed without giving specific voting instructions will be voted in accordance with the Board's recommendations. If you are voting on this proposal today, please ensure your vote is submitted now.

The next item of business is an advisory vote to approve the compensation of our named executive officers. Approval of this proposal requires that the number of votes cast for the proposal exceed the number of votes cast against the proposal. Abstentions and broker nonvotes are not considered votes cast and have no effect on the outcome. The Board recommends a vote for this proposal and all proxies solicited by the Board will be voted in accordance with the instructions of the stockholder, provided that any proxies that were dated and signed without giving specific voting instructions for this proposal will be voted in accordance with the Board's recommendation. If you are voting on this proposal today, please ensure your vote is submitted now.

The next item of business is ratification of Deloitte & Touche LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2026. Approval of this proposal requires that the number of votes cast for the proposal exceed the number of votes cast against the proposal. As abstentions and broker nonvotes are not considered votes cast and have no effect on the outcome. The Board recommends a vote for this proposal and all proxies solicited by the Board will be voted in accordance with the instructions of the stockholder provide that any proxies that were dated and signed without giving specific voting instructions for this proposal will be voted in accordance with the Board's recommendation. If you're voting on this proposal today, please ensure your vote is submitted now. I have confirmed there are no questions regarding the proposals.

It is now 8:09 Pacific Time on May 28, 2026, and the polls for each matter to be voted on at this meeting are now closed. No additional ballots, proxies or votes and no changes or revocations will be accepted. Based upon all the proxies and ballots received prior to commencement of the meeting, and subject to final adjustment of the numbers for any votes and proxies submitted here today, I can tell you that. With regard to Proposal 1, the 3 Class II nominees, David Baszucki, Gregory Baszucki, and Dennis Durkin received the largest number of votes cast for such nominees. Each of them has therefore been reelected as a director of the company to hold office until the 2029 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

With regard to Proposal 2, the advisory vote for the compensation of our named executive officers has been approved because the number of votes cast for the proposal exceeded the number of cast -- votes cast against the proposal. With regard to Proposal 3, the ratification of the independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 2026 has been approved because the number of votes cast for the proposal exceeded the number of votes cast against the proposal. The final results of voting will be reported on a Form 8-K to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission within 4 days of the meeting.

As inspector of elections, I will execute a certificate setting forth the results of voting which shall be filed with the minutes of this meeting. There being no further business to come before the formal portion of the meeting. It is now adjourned.

Now we would like to open things up with stockholder questions and comments. [Operator Instructions]

Since there are no questions have been submitted, I will turn the meeting back over to Dave.

Thank you all for attending today's meeting and for the interest you have shown in Roblox Corporation. We very much appreciate your attendance. And as always, thank you for your support.

This concludes the 2026 Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Roblox Corporation. You may now disconnect. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Kate, and I will be your conference coordinator today. Welcome to Roblox Q1 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Now I will turn the call over to Jamie Morris, Roblox Head of Investor Relations, Jamie.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us to discuss our Q1 2026 results. With me today is Roblox Co-Founder and CEO, David Baszucki, and our Chief Financial Officer, Naveen pro. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our commentary today may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. A description of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions are included in our SEC filings, including in our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.

You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events, and we disclaim any obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics can be found in our shareholder letter and supplemental slides, which are available on our Investor Relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dave.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. We continue to make progress towards our target of capturing 10% of the global gaming content market on our platform and an even greater share of the U.S. market. In Q1, we had revenue of $1.4 billion, which grew 39% year-over-year, bookings of $1.7 billion, which grew 43% year-over-year. And I'll note that's roughly twice we've shared with investors as our long-term growth trajectory. We generated $629 million in operating cash flow and $596 million in free cash flow, up 42% and 40% year-over-year, respectively. Monthly unique payers increased to $31 million, up 52% compared to a year ago. And we have strong payer growth in international markets and continued solid growth in the U.S. and Canada, up 19% year-over-year on a larger payer base.

We also saw year-over-year user and engagement growth DAUs of [indiscernible] million, up 35% year-over-year and DAUs outside of the U.S. and Canada grew 40%. DAUs in the U.S. and Canada grew 17%. DAUs in Japan grew 96% year-on-year in Q1 and DAUs in India grew 84%. Hours engaged were at 31 billion, up 43% year-over-year. Outside of U.S. and Canada, that number grew 50% and hours in the U.S. and Canada grew 21%, hours in Japan grew 101% year-on-year in Q1 and hours in India grew 91% year-on-year. For our 18 and up numbers, as of Q1, over 18 users represent 26% of DAUs who have age checked, in the U.S., DAUs and hours for the 18 cohort grew over 40% and within that, our 18 through 34 cohort grew over 50% faster than any other age cohort. Additionally, in the U.S., the over 18 and over users on Roblox monetizes over 50% higher than our under 18 users.

As we expected, DAU growth, while very healthy at 35% has declined from the roughly 70% growth rates we saw in the past 2 quarters. User acquisition and engagement was also impacted by our global rollout of age checks to access chat in January. At Roblox, we're committed to setting the global standard for healthy, safe and age appropriate digital engagement, and we're building a platform for all ages as part of the core vision to connect 1 billion users with optimism and civility. As part of this commitment in Q1, we became the first large online gaming platform to introduce age checks to access chat on a global basis. And I want to also note, we're really the first large platform other major announcement in our plans to introduce age-based accounts which leverage our a check technology, and we expect this to roll out globally in June.

I want to note, because we globally introduced age check, we've been able to introduce kids accounts within our core app. These proactive measures are setting a new industry benchmark and also, we've been incorporating really input from policy makers and regulators around the world. Note that not all of our users have age checked even as the percentages continue to grow in the United States, we're at 65% age check. In Australia, where we started a bit earlier, we're at 70% age check. This is always in addition to our robust text filtering technology that we're continuously improving and also our open source of voice safety tech.

We're now better able to understand the impact in the short term of age checking. For communication engagement, we have had a follow-on in edition in the percent of users communicating on our platform just because people right now who have not aged checked, we don't allow them to communicate. In addition, along with age checking, we've now banded communications, so we no longer allow adults to communicate with users under 16 even with our existing industry-leading filters and with no image share. We believe this reduction in [ cans ] does affect both people who have aged checked as well as those who have not because those who have age do have fewer people to communicate with.

Also, as we push towards 10% of gaming, we believe our discovery algorithms should be focused primarily on driving incremental long-term platform retention over short-term monetization, especially to grow our 18 and up user base. We're implementing this transition now. And as we continue to adjust to local customs and regulations, we do foresee some restrictions of content to both non age check users relative to their age range and also as part of region-specific content guidelines. We believe as a result of age check also and reduced communication discovery that we've weighted more towards monetization. We have seen a reduction in app store ratings and we believe this may be contributing to a reduction in organic sign-ups that typically flow from app stores.

We believe the strategic upside of everything we're doing is significant and the right thing to do for the long-term health of the platform. Kids accounts and select accounts offer the long-term opportunity of increasing safety and stability, which in turn drives organic engagement growth in line with our mission to connect 1 billion users with optimism and stability. And we're unique among large platforms and our focus on the safety of users who are under 13, especially given the reality that a large number of young people under the age of 13 have access to phones and to these other large platforms. And these platforms typically aren't designing safety systems for those under 13.

However, as a result of this, we do expect to see continued short-term bookings headwinds as a result and this will lead to a revision in our full year guidance, Naveen will discuss more in his remarks. Now to address the short-term friction, we are taking a number of actions across several key areas. Age checking is our vision of the future, and we believe this tech will continue to scale across the industry. We expect to see continued adoption by other companies in the gaming, social networking social media and AI chat bot spaces.

Through the end of Q1, 51% of global Roblox DAUs have aged checked. As we work to set the global standard in safety full adoption of age check will take time. We expect our new age-based account framework to drive an increase in age check penetration rates and we're focusing on additional means to drive our percent of users that have aged checked to a level that long term, we hope to bring above 90%, which then also unlocks our ability to significantly improve our native communication features. Communication engagement is fundamental to our user engagement and retention and following global rollout of a check to access chat we do see new opportunities to enhance communication features and boost engagement through our higher confidence user age data.

Over the next few months, we're going to be rolling out several enhancements designed to increase communication adoption and improve the chat experience on Roblox. This includes global chat, which is going to allow players across multiple servers in the same game to communicate in a single shared room, which we believe will increase in-game chat density and we're also going to be integrating party chat directly into the in-game chat window, which we believe is going to remove the need for users to leave an experience to coordinate with friends. We plan to expand party chat between trusted friends when appropriate age and necessary parental consent is granted to include voice and Avatar video. And as of now, we're not sharing a ship date for this. We've also planned a system for preset messages that will enable all users to easily coordinate gameplay. Collectively, these investments paired with our incentives for age check will be engineered to drive on-platform communication beyond our precheck levels and deepen user connection. We continue also to evolve our discovery system. Last year, we enhanced really the discovery of long-tail content, and we improved content diversity we're now focusing on high-quality games with beer long-term engagement, and we're currently experimenting with enhanced discovery algorithms designed to optimize for 28-day retention and beyond. Some of our creators have already taken notice as I tweeted this week, and we're implementing changes on how to really create a market that levels the playing field for high-quality, long-term experiences. We continue to see an acceleration of AI tool chain use by our top creators. Nearly half of the top 1,000 creators on Roblox now leverage either Roblox' assistant which is our own AI entry point or MCP model context protocol to compress dev time lines. In addition to our own assistant AI, our creators are using quad code, cursor, codecs and other third-party tools tightly with Robo Studio. These technologies are being used to support creators on everything ranging from light assistance to fully buy coated content. We ultimately leave gaming is a much more complex base than the coating space and really we're driving to achieve iterative Wiggans loop style programming because games are not just based on code but 3D assets, NPCI, core gaming loops and live ops, among others, -- we really want to get to the point where Dev can have Robot studio working overnight on their game and come back in the morning and see those improvements. We really want to try to do a game creation, what tools like codecs, Cursor and Quad code are doing for coding, which is really radically accelerating speed -- and we believe we're uniquely poised to innovate and solve this given the integrated architecture we have from our cloud to our engine to our developer tools to our native AI -- in April, we call that the month that Roblox Studio went Agentic. -- creators can now engage in focused conversations with our assistant about the design and implementation and test plan of new features. Assistant executes the plan now, launches a suite of building agents to test and really try to deliver new features with minimal creator engagement.

We're also on the 3D side to complement coding introducing new mesh and procedural model generation capabilities, which are going to allow creators to build richer world. And we've introduced NPC, which is noncleared character testing agents that can now navigate complex 3D worlds and execute gameplay actions as part of really game development. The vision for MPCs really at Roblox goes beyond PCs, you might interact within game or MPCs used for safety. And part of that vision is really for testing. We believe MPC testing agents can be part of a foundational model that we're building to really help creators iterate quickly on their games using MPCs in addition to humans for testing. And all of this really is to enable small teams to produce super high-quality content very quickly.

We do believe AI is going to fundamentally accelerate gaming, and we are in a unique position to lead in this transformation. Yesterday, we shared on our blog our vision for the future of really integrated AI and gaming and the creation of photorealistic multiplayer gaming and creation that's easy for anyone to participate in. This is really our most ambitious technical innovation to date. We call it the Roblox' reality project. And this patent-pending architecture integrates hyperscale multiplayer stimulation with our current Roblox cloud engine with photorealistic rendering and persistent world state into really a hybrid unified architecture built on our global edge cloud and interim.

The goal of Roblox reality is to really enable creators to construct interactive environments that are high fidelity. And really drive this new technical frontier, the ultimate introduction of the first easy-to-use multiplayer photorealistic platform that we're uniquely poised to build. More details on the blog post, if you want to read up on it. In general, on the AI side, just to wrap up, we have over 400 models running over 1.5 million inferences per second on-prem and on our cloud. This is powering in addition to creation and Roblox reality, everything from discovery recommendations to communication safety, marketplace recommendations and 3D generation and we're now investing in 4 in-house proprietary models, 40 generation NPC behavior, our just shared video super up sampler initiative and coding assistance and generation.

Finally, we've announced several initiatives on our novel games initiatives as we shared, there's a very large opportunity for us in the over 18 cohort. Over 18 represents 26% of the DAUs who have age checked. And once again, in the U.S., DAUs in hours within our 18 through 34 cohort grew over 50% year-on-year. Today, we announced an increase in the Devex rate for age checked 18 users in the U.S. starting on June 8, created earnings for in-game spend generated by age checks, 18 and up users in the U.S. will increase from 37.8% and -- up to 37.8% from 26.6%. I will highlight what made this possible is age check.

Games to do this must meet our definition of novel games which means they're going to utilize our R15 Avatar framework. We're also now working with several well-known game studios to bring reimagined versions of their beloved mobile games to Roblox more details on this in the coming months. We also have announced an internal jump-starting incubator program to support internal existing creators with novel game creation, the initial response to this has been amazing, was strong. And with our existing creators right now with our white glove service, we have roughly 100 novel games being onboarded into the program.

