Roblox Corp. disclosed a year-over-year drop in player engagement following the rollout of stricter child-safety protocols.
The gaming company recorded 138 million daily active users in the third quarter, a 9% decrease compared with the same period a year earlier, even with the debut of a new wildly popular title. Bookings, a proxy for sales, fell 12% year over year to $1.7 billion.
Analysts on Wall Street had projected 145.8 million users, based on estimates from ten analysts compiled by Bloomberg. Wolfe Research had anticipated 136 million.
Roblox shares declined roughly 16.6% in after-hours trading.
In July, the company indicated that its investments in AI-driven projects would lead to elevated infrastructure expenses and that it would hold back full-year guidance due to heightened unpredictability.
Roblox executives remain confident that the company's AI investments will yield more games, more users, and quicker development cycles. "Roblox is uniquely positioned to capture this moment," the company stated in Thursday's Roblox Corp - A: Third Quarter 2026 Shareholder Letter to shareholders, noting that over 80% of the top 100 games on the platform last month utilized AI tools.
"AI is fundamentally reshaping the gaming industry," Chief Executive Officer David Baszucki said in the letter.
The Nov. 19 launch of Grand Theft Auto VI, a highly anticipated video game from Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., could create "a modest headwind" for Roblox's daily active users, Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra said on a call with analysts Thursday.
Simultaneously, Roblox's user-generated games frequently mirror major pop-culture phenomena, and some analysts anticipate that Grand Theft Auto-inspired games will appear on Roblox, attracting users who are too young for the actual vice-laden blockbuster.
For years, Roblox has drawn criticism over predators who exploit the platform to groom children, resulting in numerous lawsuits from state attorneys general. To mitigate the danger, Roblox started rolling out dozens of safety modifications, such as verifying users' ages, which ended up hurting growth in the first two quarters. The company is wagering that these changes will draw more people to the platform over the long term.
The company lures new players with popular games created by third-party developers, and analysts have noted that it's hard to predict when a new hit title will arrive. In 2025, Roblox's user engagement surged, largely owing to hit games Steal A Brainrot and Grow A Garden, which generated enormous traffic and shattered industry records. During the first half of 2026, no new games managed to achieve the same level of attention.
Then over the summer, a new title called Steal An Egg became a sensation among Roblox players, representing as much as half of the platform's concurrent users on certain days, according to Freedom Capital Markets analyst Nick McKay. But optimism over the game's overall impact on Roblox could be "overdone," he warned, because its popularity might be coming at the expense of older viral games, such as Steal A Brainrot.
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