管理層發言
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Regina, and I will be your conference operator today. Welcome to Roblox's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Press the number 1 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. We ask that you limit your initial question to one. I will now turn the call over to Jaime Sue Morris, Roblox's Head of Investor Relations. Jaime?
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us to discuss our Q2 2026 results. With me today is Roblox's Co-Founder and CEO, David Baszucki, and our Chief Financial Officer, Naveen K. Chopra. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our commentary today may include forward-looking statements which are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. A description of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions is included in our filings, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We disclaim any obligation to update these statements except as required by law. During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics can be found in our shareholder letter and supplemental materials, which are available on our Investor Relations website. With that, I will turn the call over to David.
Thank you. Afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Today, I will start with a few remarks about the quarter, and then I will turn it over to Naveen to discuss results and guidance. I will conclude with some important updates about how we plan to achieve our long-term goals. We remain steadfast in our goal to capture 10% of the global gaming market and an even greater share of the US market. Against the backdrop of the incredible growth we delivered last year, in Q2 we delivered healthy year-over-year growth in users, hours, and cash flow. While bookings growth fell within our guidance range, it was below our internal goal, which we will discuss in detail on today's call. Before I hand it over to Naveen, I want to give some updates on the business. First, let's talk about safety. Earlier this year, we made the decision to AgeCheck everyone on our platform and to limit chat only to those users who have AgeChecked.
We made significant progress this quarter. As a result, AgeCheck penetration has increased to 57% globally. In the first countries where we rolled it out, Australia is approaching 80%, and the US and UK are at 70%. Within the 18+ segments, we are making enormous progress with the US 18+ at 75%. In addition to our filters and industry-leading safety, we do not allow image sharing in chat. In conjunction with AgeCheck, we implemented age-banded communication. We have also introduced new comms products. We will share a bit more about that. On the content side, in June we successfully rolled out age-based Kids and Select accounts. We believe accurate age data amplifies our conviction in the long-term growth potential for the platform. On the Discovery side, in the last few months we shared with our community our strategic decision to focus our discovery algorithms directly on measured long-term retention.
We have seen this impact monetization, primarily in the US 13+ cohort, and this has been exemplified by a lower frequency of impressions with games that emphasize short-term monetization rather than long-term retention. It is still early, but our data shows a positive lift in quality, stickier engagement games. We believe the benefits of higher retention outweigh the near-term impacts we are seeing as improved retention and engagement compound into future growth. I am going to now turn it over to Naveen to address some specifics, then I will be back to talk about our future plans.
Thanks, David. I am going to share a few details about the quarter and then also discuss updates to our outlook. For the quarter, revenue grew 36% to $1.5 billion and bookings grew 8% to $1.6 billion. As David mentioned, this was at the low end of our guidance and we will discuss more about that in a moment. We finished the quarter with 123 million DAUs, up 10% year-over-year, and hours grew 5% to 29 billion. In addition to building on the existing scale we have in the United States, we continue to see strong year-over-year growth in many international markets. For example, DAUs in Japan grew 67%, and DAUs in India grew 64%. Similarly, hours growth in Japan and India was 60% and 160%, respectively. We also saw users in Russia come back online as we were unblocked there late in the quarter. On the bottom line, operating cash flow was up 60% year-over-year to $318 million and free cash flow of $294 million was up 66% year-over-year.
From a content perspective, our platform is getting more diverse while maintaining a steady velocity of new content. Case in point: three years ago our top 10 games accounted for about 30% of all the hours engaged on Roblox. Today, top 10 games account for approximately 20% of hours. In terms of user metrics, new user sign-up activity improved throughout the quarter, benefiting from seasonality and the reinstatement of Roblox in Russia. Retention of existing users remained stable, and engagement hours were in line with our expectations. Monetization, however, as measured in bookings per hour, was below our forecast, particularly with under-13 cohorts, and was the primary factor impacting our bookings performance. We attribute the unforeseen monetization shortfall to a greater-than-expected shift of engagement from high-monetizing vintage viral games to a combination of new and evergreen experiences with lower hourly monetization.
This underlying mix shift was compounded by changes in our recommendation algorithm, which optimizes for long-term retention and is therefore providing more impressions to highly retentive games at the expense of near-term monetization. In Q2, the bookings impact of this trade-off on younger users was greater than we had anticipated. Although these discovery changes add to the variability of our business, our testing suggests that the long-term benefit to retention will more than offset the short-term monetization hit, particularly as we continue to improve the algorithms by doing things like using AgeCheck data to better target recommendations by region and age cohort, which over time should help mitigate the monetization headwind we saw in Q2. Another, albeit less significant, factor in the monetization shortfall was the impact of our decision to disable the sale of cross-experience game passes.