I recently created in Q1 that we've delivered a large number of technical milestones that are all designed at enhancing realism and expanding creator capabilities in parallel with the longer-term Roblox reality project. These are all designed to support high-quality immersive experiences that scale dynamically from 2 gigabyte Android devices all the way up to high quality on a gaming PC. We've introduced our new R15 + Avatar framework with Dynamic heads and this provides a foundation for more lifelike avatars on the platforms, just like recently released Avatar makeup. Together with some of the deep tech like instant streaming, mesh streaming, texture streaming, server authority and slim, these are updates that are removing the barriers that our creators have seen in creating more and more original experiences for older users. We're committed to the long view, our confidence in the future of gaming on our platform has never been higher. And with that, I return and turn the call over to Naveen.

Thanks, Dave, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to share a few observations about Q1 and then discuss the changes to our guidance. So with respect to Q1, as Dave highlighted, we saw strong top line growth of 43% in bookings. I think that demonstrates the ability of our platform to grow at a very healthy rate without the benefit of viral hits. We also saw an improvement in content diversity, games outside of the top 10, saw a 43% growth in engagement, 41% growth in spending and as a group, those outside the top 10 games accounted for 65% of the growth in spending. We think this is a healthier level of concentration than what we've seen in the recent past. .

DAUs did come in weaker than anticipated. We'll talk about that more in a minute. But very importantly, I want to point out that user metrics like engagement and monetization remained stable relative to the year ago period. Now as Dave pointed out, we made a number of important safety-related changes to the platform starting with the age gating of comms in January. You'll recall that in our last call, we noted that we expected some headwind to engagement and bookings as a result of the rollout of age checks. We now better understand what I call the second order impacts of reduced comp engagement on things like word-of-mouth and organic content growth.

Additionally, the monetization bias of our recommendation engine likely negatively impacted App Store ratings and ultimately, sign-ups. We do have additional safety features, including kids and select accounts rolling out later this year. Those have huge long-term benefits. We've always viewed safety as a compounding moat for Roblox, and these features are an important ingredient to that. But it does mean continued friction in the short term until we get the benefit of continued adoption of age checks, the planned updates to our comms features that Dave described which we believe will improve chat vitality and chat density and discovery enhancements that result in better content recommendations.

As a result, we are lowering our guidance for full year top line growth to account for a continuation of the safety headwinds that we've experienced to date. Our revenue guidance for the full year will now be 20% to 25% and our full year guidance for bookings growth is 8% to 12%. That guidance is based on the expectation that DAUs will continue to contract between Q1 and Q2 and then return to sequential growth in Q3. And consistent with our prior guidance, we do not assume any major viral hits in those numbers. The reduction in our bookings expectation will also impact margins this year. As you would expect, much of that is related to fixed cost deleveraging given the change in our bookings expectation.

Although roughly 1/4 of the margin reduction relative to our prior guidance is related to the incremental investments we're making in AI and the 18 Inova DevEx increase. Now even though those investments are incremental to our prior margin expectations for this year, in future periods, we plan on them being funded by the capture of additional operating leverage. And even more importantly, we are highly enthusiastic about what they can unlock in terms of long-term growth, which, of course, continues to be our North Star. With that, we'll open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

Maybe a 2-parter, if I can. With respect to incenting the development out of the 18 plus community, I wonder if you'd go a little bit deeper into signal you were getting in terms of that type of content from developers in terms of what it might mean for the long-term health and compounded growth longer term for the business? And second, with respect to the change on DevEx, maybe just help us better understand why that was the right number to move to in terms of higher DevEx

Great question. There's a big invention on Roblox a while back when we moved from a platform without Roblox to DevEx, and we saw immediately that the incentive of creating a closed-loop ecosystem where robots could be used by our users devs could build interesting experiences. They could then cash those out, created a virtuous cycle, really, that's been somewhat of a machine-driving Roblox ever since. And we've seen massive organic behavior from that virtual economy -- we've been very careful in increasing the Creator DevEx rate over time, but we have slowly increased it.

As we did at RDC recently, the 18 and up market now that we have age check, we can know quite accurately who's a real 18 and up player. And in addition, that market globally is roughly 80% of the global gaming market, which is somewhat astounding given our low actual penetration, although quickly growing penetration. Those users also, as we shared, monetize at 1.5x where we are today. And that's a big part of our future in addition to our existing [ U1 ] base. So we know systems drive behavior. We want to see novel games on our platform. We want to make it very profitable for creators to make amazing content -- we want them to trust our discovery systems, we'll organically reward experiences with long-term retention. And so this is just a continuation of Roblox being a systems company. focusing on this big area we're moving towards.

Next question comes from the line of Matthew Cost with Morgan Stanley.

Great. Naveen, maybe if you could just dive one step deeper into the reduction in the guidance. I think you gave a lot of really helpful detail about the behavior of people related to age check. Is the entire guide down driven by the change in behavior versus Feber that you've observed because of age check? Or are there other material factors that are worth calling out -- that's question one. And then the second is just on Roblox reality. Are there any increased cloud expenses or CapEx that you're expecting to support that going forward.

Yes. Thanks, Matt. So with respect to the guidance, the way that I would characterize that -- excuse me, the change in guidance, the way that I would characterize that -- it is largely safety-related. There are a number of aspects to that, as we spoke about. It's age checking. It has a follow-on impact to comms and that affects both users that have age check as well as those that have not. And there's a number of things, as Dave laid out that we're doing from a product perspective to reignite comm's engagement on the platform. We do also believe that some of the dynamics that we saw around discovery being sort of more monetization biased than we would like plays into that. Content recommendations were probably not as optimal as we would like to see them. So I think it's really the combination of those dynamics, but largely driven by what we're doing from a safety perspective. In terms of Roblox reality, Dave, did you want to comment on that?

First off, robots reality will not be free. The type of technology we're showing here is going to combine Roblox hybrid engine in cloud, which I think if we you look into all of our financial statements, you can see we run at less than [indiscernible] per hour roughly. But simultaneously, what we see as the future, we're building close to photoreal or photoreal experiences, especially when multiplayer is very difficult. It takes enormous production budgets and part of what Roblox is about is democratizing creation for everyone. We do believe this is the ultimate combination both traditional 3D network, multiplayer gaming engines like Roblox, which is somewhat unique, given its cloud with all of the future research we see in video models, moving more and more towards real-time. We have the opportunity to build a very Roblox specific video world model that we call a super sampler that can key both on video as well as 3D spatial information to do arguably what we believe is going to be a beautiful job of up sampling under developer control with developer prompts.

But I do want to highlight we're right on the edge really in the whole AI space of running real-time photoreal video models 2K at 60 hertz. And that's why we say this is an up-and-coming project. When we launch this, this will not be free. This will use cloud compute, we will have some kind of way of subscribing or paying for this. And because of that, I think we will offset the real-time inference side of it. On the training side, we may have additional things. I don't think we are fully showing them this year, and Naveen may have a compliment on that.

Yes. Just to put a finer point on the expense side of it. We've not changed our expectations for CapEx this year. We think that a lot of what we're doing in terms of landing GPUs in our data centers will cover what we intend to -- or what we're going to need this year. There is some cloud training that we will be doing. I mentioned that, that is now factored into the updated margin guidance. And as this technology continues to develop, we will use a combination of cloud as well as our own data center capacity to execute both training. And as Dave said, inference will be something that will be funded by usage.

Your next question comes from the line of Ken Goralski with Wells Park.

Two, if I may. Maybe first -- could you maybe Naveen, just talk a little bit about what you've seen -- I mean, I'm a little puzzled on 90 days ago, big guidance of '22 to '26 and that you gave the first quarter guide, which you came near the high end and now we're -- the guide is meaningfully cut for the full year. Again, I'm focused on the bookings side. Could you just tell us -- I mean, how much of this is impact that you're seeing kind of already in the 2Q period versus the expectation of some of the changes that are rolling out in the June period.

And then maybe secondly, for Dave, please. Could you talk about like just philosophically, the changes you're making in terms of what content can be discovered by younger users. There are some changes that involve kind of embargoing of sudden content. How does it fit with your notion of democratizing kind of publishing content and discovery. There's kind of -- it feels like a little tension between content safety and moderation and kind of democratizing the platform. Could you just talk about where you could see the balance of those 2 things today.

Ken, I can start on the first one and then hand it over to Dave. So look, we launched age check in January. And as we said, we expected to see some headwind both in terms of hours and DAUs. I think what we did not fully understand until we have now the benefit of 3, 4 months of experience is how that impacts the platform more generally with respect to comms engagement and the knock-on impacts from that. Now I want to point out a couple of really important things: Number one, when we look at what has happened over the last few months, as I noted, engagement has actually remained quite strong. Monetization has remained strong and retention has remained strong. What we have seen is challenges at the top of the funnel, i.e., new users coming in.

And the reality is when we think about the rest of the year, we're not going to see the bookings impact of that right away, hence, the performance in Q1. But we do know that the fact that we had more sign-up headwind over the last few months is going to put pressure on bookings over the remainder of the year. However, when we start to get back to DAU -- sequential DAU growth in Q3, given the strength of monetization and engagement we feel confident that we will be able to drive the bookings growth that we're guiding to, which given the comps in the back half of the year, equates to something like relatively low single digits. So we're not trying to do something heroic in the back half of the year, and it is largely driven by return to DAU growth.

Great question on democratizing really creation. Two metrics you can look at Roblox at over many of the past years. The first is total dollar value creators participate in, what's the size of Devex every year, that's growing very rapidly. And then the second is the growth rates of Creator [indiscernible] and consistently the number goes up the total amount and the growth rate of the Creator 1,000 is consistently faster than 110 or 1, so that's a metric to measure democratization. We believe -- I believe that will continue. Relative to what we've done with kids accounts and select accounts, we believe we're striking a very good balance, and we have this ability to strike this balance because we age check.

Other platforms that don't age check have a wide range of users signing up at various ages. We know what age everyone is, and it more allows us to align the appropriate content with them. We are doing that with kids and select accounts. The corpus of that content is going to be very, very, very large. It's going to cover the significant proportion of what they play today and it's going to allow creators to participate in a UGC space for 16 and up to introduce innovative concepts and to allow us to be very careful with what content reaches under 16. So I'm optimistic you're going to continue to see that democratization.

Your next question comes from the line of Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan.

Thanks for the question. I had 2 that are related. Naveen, you mentioned a few times now, expectations to return to DAU growth in 3Q. I understand it's a seasonally strong quarter, but you're also rolling age-based accounts out in June. So maybe just talk a bit about what's giving you the confidence in the return to the growth that quarter. And probably on a related point, could you just elaborate a bit on the changes you're making to address some of the communications friction points you've seen and what the time line of rolling those out is.

Yes. Thanks, Cory. I'll hit the first part, and then I'll let Dave talk about some of the changes we're making on the product side. So look, the reason that we are speaking to DAU growth in Q3 are a few things. Number one, as you pointed out, it is a seasonally strong quarter. So we expect to continue to get some tailwind from that. Number two, we will have a number of the product changes that Dave is going to touch on in a second rolled out by that point in time. Number three, to your sort of speculation around the impact of kids and select accounts during that period of time. We don't expect that to be as dramatic as what we did in January with respect to comms. And what I mean by that is when we started age gating access to comms, it was a binary experience for our users. They lost complete access to comms. And as we've spoken about, that had a number of knock-on impacts in terms of overall sort of vitality on the platform, sentiment, app store ratings, et cetera.

What we're doing with Kids and select accounts will have some impact. So it's not sort of immaterial. However, it's not as big a change because kids are going to come in or people who have not age check, they will still have access to 20,000 games that represents more than 97% of the engagement on the platform from those cohorts. So it's not nearly as sort of drastic of a change as what we saw with age gating comp. So that's kind of how we're thinking about the impact of all this stuff over the next couple of quarters. Dave, do you want to touch on the comms road map?

Absolutely. So some of these things are in the pipeline and live and experiment. So I believe global chat is actually live in an experimental mode with a subset of our users right now. And I do want to highlight this is a way to give that feeling of chat density even if a subset of people are not aged check and not on comms because this will allow people playing the same experience to connect with people close buying a separate server. Also, with preset messages, this is a way to support what is very common in Roblox games, which is gameplay coordination, not necessarily full on chat that we believe can safely be used across age bands. This is in the hopper pretty soon. And then the bigger initiative is really to move party chat fully natively within experience, arguably played on second device on a lot of the common functionality that friends use when playing Roblox either tech channel or voice channel side-by-side. We're not giving a date on this right now. But this is, I would say, the third top priority for our comms road map.

Your next question comes from the line of Jason Bazinet with Citi.

I just had a quick question on the over 18 sort of DEVEX incentives you're giving, what have you learned in terms of when you roll out incentives like this in the developer community response and then the users respond to the developer community, how long does that gestation period take? I know the question but sort of spring yes.

It's a great question. This is a board-level discussion prior to doing Devex at all where there was a time where Roblox was a hobby for many. And as part of that hobby, there was no way to make a living on Roblox much less creative studio that makes $10 million or $20 million or $50 million. What we have seen over time is the second we introduced Devex and Roblox the quality of the experiences on Roblox got much greater, much more quickly because creators were able to make that a full-time job, dedicate their life to that, and that's why we've evolved to the point where we literally have thousands and thousands of people who make their living on Roblox.

