Ever wonder what the face of world domination might look like? Your imagination might settle on a smirking corporate overlord or a gleeful moustache-twirling villain, but the humble smile of a cartoonish Roblox player model might actually be the true answer.
Okay, I kid. But in all seriousness, the free-to-play gaming platform where users can play countless games or make their own has rocketed its way to the top of the gaming industry, and while I've always been aware of its immense success, its latest numbers have nevertheless left me stunned and in disbelief, eyes wide and mouth agape.
They come from the well-respected industry advisor and analyst Matthew Ball, and his new "The State of Video Gaming in 2026" report in particular. In one of its final sections, he details just how rapidly and significantly Roblox has grown in terms of player engagement — and how it's now even nipping at the heels of the world's biggest streaming service.
According to the report, Roblox represented over 4.5% of all non-China consumer spend in 2025, and is also responsible for an astonishing 67% of the game industry's overall growth last year. In previous years, that number was much smaller — 10-20% — meaning that Roblox spiked particularly hard in 2025.
Its average daily active users (DAUs) were already above Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch by the end of 2024, but a year later, it shot up a gargantuan 69%, with three times the DAU gains that the platform got during the first year of the pandemic. Nice (for Roblox Corporation, anyway).
But Roblox's monthly hours of engagement stats are even more jaw-dropping. In Q3 of 2025 alone — July, August, and September — the game reached over 13 billion playtime hours, surpassing its player engagement for the entirety of 2020.
The biggest revelation, though, is that Roblox's quarterly engagement matches that of Valve's PC gaming platform Steam, Sony's PlayStation consoles, and Epic Games' popular free-to-play title Fortnite combined. On average, monthly engagement last year was a little over 10 billion hours; Steam's was about half of that at over 5 billion, with PlayStation coming in at 4.25 billion and Fortnite shy of 1 billion.
Those numbers are even starting to challenge Netflix, which averaged between 15 and 16 billion hours of monthly engagement in 2025. Last year, Roblox achieved 65% of Netflix's engagement (82% in Q3) — and with Netflix reporting relatively stagnant growth of about 1% a year while Roblox continues flying high, it's not hard to imagine the latter closing the gap.
In Q3 2025, only 2.5 billion monthly engagement hours came from console or PC versions of Roblox; the other 11.5 billion were from mobile users, which is a stark reminder for people like me focused on "traditional" gaming platforms that the mobile gaming market dwarfs them by comparison.
This is precisely why we've seen companies like Microsoft's Xbox develop mobile gaming stores of their own, or begin to expand into that market in other ways. But one thing is clear: Roblox is the biggest player in the space, and it's showing absolutely no signs of slowing down.
How do you feel about Roblox?
How do you feel about Roblox, and how it's grown extremely large in the last several years? Have you played it yourself? Let me know in the comments.
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