Looking ahead to Q3, we expect sequential DAU trends to benefit from seasonality, the unblocking of Roblox in Russia, and our discovery changes. But monetization weakness is likely to continue, and as a result we forecast Q3 bookings to be between $1.58 billion and $1.65 billion which, given the tough comparisons, translates to a year-over-year decline of 14% to 18%. From a margin perspective, the reduction in bookings will result in fixed-cost deleveraging. Additionally, investments in AI-powered initiatives like Build, Reality, and Moments are expected to result in higher infrastructure costs. For Q4, increasing variability and continued updates to our platform lead to a wide range of potential outcomes, and therefore we are not providing revised full-year guidance at this time. While our expectations for the remainder of the year have changed significantly, we have conviction that we are making the right trade-off to continue our role as an industry disruptor.
Investments in AI, content diversification, long-term retention, and safety, though creating near-term friction, position us to maximize our share of the global gaming market. With that, I will pass it back to David to talk about some of our future plans.
Thanks, Naveen. Since we started the company, we have been on a mission to support play around the world, and we believe the world needs more play. We can all see it right now given, in light of everything going on in the world. This fundamental need is part of what gives us conviction in Roblox's ability to deliver long-term growth in excess of 20%. We set our goal of expanding play everywhere with a target of 10% of global gaming running on Roblox, and in the US we have shared that our goal is to go well beyond 10%. Today, we estimate that 20% of US under-18 gaming revenue flows through Roblox. We have done this through the power of our platform and the creativity and diversity of user-generated content, and in this cohort we validated the power of our ability to unify discovery, economy, tools, engine, safety, and cloud infrastructure. While we did experience softness in our younger users' monetization this quarter, we believe our monetization system is fundamentally strong, and will compound over time with additional levers, including subscription and advertising revenues.
We have established, unlike really any other company at our scale, a commitment to setting the global standard for safe digital engagement, particularly with younger users. Long term, we believe this is a tremendous benefit to have such strength among younger cohorts, and this will contribute to fuel long-term growth. The 18-and-over market is 80% of the $200 billion global gaming market, and we believe we are uniquely poised to expand play in this 18-and-over market in the same way we have for under-18. Today in the US, our 18-and-up cohort represents nearly one-third of our now AgeChecked daily active users, and our US 18-to-34 cohort DAUs and hours are growing at approximately 40% year-over-year. Our 13-and-up cohorts around the world continue to show strong growth. In addition to our viral growth worldwide in 18-and-up, we have the opportunity to power 18-and-up growth with increasing paid acquisition as we continue to improve product-market fit.
Besides safety, the majority of our product and technical investments that support growth in 18-and-up also benefit younger audiences. We have recently launched three initiatives that will support our continued growth in the 18-and-up market segment. First, as we shared, we are removing self-imposed limits on the types of games we support on Roblox. Second, we have redefined our app to align with physical play, including discovery. Third, we are reconnecting with our core promise that anyone can be a builder. First off, we want all types of gaming on Roblox. We are not that far away from having the technology in place to support the vast majority of games that people play online. On one end of the spectrum, we believe players are looking for multiplayer experiences that will ultimately mirror physical reality. Even since our start, we have had the goal of photorealism and unlimited multiplayer scale, and with our announcement of Reality, we are well on our way to being the first company to bring photorealistic multiplayer to life and to the masses.
We see a future where games will become indistinguishable from movies for certain types of games. We can see this quality today in offline AI video tools. We believe we will soon see this in real time with Roblox Reality. Now gaming is also simultaneously spontaneous and single-player and 2D for many people. Up until today, we have been focused on 3D and we have held back on initiatives to support high-performance 2D tooling and gameplay. Going forward, we are doubling down on our support for everything from 2D puzzle games to strategy. With Reality and a focus on 2D performance, we are expanding the bookends of what we believe will be possible on Roblox. This week, we announced a unified vision of our app that includes bringing video discovery and creation front and center to all users. We announced this week we are integrating Moments into our home page for 16+ users, and we have begun testing Moments for 16+ users in Canada, New Zealand, and Singapore.