The other thing we've seen over time is we have continuously made incremental updates to the DevEx rate. It started very low. It's climbed. We introduced it -- and so we have a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that when creators can trust, they will make a certain amount of revenue from their experience they will commensurately put more effort into the creation of quality experiences. So it's really been part of the Roblox history. We've seen it time and time again pay off in higher quality content that creators can trust to build.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Marok with Raymond James.

I was wondering if you could give a little bit more detail on the shift in discovery algorithms that you had mentioned in the prepared remarks, going from some of the shorter-term monetization factors to the longer-term health factors. How does that maybe evidence from a user perspective? And then how does that maybe encourage that increased chat density over time?

Yes. I would say from a user perspective, this is something, I believe, our creators and ourselves and me included, can intuitively literally see on our home page which is the quality of -- and the types of experiences and the ratings they may show. And our creators have noticed this. We have -- we've made great leaps in discovery in using ML to predict many factors for each user game pair in the whole system. Now that we've developed this capability and this muscle, if you will, we have analyzed where we are and the potential for 18 and up and made the determination we really want to drive the user growth of that 18 and up segment even if we are slightly less weighting short-term monetization.

So we can see it intuitively, and I would say our creators have noticed as well and our creators welcome it because they want to really invest in long-term retaining high-quality properties and somewhat frustrating for them when they might see a shorter-term monetization type game that really isn't going to be around for a long time. So I would say both intuitively as well as systemically, we believe it's the right thing to do.

Your next question comes from the line of Omar Gusek with Bank of America. .

So I wanted to point out that, I think, in the third quarter of '25, your European and U.S. daily active users were about 60 million, in the first quarter, it's 51 million. I think you've characterized in the past that the kind of the viral surge in the third quarter was a big user acquisition event and that a lot of your users look the same. So I wanted to know if you would still kind of consider that as a high watermark that you can get back to if you simply get through these growing pains that you talked about today or if, in fact, that the retention that you thought you had will not materialize? .

Yes. Omar, it's Naveen. I'll take that. First of all, just to put into context some of what you're seeing with respect to the Dow trend for Europe and U.S., don't forget that there's roughly, I think, 4 million dows that came out due to the Russia block. So that's an important thing just to note. That being said, sort of -- with respect to, call it, the broader question, we expect that we will return to DAU growth as we get through some of the safety friction on the platform. What we've said in the past is that the users that we acquired through viral games last year had similar retention characteristics to, call it, the platform at large. That continues to be true. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, when we've looked at what has happened over the last few months, sort of the nature of this friction, retention has remained strong. The reason that DAUs have come in weaker than we expected, is largely top of funnel sign-ups, which we believe is related to what we've seen in terms of comms friction and how that's been reflected in organic growth through the app stores.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Pete with BMO Capital Markets.

This is David Lusoga for Brian. Dave, you talked about working with some well-known studios to bring their mobile games into the Roblox ecosystem. -- on the conversation of higher Devex for certain things like over 18 cohorts, can you talk about your expectations for how the revenue share with some of those creators might compare to the broader mix shift revenue to the platform?

Hey, we do everything linear and we do everything as a system. So I believe it's safe to say I'm looking around the world, we've never cut a custom revenue share deal like -- we've had lots of discussions in the past about accelerators and de accelerators and all of that. But Devex is consistent across everyone. The benefit of raising it for 18 plus is those studios we're working with are going to get that as part of it. And one of the most attractive things to the studios we're working with, whether they are traditionally a mobile game creator, or a PC game creator, is there's something very unique about the Roblox architecture in that it is the same build, the same game, whether it's PC, tablet, console or PC it's dynamically scaling with a lot of the tech we mentioned, whether it's slim, streaming, textures, streaming, mesh and so there is the ability to unify a single build for both of those platforms, which is very attractive to a lot of the studios we talked to.

SP255882563 Okay. So I'm getting the queue. So we're going to wrap up here. I appreciate all of your questions and feedback, and I'll kick it back to Naveen to see Naveen, if you have any closing remarks.

I just want to thank everyone for joining us this afternoon, and we look forward to speaking to you next quarter. .

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.

All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day 3 of the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference. My name is Matt Cost from the Morgan Stanley U.S. Internet team. Very excited this morning to be joined by Naveen Chopra, CFO of Roblox. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having us.

Yes. For research disclosures, please note that all important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and MS disclosures appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at ms.com/researchdisclosures or at the registration desk.

All right. And with that, let's start with the hot topic. The market clearly views interactive entertainment as vulnerable to disruption from AI. And the technology is evolving so quickly that I think it's an understandable question investors are asking about the potential for disruption. So let's just start there. What do you think about the way the market has been approaching that topic? And how do you think it applies to Roblox?

Yes. Well, thank you for going straight there. No beating around the bush. Look, I don't think it will surprise anyone to hear if we think the market has it wrong. We think AI is very much a tailwind and an accelerant for our business. It's one of the reasons that we've been investing in it aggressively over the last several years.

And I think the reality is like if I step back, the market seems to be kind of assuming that you're going to have this very small handful of AI winners and everyone else's business is going to get vaporized.

And I think that's honestly an overly simplistic way of thinking about how new technologies tend to be adopted and ultimately commercialized. There will be companies not named OpenAI and Meta and Google who use specialized AI to disrupt their competitors and ultimately become winners in the next generation of AI and technology.

And that's very much how we see Roblox, and we are mobilizing the business aggressively to make sure that we are one of those disruptors in our space. We have a large-scale platform business with very strong network effects. And we are using and building gaming-specific AI to further entrench our position as the platform of gaming.

We see a world where these AI technologies will allow people to someday create games without having to write a single line of code. That translates to more creators and more content. And if you run a platform business like ours, that makes everything that we do from the discovery platform, the monetization platform, the safety infrastructure, the hosting infrastructure, the communication capabilities, the social graph, it makes all of those things much more valuable because you got more content and more creators. So we're really excited about what this is going to unlock for the business. And as I said, we're investing to try to make it happen.

Great. So what does it mean to be a disruptor, I guess, following on from that? Because you have a lot of tools that you've announced already like the Cube model and the world model and other content creation capabilities in Roblox Studio. So what are they enabling that wasn't possible before? And what feedback are you getting from creators and users on those?

This space is obviously moving very, very rapidly. And one of the ways that we have started to think about our product road map, call it, for the short to medium term is to do for gaming what we see a lot of other software development tools doing in, let's say, software more generally.

Let me explain what I mean by that. I think most people here are probably now aware that over the last, call it, 3 to 6 months, we have seen some -- this massive acceleration in agentic coding. And what these agents are able to do in terms of software development is like mind-blowing.

These things code 24/7. They are infinitely scalable. They're iterative, so they code all night. They test their own code in the morning and then they fix a bunch of stuff and make it even better the next day. And they are able to do that because they are built on top of very sophisticated, very capable operating systems with APIs and the like.

In gaming, Roblox is that operating system. And so we are starting to now provide the ability to plug in both AI tools that we develop internally as well as third-party AI tools to create that sort of acceleration on top of our own platform. And we're actually starting to see developers experiment with this kind of stuff. And they are using these tools to design games, to build 3-dimensional assets to orchestrate gameplay. And it's pretty exciting when you see what they can do with it. In fact, there were some folks just yesterday who were showing me a demo. These are folks internal at Roblox, where they had taken some of these AI agentic tools, again, a combination of stuff we've developed internally as well as some external stuff.

And they created a game where you could drive around the streets or actually walk around the streets of San Francisco. And the whole thing was prompt based. So they basically said, create a game where I can walk around the streets of San Francisco, make it physically accurate and as high fidelity as possible.

And in 24 hours, they had a game created entirely by agents where you can walk around the city of San Francisco, you can look at -- it's basically the downtown area, but you can look at the buildings. They're physically accurate. Every traffic light is in the right place, 24 hours.

And that ultimately is going to turn into a world where you could have a team of, call it, 3 people developing like a GTA class game in maybe a week. Not there today, but that sort of acceleration in content creation is what we are so excited about and what we think will unlock tremendous growth in our business.

You mentioned in there, this kind of a mix of internal and external tools. I guess what is the mix between those 2 things? And how do you approach the decision about whether to build from new, whether to use open source or whether to work with a larger partner for those tools?

The reality is developers are going to make that decision. What we -- our goal is to make sure that we have all the tools available that allow you to make really high-quality games. At the end of the day, we're ambivalent as to whether you use our tools or whether you use third-party tools. We want that content to exist because that's going to make our platform more valuable.

That's like the MCP server, I guess.

Exactly.

Allowing that interoperability. Got it. So I think moving away from AI for a moment. The platform has seen a lot of growth in users and engagement over the past couple of quarters. There are a number of really notable hit games on the platform last year. So on that topic, I want to start by asking what has gone right? And how do you think about the sustainability of that engagement as we move through 2026?

Yes. I mean, as you pointed out, '25 was an incredible year for us. Just to give people some dimensions around that. I mean if you look at users on our platform between the end of '24 and the end of '25, we grew users by 70-ish percent and bookings growth was 55% for the full year. So very healthy growth. Now there is no single sort of silver bullet that I would point to and say this is the thing that we did that unlocked all of that.

The reality is this is a platform business, and there are initiatives across every dimension of that platform that work together to enable that kind of growth and enable the success of some of the very big viral hits that obviously contributed to 2025.

Just as a few examples, we continue to make a lot of progress around things like search and discovery. That led to significant sort of content diversification on the platform. We saw a double-digit increase in the number of unique experiences that people engage with in any given month.

We've also seen double-digit increases in time spent on a lot of these different experiences. So real benefits coming out of continued evolution of search and discovery. You look at monetization, and we have continued to deploy things like regional pricing and price optimization. These are basically tools that help our developers ensure that the virtual goods that they are selling on Roblox are optimally priced given the nature of the good and the location of the user.

And as we've continued to evolve those kinds of capabilities, we've seen, for instance, outside the United States, massive growth in the number of payers on our platform, basically doubled the number of international players on the platform. And we've also seen very, very healthy growth in bookings per active user.

So all those things work together. We've made major strides around safety as well, which is a huge priority for us, as you know, most recently rolling out facial age estimation. And so it's a combination of all of those things that really facilitated the growth that we saw in 2025.

And we expect to see more of that in 2026. We've got a lot of momentum coming out of 2025. We like what we're seeing in terms of the content pipeline. We've got a really ambitious product road map. And it's the combination of all those things that make us bullish about the long-term growth opportunity in our business.

There are a lot of things in there, and I noticed one thing that you didn't raise is, oh, we're going to have another giant viral hit in 2026. Obviously, those things are hard to predict, but we saw it happen a couple of times in 2025. I think there's a perception from investors that Roblox is a little bit of a hit-driven business. How do you think about it? And how would you respond to that?

Yes. Well, I'd respond, I guess, by pointing out some important facts, right? I mean, Roblox is a platform with over 14 million different experiences, millions of different creators, 144 million daily active users as of the end of '25 and call it, 125 billion hours of engagement.

And interestingly, if you look at 2025, on average, I think something like 2/3 of that engagement time was spent in experiences outside of our top 10. So what we describe as kind of the torso and the tail of the platform is a huge part of this business. And it's growing at a very healthy rate. I sort of highlight these stats on each of our earnings calls. And like in Q4, those experiences outside of the top 10 grew bookings at, I think, like 55%, 56% year-on-year.

So they are really important parts of the platform. And if you look at the business as a whole, like in Q4, we didn't really even have a big new viral hit. And you still saw very high levels of growth in users, in hours, bookings grew 63%. So I obviously came from the entertainment industry. I know what a hit-driven business looks like. It's not what I see in Roblox.

We love the big viral hits. They obviously contribute to the platform. They help attract a lot of new users. They lift other elements of the platform, but this is not a business that's dependent on those.

I think a closely related concept to that is genre expansion and trying to broaden what's available for people to play on Roblox. Maybe give us an update on the initiative that you've been undertaking for a while now to broaden out into many different types of games and experiences and sort of what opportunities it opens up as you try and continue to reach a wider and wider audience.

Yes. Look, for us, genre expansion is really a critical part of audience expansion, right? We want to continue to attract new users to Roblox. And one of the things that's been really exciting for us that we've learned over the last couple of months really just as we've rolled out mandatory age checking, which now gives us our first view of like the actual age of people on our platform.

And it demonstrated that we have a huge opportunity ahead of us to bring older users on to Roblox. I think we're like less than 10% penetrated in 18- to 34-year olds in the U.S. market. So there's just massive opportunity ahead. And we know that we need to evolve the selection of content that exists on the platform in order to attract those users. And so -- there are a variety of things that we're doing to try to make that happen.

I would largely put it into kind of 2 different buckets. First bucket would be a bunch of stuff that we need to do from a tech perspective, right, to be able to facilitate games that have higher fidelity, higher performance, more complexity. We've talked and demonstrated some of those things in the past, whether it's Texture Streaming or SLIM or Server Authority.

