Earnings Call Transcript - RBLX Q2 2022

Operator, Operator

Good morning. My name is Dennis, and I will be the conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Roblox Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been muted to prevent any background noise. After the speaker’s remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stefanie Notaney, Director of Financial Communications. Please go ahead.

Stefanie Notaney, Director of Financial Communications

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q&A session to discuss Roblox's Q2 2022 results. With me today is Roblox's CEO, Dave Baszucki, and CFO, Mike Guthrie. Before we start, I want to remind everyone that yesterday after market close, we published a shareholder letter and earnings results on our Investor Relations website at ir.roblox.com. On this call, we will make some brief opening remarks and reserve the rest of the time for your questions. For our webcast participants, please note the question icon at the bottom of your screen, where you can type in your questions. We'll do our best to take as many questions as possible in the time we have allotted today. On today's call, we may be making forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, our expectations of our business future financial results and business and financial strategy. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements, and such risks are described in our risk included in our SEC filings, including our Form 10-K filed for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for our reported results can be found in our press release issued yesterday as well as in our supplemental slides, copies of which can be found on our Investor Relations website. This call is being webcast, and it will be archived on our website shortly afterwards. With that, I'll turn it over to Dave.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Thank you, and welcome to our investors, and welcome Roblox community. I'll share a few quick highlights and then we'll take questions. We had a solid Q2 and then we followed this up with July, which was absolutely the biggest engagement month in Roblox's history, including all peak COVID times. The month of July was a peak across regions and across demographics. I want to share a few highlights. In July, our DAUs were 58.5 million, up 26% year-on-year. And our hours of engagement were 4.7 billion hours across the whole platform, up 25% year-on-year. I want to highlight that this year-on-year growth and this peak engagement also included our core US Canada market with DAUs up 15% year-on-year and hours up 23% and bookings up 14% year-on-year in July. We continue to see accelerating growth in our over 13 DAUs, which were up 36% year-on-year globally, and as greater than 13 users on the platform become more prevalent this is a good harbinger of the potential size of this market and why we continue to be so optimistic. And then finally, we exited June with bookings up 8% year-on-year and July bookings, up roughly 8% to 10% year-on-year. This is powered by amazing content and our amazing community and continued innovation on the technology side. On the content side, we are approaching 50% of our top 1,000 experiences with more over 13 than under 13 players and our developer community with our developers producing experiences that gained over 1 million hours per month is up 32% year-on-year. We continue to see great brand experiences side-by-side with the amazing Roblox experiences that have traditionally been on our platform. And more and more of these are self-served. I'll highlight some of the brands we shared with this last quarter, including Gucci Town, which had over 30 million visits since March. We saw Tommy Play from Tommy Hilfiger with over 7 million visits since June, Wimbledon released WimbleWorld, and Spotify Island was released, which is a persistent space with artist appearances. I want to highlight that we are getting to the point where our 17 through 24 cohort is going to pass our 9 through 12 cohort in size. Now, the 17 to 24 cohort is larger. But once again, this is a great signal of the potential size of our market across all ages. This growth, in addition to being powered by our amazing content developers and our amazing viral community is supported by our innovative tech, some of which is iterative and measurable, including improvements to Roblox's translation system, including the quality and personalization of our search and discovery system, and even including things that might not be readily noticeable, such as the speed that our mobile app experiences occur in raw performance. On the vision side, our layered clothing system is just a first step to very highly personalized avatars across the platform. Our voice system is rolling out and is a great sign of really the future of how people will communicate on platforms like Roblox. And our physically-based material system is widely acclaimed by our developers as the next step in taking Roblox to a more realistic look and feel. Finally, I want to highlight that we continue to work on innovative, immersive native monetization systems, and we do expect to be rolling out a test of our immersive advertising system sometime later this year. You'll notice in our announcement, we are making investments in infrastructure. We are building a worldwide cost performance and reliability-leading infrastructure including active performance around the world. And I want to highlight that infrastructure performance contributes to our growth with an example of the recent data center we deployed in India. Finally, we continue to hire at the same rate we did in H1 and are optimistic about continuing to bring great talent into the company. With that, we will move on to your questions. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. And we'll first go to Drew Crum from Stifel. Please go ahead.

Drew Crum, Analyst

Okay. Thanks. Hey, guys, good morning. So, Dave, in your shareholder letter and in your preamble, you noted your fastest growth demographic in the US and Canada was that 17- to 24-year-old segment. Can you remind us how this cohort monetizes relative to others on the Roblox platform? And then I have a follow-up.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Hey, Drew, it's Mike. Just getting into the numbers. In the month of July, that 17- to 24-year-old cohort in the US, and we measured this on a bookings per hour basis, was actually just slightly ahead of our core 9 to 12 demographic, which historically has been our peak monetizing age demographic. Now we've expected that. Over time, we also saw that older users who have more direct control over their spend become more prominent in the market, and we certainly saw that in July.

