Highlights
- Roblox fueled 67% of global gaming growth, capturing 4.5% of total consumer spending.
- Monthly playtime hit 10.25 billion hours, surpassing Steam and PlayStation combined.
- Massive mobile hits like Steal a Brainrot drove a peak of 45 million concurrent users.
We all know Roblox is incredibly popular, but the sheer scale of its grip on the world's attention has officially reached a level that is difficult to wrap our heads around. According to an early access 2025 industry trends report by analyst Matthew Ball, drawing on data from Newzoo, Ampere, and Circana, Roblox is no longer just competing with other video games. Instead, it was single-handedly responsible for a staggering 67% of all video game industry growth outside of China last year.
While the rest of the gaming market experienced stagnation following its pandemic-era peaks, Roblox continued to soar, capturing an eye-watering 4.5% of total consumer spending across PC, console, and mobile platforms.
To put this into simple terms, players logged roughly 10.25 billion hours of playtime in Roblox every single month throughout 2025. That massive figure combined the monthly engagement of some of the world's biggest gaming ecosystems. By comparison, Steam recorded approximately 5 billion hours, PlayStation clocked in at 4.25 billion, and Fortnite managed around 1 billion.
This exponential surge pushed Roblox's user base past 380 million monthly active users, with daily active users hitting over 150 million a massive 69% jump from 2024.
The engine behind these astronomical numbers isn't traditional high-end gaming, but widespread mobile accessibility and user-created blockbusters that are outperforming legacy studios. The vast majority of Roblox's playtime comes from phones and tablets, with PC and console players accounting for only 2.5 billion hours in the third quarter of 2025; the other 11.5 billion were from mobile users.
Grow A Garden
Roblox's Viral Hits and the Attention Economy
Individual viral hits are reaping the rewards of this massive audience. In 2025, a single Roblox title called Grow a Garden accumulated more average monthly playtime on its own than the combined catalog of Blizzard Entertainment did in 2024. Another runaway hit, Steal a Brainrot, shattered concurrent user records by eclipsing 25 million concurrent players, pushing the entire platform to a peak of 45 million online users at once in August.
Roblox has grown so large that its true competitors are no longer other games, but the titans of the broader attention economy. With its 10 billion monthly hours of use, the platform is rapidly closing the gap with streaming giant Netflix for total hours of use. Crucially, the momentum heavily favors the gaming platform, as reported by PC Gamer.
While Netflix has seen its engagement growth slow to a crawl at around 1% annually, Roblox has consistently posted engagement growth ranging between 25% and 70% each year since 2022. This translates to massive financial influence, with Roblox Corporation reporting $4.9 billion in revenue, up 36% and $6.6 billion in total bookings for the fiscal year, per S&P Global.
However, this unprecedented scale comes alongside a deeply sinister air that the company continues to grapple with. Roblox remains mired in long-standing controversies surrounding child safety, online grooming, labor exploitation, and predatory monetization, triggering a succession of lawsuits, state investigations, and sweeping regulatory actions like an impending swoop by the Australian government.
Despite these dark clouds, the creator economy thrives, minting teenage millionaires and leaving traditional industry executives scrambling to emulate its user-generated success.
But as Ball points out in his report, simply trying to build another Roblox is a flawed strategy. He argues that we must acknowledge there is no singular "videogaming industry," but rather a constellation of very different universes with fundamentally different growth prospects. Right now, Roblox is an industry all its own, and chances are, it won't easily make room for another.