We won't get into the weeds of all of those things, and there's a whole road map of stuff that we'll continue to do to facilitate those kinds of games. And that all gets accelerated by the AI stuff that we were talking about at the beginning. So that's really exciting.

And then from, call it, a platform perspective, there are a variety of things that we are starting to experiment with to really help our creators be successful with different types of content on the platform. And that's anything from thinking about our discovery experience, our user interface and perhaps targeting that or designing it a little differently depending if you're a 14-year-old user or a 34-year-old user.

Thinking about the promotion algorithms, the off-platform user acquisition that we partner with developers on, the financial incentives that we provide developers in terms of their economic participation, like all of these things are levers that we can pull to try to encourage development of content that we think will appeal to this older audience, which, as I said, is a really exciting growth opportunity.

Got it. Maybe translating some of those themes into your outlook for 2026. I think that where -- your guidance for 2026 bookings, I think, was comfortably ahead of where the buy side was expecting.

You saw the stock react positively to that. Maybe tell us more about the work you did internally to arrive at that, the underpinnings of, I think, 22% to 26% bookings growth this year. And since you won't be providing annual guidance after 2026, I guess, how is your guidance philosophy evolving now?

I'd say there are probably 4 things that we were focused on in thinking about how 2026 would play out. First, users. We had massive user growth in 2025, as we've talked about. And we wanted to make sure we understood what the behavior of those users was going to look like because they represent a huge chunk of the platform.

And we've been encouraged by what we've seen. Retention into, call it, month 3, 4, 5, 6, which is kind of really important in the business has been healthy. The engagement and monetization of those users looks a lot like users on the rest of the platform. So we can kind of think about this as a lot of the historical trends continuing. So that was an important input. Second, content. As we talked about, the viral hits are really difficult to predict, and we don't bank on those in terms of how we put together our guidance. But we do assume that there's going to be a cadence of new fresh content on the platform. And so we look at that pipeline, and we've been, again, encouraged by what we've seen in the early part of 2026.

And that is important to really that core of the platform, right, which is the 2/3 plus that is not in those top 10 hits. So that's something we've looked at closely. We've also been very focused on the rollout of facial age estimation. In early January, we basically started requiring people to go through an age check in order to access communication features on our platform. It's very important from a safety perspective.

We knew that, that would create some headwind in terms of engagement and bookings when we first rolled it out. It would take time for people to go through that process and then kind of return back to earlier levels of engagement. And so we took some time to study -- we rolled that out a little earlier in a couple of territories, and then we rolled it out globally in early January. And so as we got more data about exactly how that was impacting things, we were able to factor that into our guidance as well.

And then the fourth element is our product road map, and I would not underestimate the importance of that. We have a whole bunch of initiatives across the engine, across user, across communications, across discovery and very importantly in our economy as well.

And we actually work very hard to estimate how those things are going to impact bookings growth and engagement growth on a year-over-year basis, and all of that stuff gets rolled into our guidance for the year.

Got it. You talked about facial age estimation is kind of one of the important assumptions underpinning it. And you've mentioned even in this conversation, how important safety is. It comes up a lot around Roblox. I guess, tell us more about why that's so important. You mentioned how you've kind of baked in the headwind to engagement into your expectations. But I wonder as you look out to the end of the year and into '27 and beyond, are there positive opportunities that could come from knowing how old your users are?

Absolutely. I mean this notion of facial age estimation for us started with safety because we view safety of kind of everything on Roblox. Like if you want to provide a safe experience for people of all ages, you actually need to know the age of the people that are on your platform.

And unfortunately, the reality is until very recently, that was a difficult thing to do. And it's the reason why the vast majority of large-scale digital platforms rely on self-reported age information. And guess what, when you ask people to self-report their age, they lie. It turns out they lie in both directions, by the way.

Young people lie about being older and older people lie about being younger. I guess no one is happy with their current age. But knowing the age of our users allows us to both provide a safer environment, but also just a better experience for our users. So from a safety perspective, it's about doing things that make sense from, call it, a societal norm perspective, right?

So if we know you got a 12-year-old on the platform, we're generally okay with that person being able to communicate with an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old, maybe even a 14-year-old. But it doesn't feel right for that person to be communicating with a 35-year-old that they don't know in real life.

So we need to actually know the ages of these people in order to put the appropriate guardrails in place, and that's what we're doing now with the rollout of this technology. But it also makes the product better. And what I mean by that is, again, if you just stick with the communication example, if I'm going to put you in a game, chances are if you're a 12-year-old player on Roblox, that experience is going to be a lot more fun if I put you in a game with other people who are also 12 years old. The way they play, the way they communicate, the lingo that they use it's on chat, guess what, it's different if you're 8 years old versus if you're 13 years old versus if you're 25 years old. And it's just a better, more fun experience for the players if they are engaging with people sort of in a similar age band.

And that extends beyond just the communication piece of it, the content that I surface, the way that I think about what I'm going to promote in the user interface. If I know you're 12 years old versus if I know you're 25, I'm going to do different things. So having that information is incredibly valuable for us, both from a safety perspective and also just from making a better product experience.

Got it. So it sounds like my days of going and beating middle schoolers or front lines are a little numbered then.

Hopefully.

So direct payments. So it's something you called out on the fourth quarter as scaling in the mix of how consumers are buying Roblox. So I'm wondering what are you seeing in terms of the financial impact there? How do you think about the longer-term implications for margins as direct payments become a larger part of the mix?

Yes. Look, we've seen meaningful operating leverage capture by driving down COGS rate, moving more of our payments to web platforms and other lower-cost platforms. Gift cards are a big part of our business as well, and they tend to have lower cost than app stores. And that contributed meaningfully in 2025. I do expect it will continue to be a contributor in 2026. And one of the things that I pointed out on the call is that we've got this headwind to margin in '26 from the DevEx increase that we announced in 2025. But if you look at like at the high end of our guidance, we expect margins to be roughly flat despite that headwind. And one of the reasons we think we can get there is because of incremental leverage that we expect to see from COGS.

That's not going to be sort of linear improvement every single year because there are a lot of different things that go into it in terms of how aggressively we push people to different platforms, what we can negotiate with different platforms. In the gift card part of the business, there are different fees between physical gift cards and digital gift cards.

But we see all these things moving in the right direction such that COGS will continue to be a source of leverage for us and one of the things that we can use to fund either margin expansion or increases in DevEx for our creators.

And how do you approach the decision between those 2 choices?

Look, in the long run, they're both critically important to us. We want our developers to have an even more exciting economic opportunity on Roblox. And we also are committed to expanding margins in the business over time. So the trick is that there's a little bit of a sequencing dynamic between the 2, like we like to capture the operating leverage and then use it to fund other parts of the business, if you will. So generally, that's how we try to approach it. But we'll see how that plays out over the next few years.

Got it. Let's move on to advertising. So we've written a lot in the past few years about how large we think the advertising opportunity on Roblox might be, especially as you look out over the next couple of years. And you've had some important developments there just in the past year or so in terms of rewarded video going GA.

You continue to make progress on Sponsored Tiles. I guess how is that rollout tracking compared to your expectations? And what do you want investors to know about Roblox as that opportunity?

I think what I want people to know is that we are very excited about the long-term advertising opportunity on the platform. In the short term, there is still work to be done to scale it. I think the long-term opportunity is exciting because we have some really unique assets to bring to advertisers, right?

We have the ability to safely advertise to younger audiences, which I think is becoming more important by the day to advertisers and users. We have tremendous engagement on our platform, call it, roughly 3 hours a day. So this is an audience that advertisers really want to get in front of.

Now at the same time, inserting advertising into gaming is something you have to be very thoughtful about it. It's different than, call it, linear video advertising where you can say, "Oh, every 12 minutes, I'm going to show you an advertisement". With gaming, it's much more interactive. And so you have to sort of be -- you have to work very closely with game developers to make sure that you're inserting advertising in a way that is not going to ultimately be detrimental to the user experience.

So we really think about our advertising business in 2 buckets, sort of a traditional brand advertising business, and then there is an endemic advertising business, which is really what allows our creators to pay for placement and user acquisition on our platform.

We've got really strong product market fit in both of those based on, I think, sort of our early learnings. On the branded side, as you mentioned, we are really focused on our rewarded video product, which has the benefit of being an industry standard product. It's well integrated. It's highly measurable. But it is something that does take some time, as I said, to integrate from a supply perspective.

On the endemic side or for creators, our core product is Sponsored Tiles, which again allows them to pay for, call it, premium placement in our user experience. That business has seen some very healthy growth, again, starting at small scale, but the growth rates are pretty compelling. And we've been able to give our creators the tools to manage those kinds of campaigns and very importantly, to help them measure the impact of those kinds of campaigns.

From a financial perspective, those dollars actually don't show up as bookings. They are an offset to DevEx in our P&L. But it's still an important contributor to the overall economic equation over time. Again, in the near term, contribution is modest, growth rates are high, longer term, big opportunity.

Got it. When we think about the user growth opportunity, domestic and when I say domestic, I'll include kind of North America and that versus international. Where are you in the journey of reaching those audiences in kind of your core most mature markets versus elsewhere? Because you called out on the most recent call, strengthen in Japan, India, Indonesia as real drivers of growth in APAC. How do you think about the opportunity in those markets versus where you are in the U.S. and Canada now?

Well, what I think is super exciting about those markets is just that we're we have very low penetration. So we've seen, as you pointed out, like tremendous growth in the last few quarters in those markets, both in terms of users and monetization. I mentioned earlier that like the number of international payers that we have on the platform kind of doubled in 2025.

So the slope of the curves there is really exciting, but the penetration is still small. So there's a huge growth opportunity. There's also a growth opportunity from a monetization perspective. When you look at how many of those regions monetize relative to what we see in the United States, there's a big gap. I don't expect those things to necessarily equalize. Just there are economic differences between countries. But there's definitely room for growth and a lot of the things that we're doing from a product perspective and a content perspective are intended to facilitate that.

The formula for us to continuing to drive that growth and maximize that penetration is actually the exact same thing that we're doing in the United States, meaning it's about product, it's about content, it's about audience expansion. And if we do those things, it will drive growth in the United States, and it will also drive growth globally.

The beauty of gaming is that it is a pretty global market. So the things that appeal to users in the United States and Canada tend to also appeal to users in other parts of the world. So there's a lot of leverage from that perspective in the business.

Got it. Maybe close out with kind of 2 more thematic ones or longer-term ones. I guess you've talked a lot over the past couple of years about a goal of reaching 10% penetration of the game software market, so around $200 billion. I think you're about 3% to 4% penetrated in that today. So of everything we've talked about today, what are the key levers investors should be watching to measure your progress towards that goal other than, of course, bookings?

Right. Well, by the way, we have an even more ambitious internal target for U.S. market share that we would like to achieve. And we've talked about a number of the different initiatives that we have to try to accomplish that. But if I really boil it down, -- the path to achieving those goals is about tech.

It's about genre/content expansion, which leads to audience expansion, which translates to growth and monetization. Like that's the formula. If we can put all those different pieces together, we will continue to end up this marketplace.

Got it. And then finally, just on AI kind of ending where we started. What would you highlight as maybe when you talk to investors, what comes out as the most underappreciated opportunity to deploy AI at Roblox and take advantage of it? And then what is the challenge that you're most focused on executing through from AI?

Look, the AI opportunity is largely what I said at the beginning. I mean we see this as a massive accelerant to our platform. And I think if you -- the folks who sort of look at it as a threat, don't understand the nature of our business.

As a platform, we want more content. We want more creators. We want it to happen faster, and we can use AI to help make that happen and provide people the tools to make every aspect of our platform that much stronger. So we could not be more excited about it. And if you look at how we are mobilizing internally to make that happen, it's like at the core of everything that we do.

Challenge, look, I think the biggest challenge that we deal with is just sort of the short term versus long term. Like there's just the amount of time we spend people trying to figure out like, oh, what's going to happen to bookings in Q1 or Q2. And the reality is like that has no bearing on what the value of this business is going to be 5 years down the road. So our focus is on the latter.

Got it. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Tiffany, and I will be your conference coordinator today. Welcome to Roblox's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call.

[Operator Instructions]

Now I will turn the call over to Jaime Morris, Roblox's Head of Investor Relations. Jaime?

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I am very happy to be here for my first earnings call at Roblox. Thank you for joining us to discuss our Q4 and full year 2025 results. With me today is Roblox's Co-Founder and CEO, David Baszucki; and our Chief Financial Officer, Naveen Chopra.

Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our commentary today may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. A description of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions are included in our SEC filings, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.

You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events, and we disclaim any obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics can be found in our shareholder letter and supplemental slides, which are available on our Investor Relations website.

With that, I will turn the call over to Dave.

Thank you, and good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us today. One year ago, we shared our goal of growing year-on-year bookings at 19% to 21%, and we talked about our goal of capturing 10% of the $200 billion global gaming content market on Roblox. The results we're sharing today for Q4 and the full year 2025 demonstrate the incredible progress we've made. In 2025, we significantly exceeded our guidance, both on revenue where we grew by 36% and on bookings where we grew by 55% year-on-year. We saw the emergence of viral hits that broke concurrency records at a platform peak in August of 2025, we hit 45 million concurrence on Roblox, and we saw new records for individual games on Roblox, including in September of 2025, Steal a Brainrot peaked at 25.4 million concurrent players at the same time.

