An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Yesterday, Roblox made good on its plans to go public, with employees and previous investors selling hundreds of millions of shares in a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange. In a private funding round in January, those shares were worth $45. When the market closed Wednesday, they were selling at $69.50, a price that valued Roblox Corp. as a whole at $45.3 billion (as of this writing, Roblox Corp.’s stock price peaked at $77.30 and currently sits at $72.72 in Thursday morning trading).

How did this company, whose single title has become a game platform unto itself, become worth more than major game publishers like Electronic Arts and Take-Two? To help answer that question, we put together this deep dive into the numbers that are powering the Roblox revolution. They paint a picture of a company with an extremely young and incredibly engaged user base that has ballooned during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. But Roblox is also a company that is struggling to convert its huge and growing annual revenues into profitability. Here are the valuations of Roblox and how it compares to the other gaming companies:

Roblox
– Jan. 2017: $500 million
– July 2018: $2.3 billion
– Feb. 2020: $3.9 billion
– Jan. 2021: $29.5 billion
– March 10, 2021: $45.3 billion

Other gaming companies (current valuations)
– Ubisoft: $9.58 billion
– Take-Two: $19.43 billion
– Electronic Arts: $38.09 billion
– Roblox: $45.3 billion
– Activision: $72.23 billion
– Tencent: $843.86 billion

Visit Ars’ article for the full deep dive into the numbers, which are sourced from SEC documents and Roblox’s own website.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Roblox’s Billion IPO Values User-Created Game Platform Higher Than EA