Child-friendly gaming firm Roblox files to go public after increased use during pandemic

Roblox, the child-friendly gaming company, is going public after witnessing an increasing use during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Roblox's prospectus, the company now has 31.1 million daily users who have spent an average of 2.6 hours per day in the game this year, reports The Verge. Roblox filed confidentially to go public in mid-October, but its numbers were unreleased until Wednesday when it published its S-1 document.

Roblox is a free-to-play game and developer platform, which means users don't pay to access its service, but there are in-game purchases through a currency called Robux and a subscription service called Roblox Premium. Founded by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004 and released in 2006, the platform hosts user-created games of multiple genres coded in the programming language Lua. 

"We believe these connections will help build empathy by safely immersing people in different perspectives, where they will hear diverse viewpoints," Baszucki said. "And someday, as the metaverse supports a broader range of positive educational and social experiences, we hope this can expand opportunities for all people around the world,'' the report quoted him as saying.

Roblox reported revenue of $588.7 million during the first nine months of 2020, a 68 per cent increase over the same period in 2019. As of August 2020, Roblox has over 164 million monthly active users, with it being played by over half of all children aged under 16 in the US. Roblox's IPO comes alongside a number of other startups that have rushed to go public, lending company Affirm initiated its own public offering and a mere two days after Airbnb's filing. In May, a hacker allegedly bribed an employee at the popular online video game Roblox to gain access to the back-end customer support panel with personal information on over 100 million active monthly