Thank you for the input. I thought about buying right after the IPO too, just to have a small position to talk about with my son, but…
One of my very first steps was to ask all the parents around me if they had heard of it. I was testing how many kids were actually engaged.
This was one of my hesitations in my first review. I have a 12 year old son who loves games (duh) and while he tried Roblox, he just isn’t into it and neither are his friends. I was misled by my small sample size. In the past few months, I’ve been hearing about Roblox from other people, including some 20-somethings who work for my company.
The developers get paid based on how much money the users spend. So, Roblox is not paying people out of their own coffers.
Functionally it is fair to think of it that way–developers only make money if the game makes money. Accounting-wise, developers get paid by Roblox. Of the ~$2 billion annual revenue this year, $500 million is going to developers. So, the balance sheet gross margin will likely never be the 80-90% of a true SaaS company.
That isn’t going to stop me from buying, but for the board members who are laser focused on a certain type of business, I believe it is an important note.