Given the choppy stock market, investors might have viewed Roblox’s stock as too risky.Īfter all, Roblox’s value on its first day represented about 45 times its 2020 sales - an extremely exuberant valuation compared to how game companies have been valued in the past. The stock opened at $64.50 a share, valuing the company at $41.9 billion, and it closed in first-day trading at $45 billion. For Roblox’s direct listing (where employees and investors sold stock but the company itself did not raise money), investors had set a reference trade of $45 a share, that would have valued the company at about $29 billion. Roblox’s public offering had everybody on the edge of their seats while knowing that Microsoft’s deal was going to close soon. In some ways, Roblox had a big advantage over Microsoft. Spiketrap, which monitors social media trends, found that social sentiment on Roblox’s IPO was at 64 out of 100, a positive rating (as 60 and above is generally positive) compared to Microsoft’s Bethesda announcement, which ranked just on the edge of positive at 59 out of 100. Nevertheless, on Google Trends, searches for Roblox far outnumbered searches for Bethesda or Xbox Games Pass in the past week. These events are in such different spheres that it almost seems like they aren’t part of the same industry. Part of the point here is that Roblox’s customers are the ones that create its games, which lessens the need for staff. All of those companies have far more than Roblox’s 1,000 employees. Roblox is worth more than Electronic Arts ($37.7 billion), Take-Two Interactive ($19.6 billion), Ubisoft ($8.1 billion), and Square Enix ($6.2 billion). It is staggering how much Wall Street is betting on Roblox as the future of gaming and how much more valuable it considers Roblox’s strategy to be worth compared to Microsoft’s big acquisition of a triple-A game publisher.

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