We saw strong engagement and bookings growth across a long tail of content driven in part by search and discovery advancements, and we made great progress on the technical underpinnings of our platform that drive genre expansion. We took safety a step further in just the last 2 months, rolling out facial age estimation across our platform, and we're unique in large platforms with over 100 million DAUs. In doing this, we completed the global rollout in January. Today, we continue to be bullish of our future. We're at about 3.4% of the global gaming content market. As you know, we're aiming for 10%. And internally, we have even more ambitious goals for the U.S. market.

Now diving into Q4, where we delivered another quarter of outperformance. Q4 revenue was $1.4 billion, up 43% year-on-year. And our Q4 bookings were at $2.2 billion, which is up 63% year-on-year. We saw strong growth across all regions. U.S. and Canada grew 41% year-on-year. APAC grew 96% year-on-year with a couple of key strength points, Japan at 60% year-on-year, India won 10% year-on-year and Indonesia at over 700% year-on-year. On DAUs in Q4, we saw growth at 69% year-on-year, really strong growth across all regions. And our engagement hours in Q4 of last year were at 35 billion hours. That's up over 88% year-on-year.

Quarterly -- monthly unique payers were nearly 37 million, which is close to a double from a year ago and up sequentially. And this was strong across the globe, U.S. and Canada up 34% year-on-year. And in Q4, DevEx was at $477 million, which was up 77 -- or 7-0% year-on-year. This increase in DevEx reflects our 8.5% increase rate in September. And for 2025, creators earned over $1.5 billion for the first time.

If we take a look at our top 1,000 creators, they earned an average of $1.3 million, which is up over 50% compared to a year ago. Our results reinforce our conviction in our long-term vision. We believe the future of gaming is part of a bigger vision around human co-experience. Our mission is to connect 1 billion people every day with optimism and civility, and we remain bullish about this vision.

In the shareholder letter, we outlined some areas of innovation and investment we believe will fuel growth in 2026 and beyond. First, we introduced the concept of novel game expansion, which is how we talk about expanding the genres and footprint to our older audiences. You'll note now that we're age checking all users who participate in communication on our platform, we've been able to find really a bigger growth opportunity in the 18-plus demographic than previously assumed. We estimate our 18 and over cohort is growing at over 50%, and this cohort monetizes 40% higher than younger cohorts. We're optimizing our platform technically to facilitate growth of high monetizing genres popular with older users such as shooters, RPGs and sports and racing. And we believe our technical opportunity on the platform is enormous.

When we look at the gaming industry as a whole, in a sense, there's enormous room for advancement right now. Typically, where we're going with our platform is a focus on vertical integration from cloud to engine to tooling to our clients on many devices to discovery, economy and safety as opposed to what typically and often happens in the gaming industry is in a bespoke way, putting together different cloud, different engine, different social communication.

We have an enormous amount of high fidelity AI training data that we'll share more with you, and you can watch on our main X feed as far as what we're doing with it. And we are pushing the notion for studios that the exact same gaming experience should run very well and at high performance on low-end 2 gigabyte Android. and at the same time, blossom into high res on a PC or console. And that includes running on every language or most languages with auto translation as well. Our stack from top to bottom is multiplayer, and we run that extremely efficiently in our own data centers. And of course, we auto scale. And we believe for cost, it's very important to run the majority of your world on your own bare metal, but be able to burst in the cloud.

Finally, we'll talk more about our advances in safety that are built in. A couple of highlights on critical innovations we're introducing to support genre expansion. We have now -- are in the middle of a full cloud rollout of native streaming of both 2D and 3D assets with various LODs. We're doing that automatically in our cloud. We have introduced SLIM, which is our nickname for dynamically compositing very complex assets in our cloud and delivering those at various levels of detail for performance on all devices. We are -- we've announced that we're bringing native server authority, which is very necessary and popular and competitive gaming. And we've rolled out custom matchmaking, which our creators can use to optimize either latency, age or social connection. In the first half of this year, stay tuned. We're doing a complete release of an expansion of our avatar system, including higher fidelity and more articulation.

And finally, really, we've seen over the last few years, the definition of what is a game expand. The more infra and platform technology we provide, the more we see experiences that aren't typically thought of as a game, for example, dress to impress and grow a garden. And we're sharing more and more the AI tech we're building on top of our enormous data to continue this expansion with the use of AI. This week, we launched 4D Generation, which allows experiences to include creation of new objects simply by users prompting and creating by AI. We shared earlier our vision on using our training data to create higher and higher quality NPCs. We're now working on photo upsampling in our cloud on both 2D and 3D for higher photorealism. And we shared really yesterday the work we're doing on our internal world model as a service and as a service that could be used both for creation by walking around and painting potential worlds as well as something we look forward to potentially integrating with Roblox moments.

In addition to this AI future, AI is really driving creation, safety, discovery, translation in addition to these potential areas of user growth on our platform. Every day, we capture roughly 30,000 years of human interaction data on Roblox in a PII and privacy compliant way. We're actively using this data to develop and train AI models that continue to bring our vision to life. I want to highlight that we're internally now running over 400 AI models. This includes, of course, Cube 3D, which has recently expanded to do 4D or functional interactive type simulation. We have our own facial tracking client side model that we use for avatar facial animation. Our voice safety model has been open sourced and is open source as part of the ROOST consortium. Our text filter is constantly updated and we believe one of the best, if not the best, in the world. Our text and voice translations are supporting published once and chat in multiple languages. And of course, we highlighted our internal world model team and our internal NPC efforts as well.

We see a future of creation in Roblox Studio that's enhanced not just by code gen and not just by experience gen, but ultimately, agentic iteration and testing in our cloud, once again powered by our 4D foundational and 3D foundational cube models.

Some other AI highlights, and then I'll turn it over to Naveen. In discovery, AI has been driving personalization. In Q4, AI drove a double-digit increase in the number of unique experiences that are surfaced in our Recommended For You algorithm. In 2025, on average, users engaged with over 24 unique experiences per month. This is up double digits from 2024. And I want to note we've done this all relatively transparently by sharing with our creators the factors we use for discovery.

Of course, critically in safety, we've been using AI not just for our voice model, but with state-of-the-art models like Roblox Sentinel and Roblox Guard. And I want to highlight in safety, the continued focus on our goal to lead the world in online gaming safety and civility. We shared a few months ago what we believe is the gold standard. We continue to innovate in this direction. Of course, no image sharing on Roblox, of course, monitoring text for critical harms. But in addition, moving to the estimation of age of everyone on our platform and the use in how we support chat.

In Q4, we started a global rollout of age verification for access to communication in Australia, New Zealand and Netherlands. I'm pleased to report adoption has been strong with approximately 60% of DAUs age checked in these markets. We completed our global rollout in early January of '26. And as of January 31, we've achieved 45% penetration of global DAUs. We're bullish about continued adoption with Australia and New Zealand and as a model. We are also rapidly enhancing our platform to make both age check adoption and to improve its reliability. And then kind of a fun full circle here that as part of our age estimation release, we're really going up and down our system. We've enhanced our matchmaking to cluster users based on their age and skill level. We're moving to continuous age estimation, which will use additional signals such as play patterns, the social graph economic activities to supplement facial age estimation. And over the coming months, we have more product launches, including always continuous refinement of our text and voice filters.

We're ambitious, and we believe these types of enhancements really give us the opportunity to enable even higher level of engagement than what we saw prior to our Age Check rollout. From a commercial and financial standpoint, our flywheel continues to accelerate. We believe having all ages on our platform is a long-term strategic opportunity that many other platforms are not confronting as they claim 13 and up users. We're seeing the growth we saw in 2025 in combination with fixed cost discipline to reinvest in our creators and our infrastructure, all really with an eye to fueling continued growth and long-term margin expansion. We're excited about the innovations we're developing and executing across all areas of our platform, which we believe will ensure our ability to continue to deliver on our long-term vision and deliver growth over a multiyear period.

With that, I'll turn it over to Naveen.

Thank you, Dave, and good afternoon, everybody. Dave obviously shared a lot of the highlights from a spectacular 2025 and a strong end of the year in Q4. I'm going to share a few reflections on the business based on what we've observed over the last few months and then also share some additional color on our expectations for 2026. We have more conviction than ever in the ability for Roblox to grow in excess of 20%. Our platform is healthier than ever. In fact, if you look at Q4, we saw very strong growth rates, 63% growth in bookings without the benefit of a big new viral hit. Our Age Check data, as Dave mentioned, showed that we have an even larger opportunity to grow with older audiences than previously imagined. That's especially true in the United States, where the 18 and over cohort on our platform is growing at more than 50%.

We have an international business that is still relatively nascent and growing at close to triple-digit rates. And the pace of innovation in AI is a tremendous accelerant and has the potential to help us grow beyond gaming as we develop even deeper connections in communication, entertainment and commerce. In addition to the tailwinds on the top line, all the ingredients for long-term margin expansion are in place. Now that margin expansion may not be linear, as you can see with investments that we're making in 2026. But in the long run, we expect to capture operating leverage from COGS, from infrastructure and our fixed costs. So as I said, our conviction in the ability to drive very healthy top line growth and bottom line margin expansion continues to grow.

Now at the same time, we've learned that it's difficult to predict exactly where this business will land 12 months out. I mean if you look back at 2025, when Roblox set guidance, Steal a Brainrot and Grow a Garden had not even launched. And that's created a situation where the company has had to provide relatively conservative guidance. I don't think that's helpful to investors, and it's certainly not helpful to day-to-day operation of our business. So we're going to get out of that cycle. We're going to give everyone a long runway. We're providing detailed guidance for 2026. But as we get into 2027, you'll see us starting to guide one quarter at a time.

So let's talk about 2026. We're expecting bookings growth of 22% to 26%. Those estimates are informed by the quality of the users that we saw come to our platform in 2025. It's informed by recent content trends that we've seen in early 2026. It reflects our confidence in the adoption of our age checking technology. And a number of things that we have planned in our road map related to our economy, discovery capabilities and many other features. Now importantly, our bookings guidance does not assume because we wouldn't be able to predict it, another viral hit of the magnitude of a Grow Garden or a Steal a Brainrot.

And when it comes to margins, we're expecting at the high end of our bookings guidance, margins to be relatively flat year-over-year. At the low end of bookings, we are estimating a slight year-over-year decline in margin. That's driven by the increase in the DevEx rate that we announced last year, and we'll see a full year impact of that in 2026. It incorporates investments that we've talked about related to continued growth in users and engagement and also AI workloads. And we're also planning to invest more aggressively in safety marketing to better educate our users, parents and other constituents about everything we're doing to ensure that Roblox remains a leader in online safety. And we are funding a decent chunk of those investments through operating leverage on COGS and fixed costs.

Our guidance also implies another year of strong free cash flow growth. In fact, at the midpoint of our guidance range, we're estimating 26% year-over-year growth in free cash flow. That includes a slight uptick in CapEx spend relative to last year as we are continuing to land GPUs in our own data centers and also navigating the recent inflation in memory prices.

So overall, we see 2026 as another year of strong growth on top of a spectacular 2025. We're making investments in our creators, in our infrastructure, in our safety, all of which sets us up for future shareholder value creation in the form of long-term growth and margin expansion.

With that, we'll open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions]

We'll take our first question from the line of Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo.

Two, if I may. First, maybe, one, could you talk about -- could you give a little bit more color on the elements that inform your outlook for the bookings outlook for the year. I think it was -- it certainly has been a bit better than feared. Could you talk about -- I know you're saying that you don't assume any big viral hit. But like how much visibility do you have kind of beyond the first quarter into content schedules and releases? And kind of what informs your conviction in that guidance?

And then the second one, maybe just could you elaborate a little bit more on the -- you said the increased -- the better opportunity to target the 18 plus. And maybe within that, kind of if you could please talk a little bit about the recent developments with Genie and AI gaming. Just how does that inform your view and help hurt -- how are you going to use AI to make the platform better for developers?

It's Dave. I'll kick off a little on the first question, pass it over to Naveen and then come back on the second question. We have a lot of internal leading indicators we can see that somewhat correlate to the health of our system. And part of that is content diversity, content distribution, content velocity and types of content that are hitting different age ranges and genres. And we see a lot of health in that. So from just a high-level predictive view, that is one confidence inspiring thing we would see.

I'll hand it over to Naveen on more of the modeling and the makeup of our bookings forecast.

Yes. Thanks, Dave. I mean I'll really kind of put a finer point on what Dave said and then a little bit of what I said in my opening remarks. The content dynamic that Dave mentioned, I mean, we saw both in Q4 sort of an increasing diversity of content. We noted in our shareholder letter that experiences outside of our top 10 are growing at an even faster rate than they were in Q3, and that's true both with respect to engagement and bookings. So that's something we really like to see just spreading the growth around, if you will.

