Roblox shares have plummeted 70% over the past 12 months, and the company’s market value has lost $70 billion from its all-time peak. The reason isn’t external factors, but rather its proprietary recommendation algorithm, which was switched in April 2026 from chasing quick monetization to long-term player retention. Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra acknowledged this at the earnings call on July 30: the system now promotes “evergreen” games with low hourly monetization instead of viral hits from 2025, hitting the most vulnerable audience—children under 13.
And here’s the interesting thing: Roblox is being punished for what it’s been demanding for years. Reducing the number of highly profitable games for under-13s is exactly what safety activists wanted. But the price turned out to be higher than the company expected.
In the Q2 2026 report, the numbers are wildly inconsistent. DAU was 123 million, up 10% year-over-year, but 29 million below the peak of 152 million in Q3 2025. Revenue grew 36% to $1.5 billion, exceeding many analysts’ expectations. Bookings, however, grew just 8% to $1.6 billion, falling within the company’s own guidance. And here’s the key piece of evidence: monetization per DAU fell most sharply among users under 13—the very group Roblox had been building protective barriers around all of last year. The decline in bookings in this segment was more severe than the company had anticipated.
During the earnings call on July 30, Chopra explained this bluntly: players have shifted their focus from high-yield viral games of 2025 to new and evergreen projects with lower hourly revenue. But the algorithm is key. In April 2026, Roblox updated its “Recommended For You” recommendation system: instead of 7 days, it now evaluates player retention over 28 days. This switch “intentionally favors games with high retention at the expense of short-term monetization.”
“This fundamental shift in product offerings was exacerbated by changes to our recommendation algorithm, which is optimized for long-term user retention and therefore favors games with high retention at the expense of short-term monetization. And in Q2, the impact of this trade-off on bookings from younger users was greater than we expected,” Chopra stated.
And that’s not all. The Q3 guidance is for bookings in the range of $1.58–$1.65 billion, representing a decline of 14–18% year-over-year. The company has abandoned its full-year guidance altogether, citing growing uncertainty in the fourth quarter.
Now, on to strategy. Roblox is betting on an adult audience. Effective June 8, 2026, the platform increased its DevEx (Developer Exchange) rate by 42% for revenue from US users aged 18 and older. The 18-34 demographic in the US is growing at 50%+ year-over-year and spends approximately 50% more than younger players. In 2025, developers earned $1.5 billion through DevEx. The company is also relying on AI: in July, they announced Build, a mobile game builder based on text prompts. Public alpha testing began on July 28 in New Zealand for users aged 9 and up. Build will roll out to other countries “in the coming months.”
A separate story concerns hackers from the Lviv region. From October 2025 to January 2026, the group hacked over 610,000 Roblox accounts and earned nearly 10 million hryvnias (~$228,000) from their sales in Russia. The accounts are worth that much because that’s what Robux and rare items are worth—it’s the same economics discussed in the financial statements, only from a different perspective.
Comparison table: Q2 2026 vs. Q3 2025 (peak)
A decline in monetization will likely continue, according to Chopra. The company is betting on long-term retention and an adult audience, but the price of this choice is a $70 billion market value and a 70% share price drop. 70% isn’t a death knell for the platform. Roblox still attracts 123 million daily opens, and revenue is growing 36%. But this is the first public quarter where child safety and monetization have come into direct conflict. And Roblox is unfazed—the company remains confident in the correctness of its decisions.
