Roblox ate the industry’s attention in 2025 — and the numbers are staggering

Roblox’s scale just rewrote the industry’s playbook – here’s what actually changed

This caught my attention because the figures aren’t just big – they bend how we measure the entire games business. In Matthew Ball’s early-access 2025 report (covered by PC Gamer), Roblox accounted for 67% of global games-industry growth outside China, drew more than 150 million daily active users, and logged over 10 billion hours of play each month. For context: that’s more monthly engagement than Steam, PlayStation and Fortnite combined. Those are not incremental wins; they’re structural shifts.

• Platform-scale engagement: 150M DAU and +69% year-over-year growth into 2025.
• Time spent: 10 billion hours per month – surpassing major console and PC ecosystems.
• Economic impact: Roblox drove 67% of non-China industry growth and held >4.5% share of consumer spending across PC, console and mobile in 2025.
• UGC outsized returns: Individual Roblox experiences (e.g., Grow a Garden) outperformed entire publisher catalogs by monthly engagement.

Breaking down the numbers

Ball’s report pulls from industry trackers like Ampere, Newzoo and Circana and paints a clear picture: while the broader games market outside China largely stagnated after the pandemic bump, Roblox kept accelerating. Its consumer spending share exceeded 4.5% across platforms and its user base jumped 69% versus 2024. Monthly hours — the metric that actually measures attention — hit 10 billion. Ball even notes Roblox is “starting to challenge Netflix for total hours of use,” a striking comparison that underscores how games platforms now compete in the same attention economy as streaming giants.

Why this matters — and why it should make folks uneasy

When one platform accounts for two-thirds of an industry’s growth, that isn’t just market success — it’s market reshaping. Economically, Roblox is a giant funnel: creators, microtransactions, and discoverability mechanics concentrate money and time in ways traditional publishers rarely achieve. That has real benefits for creators who strike gold on the platform, but it also amplifies longstanding problems: child safety concerns, complaints over creator pay and labor classification, and accusations of predatory monetization that have already drawn lawsuits and regulatory attention.

Can other companies become “a Roblox”?

Ball’s blunt takeaway cuts through the copycats: “To find growth, we have to acknowledge: There is no ‘videogaming industry.’ There are many.” Translation: you can’t just slap a UGC layer onto an existing studio pipeline and expect the same network effects. Roblox grew as a social, discovery-driven, creator-first economy over many years. Replicating that requires a product-market fit between creators, users and monetization mechanics—not simply a corporate imperative to chase engagement metrics.

That said, expect more attempts. Publishers will trial creator tools, live-service hooks and discovery algorithms, and platform holders will study Roblox’s user funnels. But Ball is right: different segments of “games” operate on fundamentally different dynamics. Success in premium AAA cycles or single-player storytelling doesn’t map cleanly onto a thousand-person developer economy running inside one giant sandbox.

The gamer’s perspective

For players this has mixed implications. On one hand, Roblox’s scale means more low-barrier creativity, social hangouts and surprise hits — the pipeline for viral, bite-sized experiences is unbeatable. On the other, attention concentration risks homogenized discovery (the same hits sucking up more eyeballs), monetization tactics designed to maximize time-on-platform, and fewer incentives for high-budget one-off experiences in parts of the market where Roblox dominates engagement.

Looking ahead

Roblox in 2025 looks less like a single successful platform and more like its own sub-industry within gaming: massive engagement, real economic heft, and regulatory and ethical questions that won’t disappear. For companies and creators, Ball’s report is a warning and a playbook: study the mechanics that made Roblox sticky, but don’t assume you can transplant them wholesale. For players, the big change is simple — your attention is now a commodity this platform is exceptionally good at capturing.

TL;DR — Roblox didn’t just grow in 2025. It re-centered where and how the industry measures success: hours, daily reach, and creator-driven economies. That dominance brings opportunity, wealth concentration, and a stack of policy and ethical questions that will define gaming’s next chapter.