And we've continued to see similar trends in early 2026. And we like both the diversity of content, but also the freshness of the content. So there have been even not necessarily something as big as a Grow a Garden or Steal a Brainrot, but there have been new titles come in that have grown in a healthy way, which gives us a lot of confidence in the power of the platform.

I also mentioned the quality of the users that we saw in 2025. There was some uncertainty in that period of very high growth. Are these sort of low-calorie users that are going to come in and disappear. But when we look at what has happened on the platform, the behavior of the new users that came to Roblox in Q3, Q4, they largely look like our core users. And that's true when you think about how they engage, how they spend, how they retain. So that gives us confidence in how to think about the business over the next few quarters.

All that being said, there is still uncertainty trying to predict exactly where things are going to land 12 months out. That's the reason we don't think annual guidance is the right approach long term. We are using a slightly wider guidance range for 2026 than what we've used in the past, which kind of reflects some of that uncertainty. And then importantly, as I said, we are not building into our guidance an assumption of a massive viral hit the size of a Grow a Garden or a Steal a Brainrot. We're optimistic that things like that will happen again. But since we can't predict them, they're not built into our guidance.

Dave, do you take the second question?

And then just on the AI future, and I highlighted a little that we're optimistic we're going to see an expansion of the definition of really what is gaming and AI is going to power that. I'll step back though to our mission. And our mission is to connect 1 billion people every day with optimism and civility. And I'll highlight the word connect, which means bring multiple people together to play, to learn, to work. And for the last -- really since we've gone public, we've been sharing the visionary spec we've been building, which is many, many people coming together in physically simulated environments within games to play. We've started adding the notion of adding both NPCs as well as people to those environments, making those environments more and more photorealistic. And finally, making those environments one in which in real time, people can create, modify and change the environment.

So we're staying with that spec -- that spec. And we're -- as we showed on X yesterday, starting to use AI up and down the stack, up sampling 3D to bring things more to life, training NPCs with the 13 billion hours of not just video data, but intrinsic 3D world data. And we highlighted yesterday our internal world model team and what they've done using not just video data, but internal Roblox data to build internal world models that we think we can use both for creation and whatever.

I will highlight one thing, and that's very important to the spec we're designing. We're building multiplayer platform technology. We're building stuff that brings people together. And a lot of the current work that you see out there is operating in video latent space rather than synchronize 3D multiplayer cloud space. I would just cautiously highlight investors to understand the difference of that. You can read our recent tweet on X. That said, we continue to be optimistic about hybridizing and putting together many AI components to build the stack we're talking about.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

I appreciate all the disclosure in the materials and especially the shift around the guidance philosophy. Dave, I have one for you. The journey you've been on with respect to discovery on the platform over the last 12 months, what have been the key lessons you've learned about the opportunity that sits in front of you based on what you've learned about the evolution of discovery? And how does that align with your strategic priorities either for the platform or individual products as you look out over the next couple of years?

Discovery is a really hard problem to do right. And we believe being transparent in it is very important. We're as much as possible trying to optimize discovery not for short-term gain, but for long-term gain. And that's both long-term gain in user engagement as well as long-term gain in platform health and creator health. And any efforts to optimize discovery in the short term may not be optimal for long-term enterprise value and the health of our system.

So figuring out how to personalize discovery for every user in a way that connects great users with great content in the long term is what we've been focusing on. What we've seen as a result, as I mentioned, is more good content, reaching more great users, an increased robustness in the diversity of our content mix in a way that we believe is very, very healthy and also some future opportunities. So stay tuned with moments. We believe for many users, browsing in-game experiences will more and more be a complement to our discovery. So it's a long-term journey, and we'll keep getting better at it.

Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Cost with Morgan Stanley.

I have 2. Maybe one for Naveen to start. I think that the gross margins that you showed in the quarter were, I think, the second strongest that we can see going back even to 2020, I think it was the only time you did better. When we think about that improvement to gross margins, is that a function in the fourth quarter of a shift towards direct payments or any other moving pieces? And could you just give us an update on kind of the direct payment initiative?

And then a second one for Dave, if I could. I think the detail on the blog post that you've shared so far on this call about the work you're doing with AI and world models is incredibly helpful. And I want to put a finer point on kind of the concerns that we've seen coming up in the market over the past week about the potential for disruption to your business from other advances from -- with AI coming from other companies out there in the space. And I wonder if you could respond to those concerns and what you see as the differentiating factors that protect Roblox. I think the commentary you made a moment ago about multiplayer versus non was really helpful. But if you could expand on that.

Yes. Matt, thanks for the question. I'd really point to 2 things in relation to your question on gross margin in the quarter. One, as you hypothesize, we did get some tailwind from COGS. I think as we've spoken about in the past, we are doing a number of things in the product to try to steer the purchase of Roblox to lower-cost platforms. And that honestly performed better than we anticipated in Q4, and that was very helpful from a margin perspective. We -- the other source of margin expansion in the quarter was really bookings growth. Bookings came in also better than expected, which gave us powerful leverage against fixed costs.

When we look forward, and I think I spoke about this in relation to 2026 margins, we do continue to expect improvement in COGS rates as we are able to shift more and more of the business to lower-cost platforms. That's not going to be necessarily linear. There will be places and points in time where we're able to be more or less aggressive on that. But in the long run, we do see that as a source of additional margin expansion in the business.

Dave, on AI?

Yes. I would -- this is a great question. I would flip it and share how we think about it internally which is an opportunity for disruption in the opposite direction, which is an opportunity for the expansion of the Roblox vision beyond gaming into the future mix of what is entertainment and where does gaming end and where do other points begin. 10 years ago, a lot of people in the market used to talk about how is video going to get interactive, and there's been a lot of experiments on that, that have been very difficult. But the other direction to think about is how does gaming expand and become part of entertainment.

So I would say stay tuned on that. We feel what we're building, which is multiplayer technology that runs in the cloud that more and more can load instantly that more and more can be consumed in smaller bite-sized nuggets will more and more start to blur those 2 visions. World models are interesting. I would say, not initially in many of the ways that I think many people think, but we do think they have an opportunity for walking around and painting a world, for example, they have a really interesting opportunity to think about where does video end and snapshots end and interactivity begin. And so we have developed our own models there, but the core of our technology will continue to be the very difficult problem of 3D cloud synchronization and building communication type technology.

Our next question comes from the line of Omar Dessouky with Bank of America.

I wanted to ask more of a financial question. Specifically, how do you think about dilution in stock-based compensation in 2026 with your stock price significantly down compared to last year? Could you explain how having that stock-based comp flexibility is helping you make long-term strategic investments? For example, what investments besides headcount have a higher ROI that you would use that cash for?

I'll go first, and then I'll hand it over to Naveen. Internally, we're always running a multiyear model on stock-based comp and dilution at a very, very wide range of stock prices and running the business in a way we feel comfortable. So we do think about these things and model many dimensions. I'll hand it over to Naveen.

Yes. Not a ton to add to that, Omar. But number one, I would say we look at this on a pretty long-term horizon. I mean that both with respect to the share price and dilution. I mean, sure dilution at various points in time might spike just because of what's going on with the stock price. But ultimately, we think we're going to create shareholder value, and that will cause dilution to come down over time. If you look at what's happened over the last few years, that's definitely been the case. So something we pay attention to, but we're much more focused on the operating results of the business because dilution is going to get solved by that.

Our next question comes from the line of Brian Pitz with BMO Capital Markets.

Maybe a quick update on your ramping advertising ambitions and how you're thinking about the potential growth contribution from advertising in 2026? And then any additional detail about the age verification rollout, which maybe was not as smooth as you hoped. Can you comment on specific challenges and adjustments the team has made to ensure a better transition?

I'll go first. We sure don't think about it that way. We're very excited and proud of the way our age verification rollout has gone, and we're very optimistic that the result of it has been expanded thinking within our team on long term how to be unique in being a platform that can have all ages on the platform, can monitor and help how communication happens on the platform. I'll say that we gave our internal teams an ambitious goal of rolling this out eventually with no friction. And I would say, by doing this, we found so many other opportunities for optimization that I'm very pleased and happy with the way the rollout has gone.

And then on advertising, we expect our advertising business to show some pretty healthy growth in 2026. That being said, it is still modest. It's not a major contributor to the top line. As you've heard me say in the past, it is going to take some time to grow. I think the long-term opportunity is very exciting given the scale and engagement of our platform, but it is going to take some time, and we are executing carefully with respect to building out those products, the integration of the technology in our platform, working with our creators to expand the amount of inventory that is available, and we're going to continue to be very methodical about that to make sure we're building the business in the right way.

Our next question comes from the line of Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan.

I had 2. Maybe first, there's been some reports of interest in maybe building your presence in China. Anything you could comment on there and the type of opportunity that you see? And then just on the age of users, you framed it as the large opportunity given in novel game experiences given more younger users than previously reported. The half glass empty view of that, of course, could be that younger users have been tougher to age up on the platform than you expected. So what's giving you the confidence to invest there that you can age up more with users?

I'll go first on China. We continue to be a great partner with Tencent, and we continue to see a huge opportunity in China. We've revamped the way we look at China. If we were to go live in China, we would do it in an air-gapped way. And we think our infrastructure is built and designed in a really unique way that we can abstract and deploy it in multiple places. On our -- a couple of things about age checking and getting detail on estimated age. The first thing is it highlights the level of cultural phenomena that Roblox has become. And so yes, age checks slightly younger than self-reported. But if anything, it highlights the success.

I look to a couple of things. First, over 50% growth year-on-year, 18 plus. Two, the platform and technical advantages we've used to get to where we are in under 18 are exactly the same 18 plus. vertical integration all the way from cloud to apps to discovery to social graph and beyond, we believe right the same. And ultimately, the tech as well, supporting more and more realistic experiences. So I continue to be absolutely bullish on our 18 and up opportunity.

Our next question comes from the line of Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

This is Andrew on for Shweta. Just kind of one on the age check rollout. You talked a lot about the penetration that seems to be going well. But have you noticed any change in behavior or engagement levels for those who have completed age check versus not yet? And then maybe when you think about the derivative impacts of age check, is it possible to think about how the older cohorts may be viewing this as a quality of life update that might be contributing to the engagement levels that you're seeing?

I'll give one example on why we're excited about this. And that is the more we get into age check interacting with communication, the more we can more accurately match make different age bands together. That's one of the factors that makes me so optimistic is that age banding our matchmaking in ways that brings the average older user together as well as the average 15-year-old together, we believe can be a long-term growth aspect. So we think this is going to become -- it's why we call it the gold standard actually. And what we've seen after we did this is another very large gaming company announced they're going to do it, a communication platform announced they're going to do it. So we just see this as ultimately the way the world is going to work. We're proud to be one of the first big platforms to do it.

Our final question comes from the line of James Heaney with Jefferies.

Yes. Naveen, if we look at the Q1 bookings guide, it looks like a sequential decline greater than 20%, which I think would be one of your bigger sequential slowdowns. Is there anything you're calling out there specifically? Or is it just kind of the conservatism that you called out? Anything specific and even maybe what you're seeing so far in Q1?

Yes. I mean, I guess I look at it pretty differently. This is a quarter where we do not have, at this point, a big new viral hit. And so to put up 40% to 44% top line growth in the absence of that, I think we should all be very, very excited about what that says about the health of the platform. We said last quarter that as we started to move past this period of time with huge viral hits that growth would slow. So I don't think anyone should be surprised by the sequential trend there. If anything, I think we should be really excited about what we're seeing early in the year. I'm going to turn it over to Dave to close out.

Thank you all for joining us on our call today, and we appreciate the really interesting and thoughtful questions. Thank you all, and we look forward to seeing you in a quarter.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Good morning. My name is Kate. Welcome to Roblox's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Stephanie Notaney, you may now begin your conference.

Thanks, Kate. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our Q&A session to discuss Roblox's Q3 2025 results. With me today is Roblox's Co-Founder and CEO, David Bizzuki; and our Chief Financial Officer, Naveen Chopra. Our shareholder letter, SEC filings, supplemental slides and a replay of today's call can be found on our Investor Relations website. Our commentary today may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements.

A description of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions are included in our SEC filings, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We disclaim any obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics can be found in our shareholder letter and supplemental slides.

With that, I'll turn it over to Dave.

Thank you, Stephanie. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. A year ago, at RDC, we shared the goal of capturing 10% of the global gaming content market we'd like to report that we've made tremendous progress. We estimate now that 3.2% of global gaming bookings or revenue is going through Roblox, and that's up from 2.3% last year. Our platform and our creator ecosystem is healthier than it has ever been. Similarly to Q2, in Q3, we saw strength both across the platform with both existing and new experiences on the platform. The number of experiences that have more than 10 million daily active users on the platform at some point during Q3 2025 hit 7, and that includes a lot of experiences we're all familiar with as well as 5 that were created in the last 12 months. That's Grow a Garden, Steal a Brainrod, Brookhaven, 99 nights in the forest, PlantsF Brainrod, Ink Game and Block roots. We believe the success on our platform continues to be driven by raw platform capabilities and performance, continued improvements in discovery, continued improvements in our virtual economy, and complementing that, the investments we've made in infrastructure, which supported multiple groundbreaking records over the last quarter, including a 45 million peak concurrency during the weekend in August. Let's get into the financial results.