We are expanding the Moments feed to include short-form influencer video in addition to game captures, and we believe ultimately Moments will be available for all with appropriate and safe educational content for younger players. Ultimately, we will expand Moments with tiles that let users watch creators or view live gameplay in real time so you can see what your friends are playing. Our early tests show substantial gains in Moments user retention, and we are very optimistic about Moments. We will ultimately be moving to full 3D games in the Moments tab; this will become integrated with games created through Build. Together with Build, this means you can watch a game in action and then play it with one tap, creating a unique path from discovery to play for this new wave of content from Build. On the communication side, continuing our dialogue from last quarter, we are committed to leveraging our world-class, industry-leading safety infrastructure to build the highest-quality integrated voice, video, and text communications on the Roblox platform.
We have already shipped Global Chat and Quick Words. Today, a significant portion of our users still utilize off-platform communication tools. Our roadmap is to provide users the option to video chat with friends or stream with their Roblox avatar. Because all comms that originate within Roblox will accompany users as they move between games, they will deliver a safer, richer, more immersive connection than any off-platform alternative. As a first step in Q3, we will be deploying in-experience friend chat, which brings real-time text messaging directly into any Roblox game. Creating a game is much more complicated than writing code. Games are built with code, images, graphics, audio tracks, 3D scenes, avatars, and, of course, enormous creativity. We believe we have a unique opportunity to accelerate game creation based on our integrated and vertical stack. Last week, we announced Build, an extension of our vision that everyone in the world can be a game builder, and we are leveraging our internally developed generative AI models to create a conversational interface so anyone who can imagine something can describe it and shape it with others and ultimately bring it to a playable experience in minutes.
For creators already building with us, we believe this will be about practical leverage, helping them build fast and reach the right audience more effectively. Build will be fully integrated with Roblox Studio, and the AI powering Build will allow users to start an experience in Build and ultimately finish it in Roblox Studio. We are already live in New Zealand with Build. I just want to highlight we are seeing a large number of creations flowing through the system already—literally people fulfilling our vision of 'you make the game.' Just as coding is not just the model, with Build we believe it is the integration of models, harness tools, and skills. Ultimately, our vision is many models unified in one harness using our cloud back end and infrastructure to come full circle. The other cool thing about Build is it really integrates with removing the bookends. Many people using Build will want to build 2D experiences or 3D, and Build will leverage our back end to support everything in between.
Given our discovery focus on long-term retention, we are comfortable that we can appropriately surface high-quality creations with Build even as creation volume increases. We are navigating a period of normalization following a year of massive growth. We have tremendous scale and engagement, which presents a unique opportunity to amplify our long-term potential. To capitalize on this momentum, we are doubling down on our vision that the world needs more play, and we are bringing to life the original vision of our company: 'you make the game.' By expanding our global audience, broadening our content offering, and deepening engagement for our users and creators, I have never been more excited about our mission and more confident in the road ahead. With that, we will pass back to the operator for questions.
分析師問答
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. We ask that you limit your initial question to one. Our first question will come from the line of Matthew Andrew Cost with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks very much for taking the questions. I guess you have done a really helpful job on this call laying out the long-term vision of what you are trying to build with algorithm changes and the Kids and Select accounts. You have done a great job of explaining what that meant to get to over the long term. I guess between here and there, what are you watching, and what should investors be watching to help us determine when the engagement headwinds from those changes have peaked? And then connected to that, when we think about the expectation of user growth sequentially in the third quarter, is that just a function of seasonality, or are there any improvements in the trajectory as you have exited the second quarter? Thank you.
Did you want me to go first, or do you want to go first? You can go first, and I will catch the last couple parts of that question.
Yeah. Hey, Matt.
Great question. I think a couple things to watch. In our under-18 segment, we have laid out on this call where we are going, and that includes, we believe, finally fulfilling that original vision of 'you make the game.' Not every user can figure out how to use Studio or make a game. What we see already in New Zealand is more people per day on Build than on Studio. We do think, ultimately, AI creation of gaming is going to be something that sits side by side with playing games. So I think watch for frequency in under-18. We also expect to be fairly generous in the amount of AI or tokens in the Build process. For those users that are using Build all day long, we will, within our Roblox Plus subscription, add the ability to increase what will be called token somewhere else; we will have our own name for it. So watch our subscription. For 18 as well. Then I would say also as we roll out the continued comms platform, watch for that. For 18+, we are laser focused on a couple cohorts in terms of the growth rate in those cohorts. We are laser focused on the type of content being created by our creator ecosystem that we believe will be more and more retentive in those cohorts. So I would watch the growth rates in over-18. I shared a bit of what they are today because those point to 80% of the market that we believe we can do the same thing in as we have done under-18.
