Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheRealPomax | Hacker News Reader

This feels like reading finance fan fiction (which it kind of is, given the author's profession?) and uses a lot of text to reach the part that lays out the actual problem: the average operating costs based on daily active users are $18 per user per quarter, and the average amount made is only $13. so either operating costs need to come down, charges need to go up, or they need (more, stable) external revenue (e.g. ads).

This article tries to, foremost, sell you on the idea that its author is someone you should listen to for financial analyses.

View on HN

$18/player is a staggering operating cost. I feel like there must be some easy optimizations to be had that would greatly reduce the overhead. Roblox games are user made! They aren't building the most sophisticated game engine. Sure there are server costs, but that should be pennies. Where is all of that money going?

It's unclear to me how $18/player was arrived it. It's not correct. We can simply look at Q2-2024 pg. 7 [1]:

* Total expenses: $1,131,492,000.

* Average daily active users: 79.5M, or $14/DAU/qtr.

* MAUs are closer to 375M, QAUs likely somewhat higher let's say 400M?

* So if we're talking about how much they spend per quarter per unique player, it's closer to $3.

* Last quarter they brought in $955M in bookings (revenue is pointless to look at due to the required accounting practices)

[1] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001315098/785cb7e...

You’re right. What else? Roblox games absolutely utterly suck. Little else matters.

50+ million daily active users pretty much instantly invalidates that claim (hell, even a million daily actives would have, AAA games dream of these numbers =)

It's not for you and me, we just see a garbage "game", but holy shit is there a large demographic that loves what Roblox gives them.

Just because something that sucks is popular doesn’t invalidate the claim that it sucks (and Roblox does suck hard). Junk food is terrible for your health and is also very popular.

Except "bad for your health" is an objective biological fact, whereas saying something sucks is entirely subjective, so that argument too is invalid from the outset. You think it sucks, vastly more people don't. You're welcome to your opinion, but that's all it is.

Except the detrimental impact of Roblox is objectively and widely documented in various links in this thread and elsewhere on the inter webs. Kids don’t think junk food sucks, I guess millions of parents trying to keep them healthy are just going by their “opinions” as well?

Right, and now you're pretending that you said it was bad, not that it sucked.

Of course it's bad: it's factually and objectively bad, there's plenty of investigative journalism that unequivocally demonstrates it's absolute garbage and enables the worst kind of crimes the US can imagine. But, and this is important: that has nothing to do with whether it sucks or not. In fact, it "doesn't suck" enough for millions upon millions of people to use it every single day. Roblox is terrible BECAUSE it doesn't suck: the whole reason it's so bad for humanity is PRECISELY BECAUSE it's awesome enough for a large enough demographic to keep using it, while being opaque enough to the demographic that should be correcting this behaviour to not get it so that Roblox can keep getting away with it.

The absolutely biggest problem with Roblox is literally that it doesn't suck. If only it did, kids would stop playing it!

Roblox has, objectively, a terrible effect on the world. This is demonstrably true. It's not an opinion. But saying it sucks is. Words matter.

Has the definition of “sucks” drifted? When it came up as slang in my childhood, it basically meant “not cool / unpopular to associate with”. Roblox seems the exact opposite.

Yes, I’d say “sucks” means “bad” more than uncool. Clearly using stuff that your friends think is bad is immediately uncool so I can see how these can seem to mean the same thing :)

> Roblox games absolutely utterly suck

There are hundreds of millions of users a month who strongly disagree with you.

Are you one of those millions of users? No? Why don’t you play Roblox?

I both play and build games on Roblox. Look at my comments.

I don’t see your games, I am sure you care about them sincerely, I see the other “polished” titles and I’m familiar with the Roblox funded development that paid for the creation of the more polished games. I can’t pass criticism on games I haven’t played, such as the the ones you listed. Roblox’s strategy sometimes works sometimes doesn’t, so difficult to generalize. Overall there’s a reason we have never heard of a single game on the platform.

Bloxburg feels like the least janky experience. But overall just moving around using virtual joysticks on a phone is really janky.

Another POV is that the overall catalog of games is very large. Many high quality options to go through before playing your first Roblox game. Even on phones, even free to play. With your level of experience you know that of course every kid would have more fun playing something like Clash Royale or something in the Apple Arcade, the issue isn’t that kids are stupid or tolerate crappier stuff like you imply elsewhere, but that you are not allowed to market expressly to them even in platforms like TikTok where there are many kids.

Yeah. Pretty sure most of the numbers mentioned are irrelevant in this case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com