Drew Crum, Analyst

Got it. Thanks, Mike. And then, Dave, maybe a more broad question. During this current earnings cycle, several video game publishers have cited weaker trends across mobile gaming with Roblox being a free-to-play model, what are your thoughts on how the business should perform during a period of economic weakness? Thanks.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yeah. I want to highlight one of the wonderful things about Roblox is we're not a game and we're not really even a game platform, we're a future human experience platform. And a lot of what people do on Roblox is to come together, to be together, to connect, to socialize. We're starting to see people supporting educational experiences. We have traditionally been neutral, i.e., immune to these types of economic cycles. We have a robust economy. We've been through these cycles before, and we've been relatively immune to them.

Operator, Operator

We'll move next to David Karnovsky at JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

David Karnovsky, Analyst

Hi. Thanks for the question. I wonder if you could just discuss the ongoing rollout of voice chat, how developers and players are responding to it and how that might be impacting frequency for some of the older cohorts. And then just as a follow-up, you mentioned a test advertising later this year. Just wondering if you could expand on the scope of that and what that potentially implies for rollout or when you might be able to update investors on kind of the longer opportunity there?

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yeah. I want to highlight consistent with our values and the way we run Roblox since the early days, safety and civility is a high priority here. We are rolling voice out. It is partially rolled out now with older players with validated IDs and which we're opening that aperture. We can measure increased engagement from the people using voice. And so we're very optimistic about what's happening there. The vision of immersive advertising has been around for a long time, and this is both performance as well as brand advertising. We are going to be rolling out tests ultimately along both of these lines. And it's the notion that in an immersive 3D space, there's a lot less friction when we see appropriate advertising, just like we would in the real world of billboard ads, for example, which we can scale across all the experiences on Roblox. But we're also optimistic now that we see many brands establishing a presence in Roblox that some of these brands will also want performance marketing, allowing in the appropriate case for people to go to one of our brand partners directly from someone else's 3D experience. So we're really optimistic about this, and we love the idea of, in a gentle way, complementing our already very healthy economy with an additional potential revenue source.

David Karnovsky, Analyst

Thank you.

Operator, Operator

We'll move next to Clark Lampen with BTIG. Please go ahead.

Clark Lampen, Analyst

Thanks a lot. Good morning. I wanted to come back to the sort of success that you're seeing with 17-plus users just because we are seeing a lot of signs of success with aging out, both in terms of aggregate DAUs and engagement. Could you give us more of a sense of how those users are engaging differently versus younger ones? Are they spending time in different experiences or are they monetizing more passively or using different hardware? Any color you could provide would be appreciated. And then Mike, just given you guys made some comments around sort of CapEx trends over the balance of the year. Could you give us a sense for infrastructure investment projects? Is this really a 2022 endeavor, or is this something that we can see sort of stretching into 2023 and beyond? Anything you can say about cash flow and CapEx would be appreciated. Thanks.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yeah, I'll start off on the experiences. I noted that the top 1,000 experiences on our platform, 481 now have more 13 and up players than under 13 players. Our developer community is amazingly responsive. The quality of the content that they're creating is getting better and better, both based on their sophistication, the size of their teams, as well as our tool set and our infrastructure. And we can see more and more experiences in those top thousands that are very heavily targeted to older players. So like any healthy market, given the size of our developer economy, we are seeing developers respond with those experiences. In addition, we have a pipeline of experiences that are very aligned with the types of things older players might want to do coming through our game fund. I want to highlight that across our platform the vision for a platform like this goes way beyond playing games. We know right now, for example, in the midst of COVID, people use Roblox as a communication tool to be together when they can't be together physically. We can see partners like First Robotics now getting ready to launch educational experiences for people who can build Roblox with the physical kits. Ultimately, all of our brand partners, including our music partners, are using Roblox as a way for people to go to concerts together. So the vision of this category is bigger than play. As you correctly note, there's a lot of differences in the use patterns we see across the platform.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

And Clark, CapEx will be spread across the balance of this year and next year. So, we'll certainly be investing in infrastructure across both periods. The timing of spend is something we'll give a rough estimate of what it looked like for the back half of the year, but we'll definitely have incremental spend in 2023. We view this investment as incredibly productive and it is partially driven by just a substantial growth in our user base and a desire to get to more even more economical infrastructure, which means more performance, more reliability, and more efficiency for us.

Clark Lampen, Analyst

Thank you.

