[ocdtrekkie]

This is probably a really risky investment: Every parent I know has a "kid stole my credit card and bought hundreds of dollars of Robux on it" story. While I've reversed the ones that happened in my own family, it took my tech expertise and some research to figure out how to do so (via Google Play, where the refund request button is deliberately extremely obfuscated)... many parents probably just accept the money is gone and move on.

Roblox has no real way to know, but I'd guess a not insignificant amount of their revenue is unauthorized charges. Better protections on parents' cards may cause their revenue to dry up a fair bit...

And that's before we get into the problematic nature of pushing a monetized game on kids as young as five years old, who might be incentivized to steal from their parents now at an early age. I could see this company's business model getting nuked by future legislation.

[akgoel]

My 7 year old daughter has stopped asking for (very pricy) American Girl accessories, and now asks for Robux. The coding schools around us are advertising Roblox Studio classes for kids.

I'm not so pessimistic as you on the model, but those previous operating losses seem pretty big.

[ehnto]

What would be costing so much I wonder? The platform has been around for 15 years and whilst I understand it's a platform not a game per se, surely most of the work is done? I wouldn't expect it to get -more- expensive to maintain than it was to build in the first place year over year.

They lost more in one year than it took to build GTAV over 7 years.