And then just to address a couple of the things you asked about, Matt. In terms of the near-term friction and DAU trends, I want to clarify that near-term engagement friction is not what we are seeing. We are actually pretty happy with the engagement trends that we have seen. I talked about some of the health that we have seen in sign-ups, retention, etc. So engagement looks good. The weakness that was inconsistent with what we expected when we put our original plans together for the quarter was really around monetization, and that is going to continue as we evolve discovery and recommendations. The DAU trends themselves: seasonality is definitely a big factor there. We are going to get a full-quarter benefit from having Russia back online. Those are probably the two big ones I would highlight with respect to DAU trends.
Our next question will come from the line of Kenneth Gawrelski with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Two questions, if I may, please. Could you first touch upon the updates to the Discovery engine? You did a good job of explaining that in the letter, but maybe if you could talk about when you expect to see some of these longer-term retention benefits filtering into both engagement gains and also potentially monetization gains. Just if you could walk us through the timeline and your expectations. And second, Naveen, could you talk about as we are going through this transition and push for over-18 and new content, are there any changes you might expect in the cost structure—either from a DevEx standpoint or from a tech/platform standpoint? How might the financial profile of the business look in success 12 to 24 months out relative to the prior 12 to 18 months? Thank you.
I will start with the discovery algorithms. As we continue to refine discovery, what any discovery algorithm is really trying to do is connect users with experiences that both drive long-term enterprise value and simultaneously give signals to creators of what types of experiences are rewarded with discovery. It is a complicated process. It involves both feedback to creators as well as feedback to users. As we have implemented and improved our algorithms over the last few months, there has been resounding support in the feeling that moving more toward evergreen-type games—games that keep players around for the long term—is the right direction, the opposite of what might be called clickbaity or cash-grabby mechanics. We want to be as far in the evergreen segment as we can. We made the decision, as we started going down this next-generation approach, to measure signals over a longer time frame.
We made the decision to use that feedback loop to update the algorithm even as we are running additional tests. We have really churned our discovery system from something that is baked in to something that is constantly self-improving and self-estimating our best guess of what user-game pairs will drive the best long-term retention. We are balancing that more and more with what we think is the optimal mix of long-term retention and long-term monetization. In our experiments, as Naveen said, we can see shorter-term reductions in monetization, but then crossover points and longer-term improvements. We are not going to share exactly what the crossover point is, but this is the reason we implemented and have gone with this—a system that directly measures retention rather than overly projecting from short-term signals. One other thing: we introduced Build and expect the volume of creations to grow much higher on Roblox.
We believe this algorithm is resilient to both finding great new Build games that will be playable by all and simultaneously not flooding users with low-quality AI-generated games that are not as long-term retentive.
And then, Kenneth, with respect to your question on the cost structure, a couple important things to highlight here.
So on cost structure, a couple of points. First, our view of the long-term margin potential of the business really has not changed. The kinds of things that are going to drive margin expansion over time are still in place: continued bookings growth generates fixed-cost leverage, we continue to expect mix to lower-cost platforms that will help COGS, and DevEx increases are something we intend to pursue but those ultimately are a function of realizing fixed-cost leverage in other parts of the business. In the near to medium term, the investments we are making in a lot of AI-powered product enhancements are expected to result in some elevated infrastructure expense. Unlike our historical input expense, this is more of a fixed cost—historically infrastructure investments were a function of hours and users on our platform; these infrastructure costs are being driven more by model training. We are moving aggressively in that direction. Over time, given the more fixed-cost nature of that, as bookings grow we expect to see leverage on those infrastructure costs as well. But as you saw from the Q3 guidance, there will be some pressure in the short to medium term as a result of the incremental cloud GPU capacity that we need.
Our next question will come from the line of Eric James Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thanks so much for taking the question. I appreciate all the comments about the progress you are making towards being 10% of the gaming market or maybe even more in North America. How do you think about the competitive landscape continuing to evolve both within gaming but also among younger users, where there are conflicting narratives about being online versus offline and gaming versus non-gaming in terms of time spent? How do you think about continually positioning yourself relative to both the gaming landscape and a broader definition of the competition for time and engagement? Thanks so much.