Operator, Operator

We'll move next to Matthew Cost at Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Matthew Cost, Analyst

Great. Thanks for taking the question. So, one for Dave, one for Mike. Dave, just there's some language in the letter about key investments and product initiatives that drove a positive impact for July. You touched on it in the prepared remarks, but I wonder if you could just give any more detail about what specific products you think were the most impactful for July? And then for Mike, just wondering how should we think about the pathway for margins from here as you continue to invest in new hires and infrastructure? Thank you.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yes. Our growth is powered by the content created by our community, by the core virality of our product, which is great content, coupled with a viral loop and then with innovative technology, all of the things I measured are early signals. Our layered clothing system is an early signal towards hyper-personalized avatars that more and more might look like you with various styles that are supported by our creator community. This is a first step. On voice, once again, I would highlight, long-term, we see more and more people potentially using voice as we roll this out. There are also under the covers coupled with the visionary type, we're working on constant iterative improvements on raw performance as how quickly can you join a Roblox experience. So we can see our translation system, we can see search and discovery, we can see raw mobile app performance. We could see our game engine performance, all contributing to growth as we go forward. Up and down our product stack, there continues to be big things we’re working on. We'll share some of these at Investor Day, but we have a lot of other visionary things in the pipeline. We've said publicly that this doesn't really stop until we're supporting a 50,000-person concert at photorealism in real-time with simulated audio and video. So there's a huge runway for technical innovation in this space.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Matthew, regarding your question about margins, let me address that first. Historically, before the growth during COVID, our EBITDA margins were consistently in the mid-teens. However, during the pandemic, those margins doubled, reaching around 30%. At that time, we made it clear that these margins were not sustainable, and we recognized a significant opportunity to invest. With our rapidly growing top line, it's challenging to maintain lower margins. We've chosen to invest in initiatives with high returns, such as recruiting top talent and enhancing our developer community's economics, which is paying off, along with continued infrastructure investments. As we have consistently invested and the top line has begun stabilizing after COVID, margins will fluctuate. What remains constant is our commitment to long-term investments, supported by our solid unit economics and liquidity. I anticipate that as we move into 2023, and hopefully move past COVID-related comparisons, we'll see top line growth that enables us to achieve healthy EBITDA margins. However, we will keep investing in infrastructure next year, leading to lower free cash flow margins, though overall operating margins should rebound, putting us in a good position for the future. I also want to mention your note earlier today about elevated stock-based compensation potentially raising concerns about dilution risks from new retention strategies. We've anticipated this and have been attentive to structuring our compensation and recruiting plans while working closely with our Board. We are committed to keeping share dilution under 5%, and we understand the importance of this for shareholders. Therefore, we will continue to attract top talent, fairly compensate our team, and monitor dilution closely, aiming for even better results. I believe there shouldn't be any unnecessary worries or speculation regarding this issue.

Operator, Operator

We'll move next to Omar Dessouky with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Omar Dessouky, Analyst

Hi, guys. Okay. So, can you please give me an update on the level of adoption of layered clothing among your players, number one. And number two, back in March, shortly after its launch, you had showed that the purchases of layered clothing items did not cannibalize purchases of existing 2D and 3D clothing items and that was at the GDC. I wanted to ask you whether that is still the case. And number three, do you have a sense yet for when 3D layered clothing will be coming to the community at large, the creation of 3D layered clothing will be coming to the community at large, and I have a follow-up question after that.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

I'll go highlight and then I'll see if Mike has the numbers floating around on that. Taking a step back and peaking at the vision of where this is going, it's ultimately every avatar, every head, every piece of clothing on our platform is created by the community. Historically, almost all of this was created by Roblox, and we're just about through that transition where everything is made by the community. The final one that you're going to see rolling out is avatars themselves being created as well, and that will bring us full circle and you'll see an amazing new look. So we are very optimistic that this is not viewed as a necessary cannibalization situation as much as where is the future here. And the future is everyone has a hyper-realistic avatar. You can imagine all the ways we might build in avatar creation, including using a camera on a device, using machine learning, using developers themselves; there’s a lot of interesting and exciting ways in the future. We'll build avatars, coupled with clothing that is more and more created by our community. So this is the right direction. It is the big vision. Ultimately, all the clothing on our platform will be 3D clothing. There will still be an opportunity for users to create clothing, but it will be painting on 3D clothing rather than long-term using our traditional 2D clothing. I don't know, Mike, if we are sharing any numbers on the adoption, but ultimately, we expect 100% of users to be using layered clothing.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Yeah. So I would give you a couple of quick numbers and just some trends. I think that's the most important thing, but it's a good question. As of June 30, we had over 100 million users that had actually acquired a layered clothing item. And we've been doing tests to look at the economic output of those users and how they behave. We've clearly seen it being accretive to bookings and robust spend. So we'll give more data as that becomes a bigger and bigger part of the business. But so far, the early indications are high levels of adoption and high performance within the user base that does acquire the items.