In Q3, our DAUs hit 151.5 million. That's up 70% year-on-year. This was growth really across all regions, including U.S. and Canada, 32% up year-on-year; APAC up 108% year-on-year. And importantly, we see continued evolution of our age demo with 13 and over DAUs growing 89% year-on-year. Right now, 2/3 of total DAUs are 13 and up. Hours had similar strength, hitting 39.6 billion hours of engagement in Q3. That's up 91% year-on-year. Strength across all regions, U.S. and Canada, up 47% year-on-year.

APAC hours of engagement up 127% year-on-year. commensurate growth with 13 and up 107% year-on-year, 68% of our total hours are 13 and up. Q3 revenue was $1.36 billion, up 48% year-on-year. Q3 bookings was $1.92 billion, up 70% year-on-year. Once again, strong growth across regions, U.S. and Canada, bookings up 50% year-on-year. APAC bookings up 110% year-on-year.

Some highlights. Japan, 125%; India, 46%. Indonesia bookings up 804% year-on-year. Our monthly unique payers continues to be strong at 35.8 million, up 88% year-on-year. And in Q3 through DevEx, we hit $427.9 million of DevEx, up 85%, a new record. I want to highlight that DevEx, which is what our creators are earning on the platform has grown 250% from the same period 2 years ago. We continue to have strong conviction for our long-term vision, and we'll continue to be more diligent about investing in this innovation to support long-term genre expansion and growth.

We've talked about genre expansion a lot over the last year. I want to do a few highlights here. We have a lot of technology that showed at RDC this year that's rolling out, including server authority and custom matchmaking, which will make Roblox more resilient and powerful for competitive genres like shooters, sports and racing. We've already showcased Avatar enhancement technology that is in the pipeline that we believe is going to really expand the look and feel of Roblox to higher fidelity and more lifelike avatars and continued focus in raw performance on the platform, including tech like Harmony and Slim, which we believe is part of the future of high fidelity gaming and the ability of our creators to make experiences that can run both on low-end 2-gig Android as well as really nice high-end gaming to PCs.

On Discovery, we've continued really a commitment to transparency that we also believe is good for the company. And we shared the notion that we're sharing our discovery signals with our creators, making those transparent in their analytics dashboard. And we've highlighted that we're using play-through rates, 7-day play days per user, 7-day intentional co-play days. So our creators can see exactly what we're using to make recommendations. We continue to see Discovery highlight new hits.

For example, in Indonesia, Fish it has become extremely popular, and we believe our Discovery system has helped promote that. I would also highlight our content ecosystem continues to be strong with what have now become perennial successes like Brookhaven Ad.me and Blocruits, which all continue to draw strong engagement. And some of our hits from last year like rivals and dress to Impress continue to launch active and successful updates. Really important at RDC, we announced an 8.5% increase to the DevEx rate.

Creator earnings surpassed $1 billion in the first 9 months of 2025. Also in support of our creator ecosystem, we've launched our IP platform, which we believe really is the future way to allow IP holders and creators to connect without all of the complexity of handcrafted individual one-on-one contractors or contracts. And I want to highlight IP owners like [indiscernible] and [indiscernible] have joined that platform. And we recently announced and launched Roblox Moments which we believe is an additional innovative discovery surface for our creators. Now in addition to all of this, I want to make a couple of highlights on some of the areas of tech we've been really working on before I hand over to Naveen.

First, really safety, which has always been a top priority for us and foundational to everything we do at Roblox. Just yesterday, we announced a partnership with the AGA, the Attorney Generals Alliance on a child safety coalition. Stay tuned with this. We believe there's a wonderful opportunity to share and develop what we believe is going to be the industry standard in communication for social and mobile apps, including our commitment by the end of this year to use AI-based facial age estimation to estimate the age of everyone on our platform and to use that to gate who uses communication technology and help root who can communicate with who, even in addition to what we already do, which is filtering of all text and no image sharing on Roblox. We believe as new technology rolls out, it allows us to harvest and use this technology for continued advancements in safety and civility.

We've also released over 100 innovations this year in our safety and civility group, including an announcement that we're going to be adopting IARC and International Age Rating Coalition rating over the next few quarters. And we've raised our minimum age for restricted content to really the global standard of 18 years old. I want to highlight, we do run stricter than typical industry policies on Roblox. We believe it's an essential strategic investment to how we run the company. And as we roll out facial age estimation, we really do believe this is going to add long-term value creation for shareholders, even if there are any short-term headwinds from that rollout.

On the AI side, we are now up to running over 400 AI systems inside the company. These are core within safety, discovery and creation, highlighting a few things that we've shipped so far. Our Cube 3D model, which we shipped earlier, is really going to come to life over the next 1 to 2 quarters as this goes live in multiplayer mode for everyone on the platform. We've also open sourced the Studio NCP server, which is making Roblox Studio the ability to integrate as both a client and a server in complex AI-based workflows. Behind the scenes, our safety model for PII continues to get better all the time. And we shipped RoGuard for our safety of our LLM text-gen tech in game. Stay tuned for a lot more generative AI.

I want to highlight that in addition to AI for safety and discovery, there's been a lot of chat about how much training data various people have access to. Within Roblox every day, we are moving forward to capturing, which is literally over 30,000 years of human interaction data and doing this in a PII-compliant way. This is unique data, data we have no intent of ever getting outside of our walls or selling that can really be used as we start to roll out our future vision of allowing people to play both with others as well as with NPCs and supporting unlimited creation in Roblox, not just for our creators, but for everyone. And that can mean per object with clothing, per the world you're in, per game creation and ultimately, with friends in real-time well playing.

Finally, 45 million concurrent users is a really big number. And we supported this really moving towards what we think is more and more an optimal mix of our own data centers, both core data centers, edge data centers and GPU installations on our own bare metal with bursting with our cloud partners. And we did this in really a wonderful way by bursting over weekends for several hour slots when we hit peak numbers. We're going to continue to go down this route.

We're investing more and more in our own bare metal for scale. Core data centers give us load balancing and efficiency. Everyone in Brazil is happy because we added a new edge data center there to reduce latency. We're going to continue doing that. And we are more and more now building out our own native bare metal GPU capability, but coupling with our cloud partners. We're going to make sizable improvements here. The big improvements we've seen in cost to serve may be harder to realize for the next few quarters, but this is all consistent with our long-term focus. With all of this excitement about innovation, we, of course, we have a lot of initiatives we work on every day to enhance our platform. We focus on the details.

And with that, we're going to hand it -- I'm going to hand it over to Naveend to complement my introduction.

Great. Thanks, Dave. Good morning, everybody. I'm going to try to keep my comments relatively brief so we can get to some questions. As Dave noted, the tremendous growth that we saw in the quarter was driven by this combination of big viral hits and underlying platform growth. And so with that in mind, I want to just share a few observations regarding overall platform health, if you will. Last quarter, I highlighted the engagement growth that we were seeing in experiences outside of our top 10. Well, this quarter, the growth in engagement for these experiences, again, outside of the top 10 accelerated even further from 47% in Q2 to 58% in Q3. That's the engagement. And then on the monetization side, spending in that cohort of experiences remained north of 40% -- excuse me, spending growth remained north of 40%. We also saw healthy growth in bookings per daily active user.

That was true in every region other than APAC, which I call out because very importantly, in APAC, the trend really is a function of mix shift at the country level. Payers, as Dave highlighted, grew 88% year-on-year, which is a very healthy growth rate in and of itself. But notably, it's higher than the rate of user growth, which was 70%. And we believe that this dynamic is at least in part caused by changes that we've made in our economy.

Remember, we launched regional pricing for marketplace items back in June. And we think that, that helped drive higher payer penetration in markets like Southeast Asia. We did see a decline in bookings per payer on a blended basis, but similar to my comments on bookings per DAU, it's important to understand that this was really driven by geographic mix shift. So platform evolution looks healthy, and that really increases our conviction in our long-term goals. But as Dave pointed out, also underscores the importance of continuing to invest to ensure that we can deliver healthy growth over a multiyear period of time. So what does that look like financially?

Well, on the top line, we see momentum in the business to continue to deliver healthy double-digit bookings growth. We think that will be aided by the launch of a number of the key technologies Dave touched on that will roll out in late Q1 and early Q2 of 2026. Many of these technologies are designed to enable genre expansion on our platform. You saw some of those demo at RDC.

From a reported growth perspective in '26, we think the adoption of these technologies will be a factor, meaning how quickly developers adopt some of these new capabilities will influence the growth rate, particularly given the tough compares that we know we'll have coming out of 2025. We're also conscious of the fact that the new safety policies we're rolling out consistent with our commitment to being the gold standard for safety may cause some short-term friction to engagement and bookings.

But ultimately, we think those are a magnifier of long-term growth. And then on the expense side of the equation, we are envisioning more investments in DevEx, in infrastructure and people to support our goals around safety and genre expansion. That's the reason you're not seeing year-over-year margin expansion in Q4 based on our guidance.

And it's the reason that we expect margins to decline slightly in 2026, given the combined impact of a full year of higher DevEx rates, limited cost to serve improvements around infrastructure and safety and higher growth rates in our comp and ben expense lines. There'll also be incremental CapEx starting in Q4 2025, that's incorporated in the guidance that we shared. And I would tell you to expect similar levels of CapEx in 2026, which, of course, implies that CapEx intensity next year should be lower than 2025 and but still somewhat elevated relative to 2024. So I realize probably getting a little bit into the weeds there, but let me step back for a second. I think the key takeaways here are we are way ahead of our long-term growth plans. And in fact, the reality situation is that bookings have grown faster than our ability to deploy the appropriate growth investments. And that means you're going to see some slight margin compression as we catch up over the next few quarters.

But I think those investments really should give everyone even more confidence in our ability to continue to deliver sustainable long-term growth. So hopefully, that's some helpful color both on what we're seeing and what we're expecting.

And with that, I think we'll open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] We'll first go through Matthew Cost at Morgan Stanley.

Dave, I want to start on AI. I mean, just when I look at your infrastructure plans, clearly, you're very excited about putting GPUs and more data center power behind what you're doing tie that back to what the user experience or the games on roadblocks are going to look like in this world that you're building towards. When you think about what Cube is capable of, what will real-time content generation and what you're calling 4D content creation mean for robots experiences and for engagement over the next couple of years? And then I have one for Navin as a follow-up.

Matthew, great question. And this is a fun one to answer. It also highlights the just enormous future technical innovation. We have rate looking in front of us. we have shared publicly RDC and others really a vision of what the ultimate spec for roadblock should be. And that ultimate spec should be creator decides everything from fun animate look and feel all the way up to photorealism, anywhere from 1 player to 100,000 people out of concert simultaneously. .

The ability to use AI to do real-time modification of that world, everything from a piece of clothing, to really 100,000 people with Dungeon master modifying the whole environment in real time. A mix of true human players, NPC players all together doing this with a very tight eye towards efficiency and cost because we're a premium platform. ultimately, doing this on everything from a 2-gig gram Android device to a high-end gaming PC. So that is that is an amazingly complex spec. What you're going to see coming out soon with Cube for the is real-time generation in experience in multiplayer, not just the static objects but of complex objects, vehicles, weapons, other types of things that user can interact with in multiplayer. -- more of that to come, more AI supporting the stack everywhere, but we're marching as quickly as we can to that really big visionary spec.

Some of the gameplay that we will see, we do not know what it is. We've seen that historically on roadblocks more and more as we both cover new and existing genres in a predictable way. along with new types of games, I would highlight Dress to impress was an example a year ago where the raw technology we were building to support more traditional gaming allowed the creation of a whole new genre. So stay tuned both for more coverage of existing genres at higher performance as well as as of now unthought of types of gameplay.

[Operator Instructions] We'll move next to Brian Pitz with BMO Capital Markets.

Dave, you mentioned increasing the DevEx rate by 8.5% putting more economics into creators hands. However, at the same time, if you look at competing UGC platforms like Fortnite, they're also offering very attractive economics to try to win over creators to build a mere UGC platform. How do you think about the need to continue driving economics towards creators to help send off any competition from other platforms that either are currently in development or could be coming in the future.

Great question. I do want to highlight, generally at roadblocks, we run the company by looking to the future and not looking over our shoulder I would say in this situation, there's one additional component to what is the DBX rate, and that is the ability of a new creator or an existing creator to make enormous economic returns. And so one needs to multiply the DevEx rate by the volume of users on the platform by the breadth of the creative tools by the velocity that new creators can make new experiences.

And in the end, that's how I believe and we believe creators analyze the situation, not simply by the DBX rate. We do believe for every incremental percentage within obviously our fiduciary duty and our balancing of earnings and Devex and all of our other costs that for every incremental percent. We do believe there can be some effect on the creators in making robots a more appealing platform. It ends up at the highest level making us think about our company, where we want our COGS to be as lean and as efficient as possible.

Our personnel cost to be as lean and efficient as possible. Our infra trust and safety costs to never compromise and at the same time, to be run as thoughtfully as possible -- and this has been one of the benefits of building out our own infrastructure. And then finally, being very thoughtful on how much we move back to our creator community relative to our own cash flow.

