Roblox Daily Active Users Drop to 123M as Grow a Garden Hype Fades and Quality Push Hurts Spending

Roblox is having a rough 2026. Daily active users have fallen to 123 million after peaking at 152 million last summer, and in-game spending is down sharply — the company's share price has shed 70 percent from its peak, wiping tens of billions off its market value.

Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki and CFO Naveen K. Chopra both addressed investors on the decline. Baszucki struck an optimistic tone, saying early data shows "a positive lift in quality, stickier engagement games" and arguing that better long-term retention will outweigh near-term losses. Chopra was more direct about the damage: bookings per hour came in below forecast, especially among under-13 players, and he attributed the shortfall to engagement shifting away from "high monetizing 2025 vintage viral games" — meaning last summer's breakout hits like Grow a Garden and Steal the Brainrot — toward newer and evergreen experiences that simply make less money per hour. Chopra warned of "tough comparisons" for the rest of 2026, with revenue expected to drop 14–18% in the next quarter. The company declined to give any forecast for Q4 at all.

Roblox has been pushing two simultaneous changes that are both squeezing its numbers. First, it overhauled its recommendation algorithm to stop surfacing games that prioritize short-term monetization over quality and retention — a deliberate move away from the viral slop cycle that drove last summer's spike. Second, it has tightened safety and age-verification requirements around communication features, adding friction to the experience for younger users. Neither of those changes is wrong on its own terms, but together they've landed at exactly the moment when the viral tailwinds from Grow a Garden have died down, with no comparable hit to replace them. Morningstar senior equity analyst Matthew Dolgin put it bluntly: "Roblox had a terrible second quarter across virtually every engagement and payment metric. Everything took a step backwards this quarter, and growth is now in question."

Despite the turbulence, Roblox is pressing forward with new tools rather than reversing course. The company just announced Build, an AI creation feature that lets anyone type a text prompt and generate a basic game directly inside the Roblox mobile app. Whether that opens the door to the next Grow a Garden — or just floods the platform with more low-effort content — is the question Roblox's algorithm overhaul was designed to answer.