I really think the broader definition is a bigger thing than Roblox, and it is our vision that the world needs more play. Play is something people do with each other; it involves not just playing, but creating. It involves being with others, communicating with others, being yourself, and watching them. As we have redesigned our app and brought Build and Moments to the home page, it is part of that vision of mirroring the physical world with what is happening in our digital world—supporting play. We think, just like in the real world where play sometimes involves creating the game, AI creation with Build will sit side by side with playing. I am optimistic we will see a volume of creation with Build unlike any volume we have seen with Roblox Studio. At the same time, pro developers and teams making extremely complex properties will utilize all capabilities of Build and Studio. I think what gaming is will change. I think we will enter an era similar to video editing 10 years ago—where tools that were once complex become broadly accessible—and with AI acceleration, everything from 2D puzzle games to complex 3D multiplayer games will be created on mobile and enhanced in Roblox Studio. That will change the whole landscape of what gaming is. Youth play is universal, and we are moving toward the vision where everyone on our platform is a creator and a builder.
Our next question will come from the line of Chris Scholl with UBS. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you. Naveen, we have seen you announce the buyback since the last earnings call. As free cash flow for the business scales in the coming years, can you remind us how you think about capital allocation and how you will prioritize buybacks with organic investment and M&A? And what impact, if any, does stock performance have on your willingness to lean in further on the buyback relative to alternative uses of capital? Thank you.
Sure. Our capital allocation strategy is clear: first and foremost, we ensure we have the ability to aggressively invest in organic growth—R&D, people, tokens, infrastructure, and so forth. We try to be diligent and efficient with those investments, but we also keep a lot of dry powder to be nimble with respect to organic investment. That said, when we look at our balance sheet and free cash flow trends, we have substantial firepower to do both: organic investment and support a buyback and potentially M&A. Our M&A historically has focused on acquiring technical talent, and we have ample ability to continue doing that, and potentially larger strategic opportunities if they arise. Regarding stock price performance affecting the buyback, two comments: one, the way we structured our buyback—to largely offset dilution from employee equity grants—results in us effectively buying more stock when the stock price goes down and less when it goes up, so there is a natural adjustment built in. We do have the ability to accelerate or supplement that, and we will continue to evaluate those options.
Our next question will come from the line of Omar Dessouky with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you. You explained clearly why you gave your third quarter guide, but could you give us perhaps some guardrails around the fourth quarter and full year given that you are not guiding the full year anymore? Is 2026 still a growth year? Would you be comfortable telling investors that 2026 bookings will be higher than 2025 bookings in total? When we think about the factors that caused you to give your third quarter guide, how is the fourth quarter—how are those factors going to improve or trend in the fourth quarter? What is getting better in the fourth quarter versus the third quarter? Just to help put some guardrails around what the fourth quarter could look like.
I will take that, Omar. We are not going to provide guidance for the fourth quarter right now because of all of the moving pieces we articulated in our letter and on the call. We feel good about where things are trending in the long term, but we are navigating both normalization from last year and a number of platform changes across discovery, safety, and the launch of new products like Build and Moments. Many of those initiatives are in early days and there is no model that says exactly what they will do over the next three to six months. We want to move as quickly as we can on all those initiatives, and you should assume that the things we do in Q3 and Q4 will be consistent with our long-term objectives, but we cannot give any more specific guidance than what I have shared today.
Our next question will come from the line of Clark Lampen with BTIG. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. Maybe Naveen, first: in the shareholder letter you mentioned being comfortable based on internal testing that longer retention would overcome a reduction in hourly monetization. Could you elaborate on what you had seen when you ran those comparisons? Second, on Morpheus, could you help us think about either the magnitude of the financial commitment or potentially help size the EPS headwind we might see this year? Thanks very much.
On the first question, David talked about this a bit too, but to put a finer point on it: we have been running many experiments and evolving the algorithms. When we AB test the new discovery algorithm versus an older one, we see a relatively quick change in user retention, which has a compounding effect because more users feed the Roblox flywheel and it also shows up relatively quickly in incremental hours of engagement. However, there is a pretty immediate hit to dollars per hour—the monetization metric we look at. We believe, based on the curves we have seen with a few weeks of data for each experiment, that those lines cross: the benefit of incremental retention will more than outweigh the short-term hit to bookings. We are not going to put a specific timeline on that because we are continuing to evolve those algorithms, and our focus is on finding ways to improve the algorithm such that we can reduce the near-term bookings impact while retaining the retention benefit. There are promising efforts underway, but it is too early to quantify the impact precisely.
