Roblox has responded to a report that claims the corporate inflates its participant numbers by as a lot as 42%.
A report from Hindenberg Analysis (through Wall Road Journal) claims that Roblox has been inflating its participant numbers by as a lot as 42% since 2021. The agency states that its analysis relies on interviews with “a number of former Roblox workers.”
Hindenberg’s analysis additionally reveals that Roblox’s moderation methods to maintain kids protected from grownup content material doesn’t work. This included the analysis agency creating a brand new account and itemizing their age as “below 13”, however discovered that the Roblox search bar nonetheless allowed the consumer to seek out grownup content material simply by simply looking for “grownup”. The agency says that it discovered one group “overtly buying and selling baby pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors.”
In response to the report, Roblox issued the next assertion,
“Security and civility have been foundational to Roblox because the firm’s inception almost twenty years in the past, and the corporate has invested closely all through its historical past in its Belief & Security efforts. Day-after-day, tens of tens of millions of customers of all ages have protected and constructive experiences on Roblox, abiding by the corporate’s Neighborhood Requirements. Roblox takes any content material or habits on the platform that doesn’t abide by its requirements extraordinarily significantly, and Roblox has a strong set of proactive and preventative security measures designed to catch and forestall malicious or dangerous exercise on the platform.”
On the claims of Roblox inflating its participant numbers, the corporate mentioned, “The monetary claims made by Hindenburg are deceptive.” The assertion continues to say that, “the authors are brief sellers and have an agenda no matter the substance of Roblox’s enterprise mannequin and outcomes.”
Roblox additionally offered an instance of how its key working metrics are calculated.
“We outline a DAU as a consumer who has logged in and visited Roblox by way of our web site or software on a singular registered account on a given calendar day. If a registered, logged in consumer visits Roblox greater than as soon as inside a 24-hour interval that spans two calendar days, that consumer is counted as a DAU just for the primary calendar day. We consider this technique higher displays world engagement on the platform in comparison with a way based mostly purely on a calendar-day cutoff. DAUs for a specified interval is the typical of the DAUs for every day throughout that interval. For instance, DAUs for the month of September could be a median of DAUs throughout that 30 day interval.”
“As a result of DAUs measure account exercise and a person consumer could actively use our platform inside a specific day on a number of accounts for which that particular person registered, our DAUs should not a measure of distinctive people accessing Roblox. Moreover, if undetected, fraud and unauthorized entry to our platform could contribute, on occasion, to an overstatement of DAUs. In lots of instances, fraudulent accounts are created by bots to inflate consumer exercise for a specific developer’s content material on our platform, thus making the developer’s expertise (which confer with the titles which were created by builders) or different content material seem extra in style than it truly is. We attempt to detect and decrease fraud and unauthorized entry to our platform.”
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