My 11-year-old declared Roblox dead late last year. Not dramatically, just flatly, the way you'd note that a restaurant closed. Roblox's most recent earnings report disagreed. The platform posted $4.9 billion in full-year 2025 revenue, with 144 million daily active users in Q4, a 69% jump year-over-year.¹
Both of these reads are correct.
Why This Matters
"Dead" is a social signal, not a usage metric. When a platform loses cachet among the group that defined it, that cohort isn't tracking downloads or DAUs. They're registering something more like ambient temperature, whether the platform still feels like theirs, and Roblox has lost that heat with middle schoolers. The sensor is calibrated correctly; it's just pointed at a different variable than the one on the earnings report. That may be an early indicator worth noticing.
Facebook ran almost this exact arc. Teen usage of Facebook fell from roughly 60% monthly in spring 2016 to 27% by fall 2021, per Piper Sandler survey data.⁴ Meta's annual revenue during that same span climbed from about $27.6 billion to nearly $118 billion.⁵ An 11-year-old calling Facebook dead in 2016 was correct about the thing they were actually measuring. But if they'd invested $100 at the IPO, it would be worth roughly $1,560 as of publication.⁶
The platform is aging up on purpose (sort of). Among Roblox's age-verified daily active users, 27% are now 18 or older, a cohort growing at more than 50% annually and spending roughly 40% more than younger users.¹ But that 27% figure carries an asterisk Roblox doesn't state but most parents and players already know. Device behavior research suggests younger users frequently overstate their age on the platform,² and some adult age-check completions are just parents verifying for their kids, not actual adult players.³
The tween and the analyst are both right because they’re measuring different things entirely, and the significance of each is simply a matter of timing.
Markets are built to confirm what has already happened. They're less equipped to price what is quietly changing beneath the surface, especially when that change starts in the informal places that don't generate data. An 11-year-old saying something is dead carries no model, no forecast, no multiple. It is easy to ignore. But it may describe a shift the numbers will only validate later. Not because the numbers are wrong. Because they arrive last.
Sources
¹ Roblox Q4 & Full Year 2025 Shareholder Letter — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001315098/000131509826000009/ex991-q42025shareholder.htm
² Konvoy Ventures: "Roblox Is Not Aging Up" — https://www.konvoy.vc/newsletters/roblox-is-not-aging-up
³ Roblox acknowledged parents completing age checks on behalf of children and ages being registered as 21+, per Silicon Snark analysis citing Roblox's own statement — https://www.siliconsnark.com/a-deep-dive-into-robloxs-age-verification-fiasco/; Roblox's own newsroom on moving beyond self-reported age — https://about.roblox.com/newsroom/2026/02/moving-beyond-self-reported-age
⁴ Fortune / Piper Sandler "Taking Stock With Teens," fall 2021 — https://fortune.com/2021/10/25/facebook-teens-usage-harm-studies/
⁵ Meta annual revenue: 2016 (~$27.6B) and 2021 ($117.9B) — Meta 10-K filings at https://investor.fb.com/financials/sec-filings/annual-reports/default.aspx
⁶ Meta IPO price: $38/share (May 2012); $100 = ~2.63 shares; at ~$593/share (March 25, 2026) = ~$1,560. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META