There’s money to be made using Roblox, according to the company’s executives. Roblox is the digital world where users create characters, purchase merchandise and play games. It has been called “an early entry into the metaverse” because it has many of the building blocks an eventual metaverse would use, including cryptocurrency and a three-dimensional gaming platform. All Roblox users are allowed to build games and sell products on the platform. These developers earned $538 million off of their experiences in 2021, and that number grew to $624 million in 2022. The earnings are on track to hit $800 million in 2023, a 28.2 percent increase year-over-year, according to Roblox executives.
Roblox isn’t scheduled to announce earnings until next month, but the company decided to release some early numbers in the name of transparency, said Enrico D’Angelo, Roblox’s vice president of economy, in a blog post. Roblox CEO David Baszucki reiterated the prediction on social media.
While gamers have been on Roblox for more than a decade, the platform gained traction during the Covid-19 pandemic, which drove users inside and online. Roblox has 66.1 million daily active users, up 22 percent year-over-year, according to its most recent earnings statement filed in May. At the end of 2019, right before the pandemic, Roblox had less than one-third of that number. The company has been at the forefront of metaverse innovations in recent years, from staging live music events with artists like Lil Nas X and Lizzo to partnering with Chipotle to create branded experiences.
Roblox’s pitch to developers is that they will get a cut of the action. In 2022, the 10 highest-earning developers made an average of $23 million each, according to the blog post. Nearly all top-500 creators earned more than $140,000 each, it said.
Who is David Baszucki?
Baszucki 60, graduated from Stanford University in 1985, having studied engineering and computer science. In the following years, he developed a software company called Knowledge Revolution alongside his brother. It built and distributed a physics program for educational purposes. MSC Software, a California-based tech company, acquired Knowledge Revolution in 1998 for $20 million. Baszucki worked with MSC Software as vice president and general manager until 2002, when he founded an investment firm.
In 2004, Baszucki began creating what would become Roblox alongside Erik Cassel, who had worked on the physics simulation with him. The two launched the website in 2006, and Baszucki has been working as CEO ever since. In playing Roblox, Baszucki enjoys an environment called Natural Disaster Survival, where players must survive typhoons and meteor showers every three minutes, Observer previously reported. He took the company public in March 2021 at $64.50 per share. After spiking to $135 in November 2021, Roblox is trading today at $41.40 per share. Forbes estimates Baszucki’s net worth at $2.7 billion.
