Roblox has responded to a report that claims the company inflates its player numbers by as much as 42%.
A report from Hindenberg Research (via Wall Street Journal) claims that Roblox has been inflating its player numbers by as much as 42% since 2021. The firm states that its research is based on interviews with “multiple former Roblox employees.”
Hindenberg’s research also reveals that Roblox’s moderation systems to keep children safe from adult content does not work. This included the research firm creating a new account and listing their age as “under 13”, but found that the Roblox search bar still allowed the user to find adult content easily by just searching for “adult”. The firm says that it found one group “openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors.”
In response to the report, Roblox issued the following statement,
“Safety and civility have been foundational to Roblox since the company’s inception nearly two decades ago, and the company has invested heavily throughout its history in its Trust & Safety efforts. Every day, tens of millions of users of all ages have safe and positive experiences on Roblox, abiding by the company’s Community Standards. Roblox takes any content or behavior on the platform that doesn’t abide by its standards extremely seriously, and Roblox has a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to catch and prevent malicious or harmful activity on the platform.”
On the claims of Roblox inflating its player numbers, the company said, “The financial claims made by Hindenburg are misleading.” The statement continues to say that, “the authors are short sellers and have an agenda irrespective of the substance of Roblox’s business model and results.”
Roblox also provided an example of how its key operating metrics are calculated.
“We define a DAU as a user who has logged in and visited Roblox through our website or application on a unique registered account on a given calendar day. If a registered, logged in user visits Roblox more than once within a 24-hour period that spans two calendar days, that user is counted as a DAU only for the first calendar day. We believe this method better reflects global engagement on the platform compared to a method based purely on a calendar-day cutoff. DAUs for a specified period is the average of the DAUs for each day during that period. As an example, DAUs for the month of September would be an average of DAUs during that 30 day period.”
“Because DAUs measure account activity and an individual user may actively use our platform within a particular day on multiple accounts for which that individual registered, our DAUs are not a measure of unique individuals accessing Roblox. Additionally, if undetected, fraud and unauthorized access to our platform may contribute, from time to time, to an overstatement of DAUs. In many cases, fraudulent accounts are created by bots to inflate user activity for a particular developer’s content on our platform, thus making the developer’s experience (which refer to the titles that have been created by developers) or other content appear more popular than it really is. We strive to detect and minimize fraud and unauthorized access to our platform.”
What do you think of the accusations made by Hindenberg Research from its report? Let us know in the comments or in the official Insider Gaming Forums.
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