And to add, the longer we look at signals and directly measure them, the more we pick up not just early revenue but longer revenue in conjunction with retention. We are trying to optimize a blend of long-term retention and long-term monetization that is directly measured as opposed to over-extrapolating from short-term monetization signals.
And then, Clark, with respect to the second part of your question on the magnitude of the investments and the headwinds that they create, I think you asked about Morpheus, which is one small part of many different AI initiatives we have going on. I will hand it back to Naveen to provide a broader perspective.
I will answer the question from a bigger-picture perspective. The simplest way to think about it is if you look at our margin guidance for Q3 and the margin compression relative to the year-ago period, about half of that is fixed-cost deleveraging from the bookings reduction, and the other half is related to investments in AI. Those investments power features like Build and Moments, improvements in safety, and training models for things like Roblox Reality, all of which require incremental investment.
I want to highlight the significance of what we are working towards with Morpheus. Our goal is to provide photorealistic multiplayer gaming which does not exist in the world today. On one end, offline video models are approaching a 4K movie; on the other end, 3D gaming technology is getting better but is not yet photorealistic. We believe a hybrid approach—3D synchronization in the cloud with end-user super upsampling to achieve photorealism—is the ultimate way to do this. The cost of infrastructure here will initially be offset by subscription. Games will run both in regular Roblox mode and in a super-upsampled Morpheus video-photoreality mode. We initially expect to charge a subscription to access that.
Our next question will come from the line of Clay Griffin with MoffettNathanson. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. David, I'm curious how you see the 2D content you are enabling with today's announcements fitting into the platform. Typically, mobile is more of a single-player experience. Do you envision 2D mobile content being an acquisition funnel for players outside the platform today, or is there demand for that type of content on the platform now? How do you think about what might make 2D content on Roblox differentiated from the typical 2D mobile experience today?
When we return to the original vision of 'you make the game,' there is a strong conjunction between what we are doing with Build and removing the bookends of the content we support. When we put Build in front of people, they do not constrain themselves to one format; they imagine a range of experiences. There is a great intersection in supporting everything people want to build with Build. Many people do not differentiate between a 2D single-player game, a 2D multiplayer game, a 2.5D orthographic game, or a 3D multiplayer game—they think of play. As we target older cohorts, some have a strong appetite for 2D. We believe huge advantages arise when an experience built on Roblox runs in multiple languages, runs around the world, is socially enabled, is backed by our economy and infrastructure, and can intermingle with other experiences. We see 2D as part of offering a wide range of gaming on the platform, and it integrates with Build. We will not limit what people can build when they imagine creating a game and sharing it with their friends.
Next question comes from the line of Andrew Marroque with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe one: can you talk a bit about the differences in monetization patterns between under-13 players and other cohorts that may have driven an outsized impact this quarter? Was it specifically related to the viral hits from last year or are younger users more volatile in their monetization patterns generally?
I think it is more the former. If you look at the percentage of hours consumed on the platform last year that came from very large, high-monetizing viral hits, it was very concentrated, and those games tended to appeal to younger users. When we see a mix shift with those games getting replaced by games with more normal levels of monetization, that shows up most significantly with younger users. I do not think there is anything structural changing about younger-user behavior; it is really that the games that are popular at this time do not have the elevated monetization levels we saw last year.
Our final question will come from the line of Aaron Lee with Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just to touch on incubator and the 18-plus initiatives: it seems like that is progressing nicely. What have you learned through this process so far, and how might that inform how the program evolves going forward or other initiatives in the pipeline to drive the business forward?
We have a lot of content coming not just from incubators but from studio partners and our existing community. As a UGC platform, the power of that content is huge, but we also see the ability to be intimate with top creators on our platform and guide them to what performs well. We have focused on the tech we introduced with incubators: much higher-performance avatars, higher-performance worlds that run well on low-end Android as well as high-end PC. We introduced a compositing technology called Slim that allows complicated avatars to run at high performance on phones. Working with partners is a huge technical opportunity for them to build games for us. They are also working on our DevEx premium—50% for games consumed by 18-plus. It is not just the incubator; it is our corporate studios and existing developer community, and we are seeing great quality coming out of them.
That concludes the question-and-answer session, and I will hand the call back over to David Baszucki for closing comments.
Once again, thank you for all the great questions. It really is an exciting time for us as we move towards fulfilling the original vision we had when we started the company: 'you make the game.' Roblox is helping to support more play everywhere around the world. Thank you again for your questions and attention.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.