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Roblox Q3 2026 results showed that the company beat its own guidance, even as bookings fell against one of the strongest quarters in its history. For the three months ended September 30, 2026, revenue rose 16% year over year to $1.572 billion, while bookings declined 12% to $1.697 billion.
The bookings figure landed above the high end of the range Roblox had set for the quarter, $1.58 billion to $1.65 billion. Roblox attributed the year-over-year decline to comparison issues; bookings were still up more than 50% compared to the same quarter two years ago, before the extraordinary growth the platform posted in 2025.
“Our Q3 financial results came in ahead of our guidance for revenue, bookings, and cash flow,” said David Baszucki, Roblox’s co-founder and CEO, in the company’s shareholder letter.
The Numbers
The bottom line improved, even as the top line diverged. Roblox posted a consolidated net loss of $230 million, narrower than the $258 million loss a year earlier, for a loss of $0.32 per share. Adjusted EBITDA rose to $138 million, up from $45.7 million in the same quarter last year.
Cash generation remained robust during the quarter. Operating cash flow was $395 million, and free cash flow was $364 million.
Engagement
The audience size decreased compared to last year’s peak but increased from the previous quarter. Average daily active users reached 138 million, down 9% from 152 million a year earlier but up 12% from the second quarter. Hours engaged reached nearly 34 billion, down 15% year over year and up 17% quarter over quarter.
Roblox said seasonally adjusted overall platform retention reached its highest level since 2021. Growth also skewed international, with daily active users up 37% in India and 33% in Japan.
Spending per user told a tighter story. Average bookings per daily active user slipped 3% to $12.29. Average monthly unique payers fell 16% to 30.3 million, while average bookings per payer rose 5%, and the company said monetization headwinds continued, particularly among younger users in the United States.
The AI Build-Out
The most notable signal of the quarter was not financial. Roblox said that over the past month, more than 80% of its top 100 games, ranked by hours engaged, used AI tools to accelerate creation, and daily asset uploads to the Roblox cloud tripled month over month. Published games leveraging AI grew more than 50% quarter over quarter.
Two titles created almost entirely with AI, Break and Steal an Egg and Huss Valley, broke into the platform’s Top 20 ranked by concurrent players. Build, the company’s prompt-to-game creation tool, has drawn more than 500,000 users in its alpha launch across New Zealand, Singapore, Serbia and Thailand, and those users have published over 70,000 games.
The next platform move is already dated. Roblox Everywhere, which will publish select top titles as standalone apps in major app stores, is planned to begin rolling out in the first half of 2027.
What to Watch Next
The fourth quarter is where the narrative will be tested. Roblox guided fourth-quarter revenue to $1.47 billion to $1.58 billion, up 4% to 12% year over year, and bookings to $1.89 billion to $2.00 billion, down 10% to 15% from the $2.22 billion posted in the fourth quarter of 2025. The outlook assumes a normal seasonal decline in daily active users from the third quarter.
The company also expects the fourth quarter to swing back on profitability measures, guiding to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $10 million to $70 million and negative free cash flow of $105 million to $190 million, with a consolidated net loss of $363 million to $423 million. Whether retention at a five-year high begins converting back into payers will determine how this quarter is remembered.
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