So I think it's much bigger than kind of this one-to-one comparison. And that's really long term, we want to move as much money in a prudent and thoughtful way while always being responsible for trust safety and our earnings to the creators.

We'll move next to Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

Can you share with us key learnings as older age cohorts continue to scale as a percentage of the mix in the business. And based on those learnings, how can you line up your investment priorities to sustain that growth and stimulate that aspect of mix in the years ahead?

I'll share some key learnings, and then I'll share how we are lining things up. I think one of the key learnings is roadblocks has a huge ability to virally attract new users to the platform with new hits. And we've seen that both with dress to and press. We've seen it with [indiscernible] where we really get user acquisition at enormous scale organically as word-of-mouth traverses these properties. We've also seen with new types of game play, once again, use those 2 as examples, that older players are excited and interested in that. .

If anything, as we look at the global gaming market space, which is estimated anywhere, I won't make the exact estimate, but numbers between $180 million and $200 billion we see all of the existing genres, and we've been able to align those genres with our technical road map. As we shared before, a lot of our technology, we believe, is going to support sports. A lot of our technology will support racing. Some of the new technology we're working on is going to make RPGs better.

Some of the technology we're working on now we believe we're going to see more and more Avatars on roadblocks that have a much bigger diversity just as we see in the gaming ecosystem as a whole relative to what we have on roadblocks. And so we can use that to guide our technical road map. But I would highlight we're not copying. We are envisioning satisfying those technical constraints while at the same time, building a platform where the exact same experience can run a 2-gram Android in a very difficult networking configuration and at the same time, look absolutely amazing on a high-end gaming PC, eliminating really kind of this void between mobile and desktop and console.

We also believe the future of platforms like roadblocks is much more cloud integrated such that AI and generative AI is always available in the experience for all creators. So we are able to align a bit both our own vision as well as what are all of the current genres in the gaming ecosystem and make sure we line up with that.

So that's -- we're optimistic there's a lot of growth ahead of us in some of these genres where we're not fully at 3% of the global gaming market right now.

We'll move next to Jason Bazinet with Citigroup.

I just had a question on the shareholder letter. I think in your '23 Investor Day, you laid out 20% plus bookings growth from '25 to '27. And in the shareholder letter, you acknowledge the great results you've had so far this year. But then you say as we look to next year, our long-term objectives have not changed. Is that essentially a soft way of saying that you think that the growth will be below 20% in '26? Is that what you're trying to say? Because I think that's what the market is trying to digest with the premarket exit in your stock?

Yes, Jason, it's Naveen. Thanks for asking to clarify that. Look, I think we are not providing any specific guidance about 2026 at this point in time. I think that would be premature. We need to land the plane on '25, and then I think we'll be able to dial in expectations for 2026 more specifically. I think what we're trying to highlight for people is that there are some important things to consider as we look at expectations for bookings growth next year. there will be tailwinds from the momentum that we are seeing in the platform today.

There will be tailwinds from a lot of the tech that's going to be hitting the platform in the first half of next year. But there could also be potential headwinds, obviously, from the tough comps and then potentially from some of the new safety policies that we are going to be rolling out. We don't think any of that changes where we expect this business to be over the next several years. But I think it is too early to put any specific numbers around '26 at this point in time.

We'll move next to Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan.

Maybe building on that, you did not mention advertising as a potential tailwind next year. So just curious what your early learnings have been in rewarded video. How big a push our priority do you plan to make that in 2026?

Yes. So I think consistent with some of the comments we shared recently around advertising. We remain very bullish about the long-term opportunities there. that we are cautious about the near term because we want to make sure that we get it right. And as you've heard at RDC, we are now rolling out rewarded video on sort of a limited basis. I think we pointed out in the shareholder letter, we now have over 140 creators onboarded.

What we have learned from that is that we want to be very thoughtful and diligent with those creators about how we integrate rewarded video to make sure that it works for them from an engagement and a monetization perspective, that it works for our users in terms of the experience, performance, et cetera, and that obviously, we are representing our advertisers in a high-quality way.

So there's still a lot for us to do on that front, and therefore, not something that we would call out as a major contributor in the short term. but something that is going to be a key part of our business as we progress over the next few years.

We'll move next to Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo.

Could you talk a little bit about the various genres? And how do you think about the the recommendation engine, which has been clearly very successful in kind of surfacing new hit games. Could you talk about how you're pushing more diversity of genres and to make sure that there's enough experiences out there. And is this a concern? Are you seeing -- are you worried at all a little bit about more concentration in certain types of genre games or in certain game mechanics?

Okay, great question. And part of my intro was to highlight that diversity on the platform with titles over 10 million DAUs at some point during the quarter and 5 of them new. One of the -- the way we have been thinking about Discovery, there's 2 big areas of it.

One is, we're not trying to optimize the short term. We are trying to optimize the long-term enterprise value of the company. And we're also trying to optimize ecosystem health in addition to what we put in front of users, which really does mean surfacing new creators and new genres side-by-side.

The second part on our discovery, we're moving more and more towards complete transparency of our discovery algorithm. We're sharing the signals that we believe point to long-term health of the ecosystem. And as you correctly noted, we believe part of that long-term health is through expansion in some genres, like RPGs, shooting, racing, battle, sports and other genres on the platform. The final thing I want to highlight on the way our Discovery system is working, is long term, there's really 3 prongs to discovery on roadblocks.

There's our own recommendation engine. It's coupled with on the homepage sponsored tiles which is paid discovered by our creators. And more and more new creators who are launching a new game or bursting are using that to complement our organic discovery. Finally, our top pick and curated sort is an additional way that we complement that with the vision on the platform. We're being very careful not to look backwards, not to burn in what has historically been big on road blocks.

But instead to look forward to what we believe will be new types of gaming on the platform. So I believe relative to a year or even 2 years ago, our discovery systems are working better than it ever has, and I think we have continued improvements coming. So stay tuned.

We'll move next to Benjamin Black with Deutsche Bank.

So just touching on the growing number of experiences that are eclipsing 10 million users. So with the growing data set that you have on user engagement, the AU behavior, does the Discovery model just get increasingly smarter at recommending content. So I guess the question is, are you starting to have a real data mode in discovery? And then Dave, over the past couple of quarters, we've seen a divergence in our engaged growth and bookings growth. Could you just help us understand -- so why is this happening is as easy as sort of a mix shift towards low monetizing experiences or low monetizing regions? And if so, how should the relationships between those to evolve from here?

This is a really good question. I want to put it under the umbrella of first privacy safety PII safety, adherence to all local laws and all of that? And second, I want to put it under the umbrella, but we're not under any financial pressure and have no intent to ever release any of this roadblocks data anywhere off the platform. Once we look into those 2 things, though, the data set is enormous. The data set is not simply who clicks where. The data set is real-time 3D Avatar interactions.

It's what areas of a certain experience are retaining more. It's what are Avatar is doing in any creators experience. It's the ability to analyze that and the ability to analyze the data that makes up a 3D experience. And in addition to maybe more traditional signals for discovery use 3D and time-based immersion signals to help predict what may be a good experience on our platform. that goes back to an interlock with what I shared, which is every day on roadblocks, there's over 30,000 years of potential 3D interaction,

Avatar training data available for us. So the answer is yes. We will mix more content understanding, understanding of what makes experiences interesting and fun into our discovery mechanism. And I'll kick it over to Naveen for the second part of that.

Yes. Thanks. Ben, your -- or at least the second part of your hypothesis was correct in terms of the dynamic between hours growth versus monetization growth. meaning it really is about geographic mix shift. You can see that if you look at -- in the supplementals, we had some disclosure around bookings per daily active user. I realize you were comparing monetization versus ours, but it's a very similar dynamic, i.e. If you look at this on a regional basis, very strong growth year-over-year. but the mix of hours is skewing towards regions that just do monetize at a lower level. And that's what you're seeing in the blended numbers. And as I pointed out in my remarks, even at the regional level, we see some geographic mix shift between specific countries that impacts the monetization at the entire region. So it really is all about growth in various regions.

We'll move next to Omar Dessouky with Bank of America.

So you called out the tough comp in 2016 and some of the dynamics there. I'm looking back at road blocks. A lot has changed, obviously, the company has almost doubled in size over the last 2 years. And when things change, you may consider different approaches and with '26 being such a tough comp year potentially, that it sounded like Dave said that the virality of your hits is the main engine for user growth. In a tough comp year, like 26, why wouldn't roadblocks consider advertising to kind of smooth out these troughs and peaks in in growth. That's my question.

Omar, great question. A couple of things to take a step back at big picture right now. we're simultaneously excited that we've nudged over 3% of the global gaming content market running on road blocks. And at the same time, there's almost 97% out there. So I continue to be enormously bullish as we roll out our tech and we expand genres, and we do this really in a new way for gaming complemented with AI.

The second thing I do want to highlight is that this quarter, next quarter, we're rolling out a lot of what we shared at RDC, which supports massive expansion of the way roadblocks works and the types of genres. You correctly note, robots got to where it is primarily based on viral growth, but we do buy traffic. I don't know if it shows up in our financial statements, but we very thoughtfully complement that with paid user acquisition. And what we are testing and starting to roll out is the notion that we can partner with the creators on our platform to help them supercharge their paid acquisition in partnership with us.

And there is a future opportunity for us to expand paid acquisition, where a creator may be a little hesitant to buy paid traffic and send that to roadblocks because we get some benefit as well. They land in our client. That user may pay other experiences. But when we start sharing that with creators there's an opportunity for both creators to expand paid acquisition and for us to support them and do it with them. So we already do some paid acquisition. There's an opportunity to make this a lot larger.

We always do this in a financially prudent way, which was appropriate return on ad spend in the right amount of time so that we're doing this incrementally. So yes, a great idea. We've got this in our sights to expand. And Naveen, I don't know if you want to complement that at all.

I think the only thing I would say is that in terms of overall scale of what we're spending on growth marketing it is still very modest, and we rely on the tremendous organic growth that the platform still has. As Dave said, there's a lot of market white space yet for us to tackle we added, I think, close to 40 million users relative to Q2.

So the organic growth engine is working really well, and that will still be, I think, the primary driver of growth. But there are some very interesting things that we can do, as Dave described, in conjunction with our debts to promote some of the content that is coming to the platform, which is consistent with our goals around genre expansion, content diversity, content velocity, et cetera. So looking forward to continuing to experiment with that.

Time for one last question from Clark Lampen with BTIG.

I'll try to make these quick ones. Dave, you talked about making the platform more attractive to the creator community over the last 2 quarters, we've obviously seen a really big spike in users. You've invested in developer exchange fees, tech, the platform. We obviously have a very good view into user growth, but a little bit less so on the developer side of the ecosystem, has debt growth essentially held serve with users in a way where we could think about that sort of growing proportionate to DAUs?

And maybe just take that a step further for Naveen, if we think about that and sort of the elasticity of growth and engagement, we've been through investment cycles in the past, this 1 feels a little bit different because it's AI-oriented. Is there a reason to think that like the yield on some of these investments, if we are seeing proportionate growth could be a little bit more immediate and is that reflected in some of the comments around '26?

Yes, I'll go first, and then I'll hand it over to Naveen on the yield side. At RDC, and I don't know if we published as part of this earnings, there's 1 spec or stat that we constantly share which is some averages around top 10, top 100, top 1,000 deaths and the year-on-year growth in bookings and engagement. And we continuously see, I would say, a flattening of that tail where the top 1,000 looks very, very healthy. So I think we're in a very healthy zone still. We continue to flatten that curve. We have many, many more creators making a living or making $1 million or making $10 million on the platform, and that all is continuing to grow. I believe we can extrapolate to the future, which is our vision of having 10% of that global gaming bookings running through our platform, and that gives a little bit of a perspective of what we would hope happens to that wide range of creators on the platform. Just one highlight on infrastructure. We continue to highlight the movement to supporting our own bare metal data centers, both for core edge and AI and complementing with Burst we're -- this has been part of the key to our efficiency, and I'll let Naveen speak on the yield of these investments as we get into that.

Yes. I think the way to think about, call it, the payback period on these investments is that there are a variety of things that we are doing that we will start to see the fruit relatively quickly. There are others that are more long term in nature. the AI stuff, in particular, there's a lot of AI investment that we've already made. You heard Dave talk about some of the benefits we're already seeing around discovery, economy, et cetera. So I view those as having relatively near-term payback. There are others that are going to be longer term. And quite frankly, it's going to take us a little while to roll out the CapEx to train and ultimately deploy these models to move them on to our own metal, as you heard Dave describe. So those are not necessarily going to have as immediate of a payback. But I think it's fair to say we're already getting benefit from a number of the investments that have been made on this front, call it, in 2025 and increasingly in '26 and beyond. I think that's our last question. So thank you all for joining. And then I will turn it back to Dave for any closing comments.

I just want to once again thank you all for your support and your insightful questions today. We look forward to continuing to innovate in our quest to have 10% of global gaming on the platform. Thank you all.

Thank you. And that concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.