Roblox misses quarterly bookings estimates on lower spending, shares tumble

(Reuters) -Gaming platform Roblox missed estimates for second-quarter bookings on Wednesday as waning demand for its online games and intensifying competition hurt growth, sending its shares down 8% in trading before the bell.

The videogame industry is struggling with a slowdown in spending as inflation-weary gamers become more selective in picking popular titles.

U.S. spending on videogame content, including new games and character skins, was flat in the first half of the year, while console sales rose 23%, according to data from gaming research firm Circana.Roblox, which operates a metaverse – an emerging virtual space where people play games and make transactions – is available on mobile devices, desktops and Microsoft’s Xbox.

It reported 65.5 million daily users in the quarter, with a long-term goal of reaching 1 billion daily users.

The company, popular for games such as “Adopt Me!” and “Brookhaven”, posted net bookings of $780.7 million in the quarter, missing analysts’ average estimate of $784.9 million, according to Refinitiv data.

Roblox’s results come on the heels of a downbeat forecast from Electronic Arts and “Grand Theft Auto” publisher Take-Two.

Net loss attributable to shareholders stood at $282.8 million in the quarter, compared with $176.4 million, a year earlier.

The company released its eponymous online game “Roblox Beta” on Meta Platforms’ Quest virtual reality headsets in July. The game arrived as a beta version on Quest 2 and Quest Pro, reaching more than a million downloads in the first five days of going live.

With regards to Roblox being a major player in the emerging metaverse, analysts say an actual metaverse is still 10 years away and the competition among platforms to dominate it will be intense.

(Reporting by Samrhitha Arunasalam in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)