Omar Dessouky, Analyst

Thank you. Regarding the recent release of dynamic heads at the end of June, I noticed you mentioned they would be available in the avatar store sometime in the fourth quarter. Can you share more about the monetization plan for dynamic heads? Will there be heads developed by a curated community of creators, or will users be purchasing heads that feature a selection of animated emotions? What will buyers on Roblox actually be purchasing?

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yes. Let's take a big visionary step here. We acquired a company called Lumi over a year ago, and you can check out the types of demos and the technology they create, but it ultimately drives towards the vision that, for those users who choose on our platform, in addition to having their avatars become more personalized and more animated like themselves, they will have the opportunity to actually have the heads and faces of those avatars animate in sync with the use of the camera on your device or lip syncing. We've shared demos of this. I've done meetings this way. It's absolutely immersive and engaging for the future. Dynamic heads are one part of this. The rollout will occur in various steps. One is developer tooling. The next step is very simple things like emojis and really emotes, actually, and the ability to have a pre-canned animation on your head and ultimately full tracking of that. We always think long-term, first, about engagement, retention, and really frequency and making our experiences better. Because our bookings tend to scale with bookings per hour, we expect more engagement to drive better outcomes. We view this as having huge opportunity for dynamic heads in our marketplace. At the same time, I want to highlight that we are primarily thinking about this long-term as increasing engagement. But it's going to be overall positive in both dimensions. I don't know if Mike wants to add anything on top of that?

Mike Guthrie, CFO

No, I think that we'll report more as we have more data and maybe touch on this at Investor Day next month.

Omar Dessouky, Analyst

Got it. Thanks very much.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Thanks, Omar.

Operator, Operator

We'll move next to Bernie McTernan at Needham & Company. Please, go ahead.

Bernie McTernan, Analyst

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe just to start, if you could talk about the product improvements to search and discovery. You spoke about this in the last call, and I think it helped with some of the age of content this quarter. If you could just detail when the improvements happened during the quarter and if there's still more improvements to come, just looking for the full-quarter benefits in the third quarter.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yes. I want to highlight that one of our vision values is to take a long view, but one of our values is to get stuff done. These improvements are happening every day. They are not forklift drops. There are constant weekly improvements in the way we do search and discovery. There are so many opportunities here because as people come to our platform from different regions, ages, and interests, there's an amazing opportunity to personalize the types of experiences they see when they join our platform. We have a lot of signals that you might not find on a traditional platform, including what friends are doing, what people like you do, and what you have done in the past. So this is constantly improving. We are more and more getting personalized. Ultimately, we are trying to share experiences with everyone on the platform that will keep them engaged as much as possible and ultimately drive long-term enterprise value. This is occurring both in cold start and warm start from more mature players on the platform. So, to go full circle on your answer every day, I will add that one of the things we have done in the last quarter, we shared that we were going to do it is more and more move to the efficient frontier where we have historically been 100% engagement based on our discovery and search. We believe there is an efficient frontier where engagement is balanced with monetization to drive the overall health of our platform. And really, when we have two experiences that are both retaining well, and that are both predictive about the same playtime, we are nudging towards that experience that monetizes better in that type of situation, which is what the efficient frontier is above.

Bernie McTernan, Analyst

Understood. Thank you. And then just as a follow-up, in the past, you've spoken about the weekend versus weekday usage, and that gave you confidence in to be able to grow following the tough COVID comp. Can you just talk about what you're seeing for weekday versus weekend usage now that you're at peak engagement again?

Dave Baszucki, CEO

I want to highlight that our long-term growth has so much opportunity; it’s not predicated on weekdays or weekends. Even in our most healthy long-term cohorts, which would be US, Canada in the nine through twelve age range, there's a lot of headroom there given that traditional Roblox users aren't using Roblox every day as a communication tool. So, there's a lot of room on frequency within our traditional audience. As you can see, the growth rates in our thirteen and up and seventeen through twenty-four cohorts; that cohort of seventeen to a hundred is much larger than the cohort of nine through twelve. There is also an amazing headroom among older players on our platform to complement the headroom we have in our traditionally strong cohorts based on frequency.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Yes, just adding to that, when COVID started, our core age demo spiked up very quickly, especially in terms of engagement. As we started to lap and reopen, obviously, especially in the US, that nine to twelve was actually filling our bookings growth numbers down, but we were making up for it in other places. We've now crested back to the point where we are at an absolute level. Those cohorts are now growing worldwide. Importantly, in the US and Canada, because that's where there's a more significant amount of wealth and spend. We are now at peak levels of daily active users and engagement and bookings in those nine to twelve age cohorts in the US and benefiting from growth in seventeen to twenty-four, thirteen to sixteen cohorts as well as all older user bases. So we're in a great position. We're finally now, on an absolute basis, where all that growth that we benefited from during COVID was absorbed. We’ve retained the vast majority of it, and we're now growing on top of that really across all age demographics. That’s true on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays as well. So yeah, I think we're hopefully if we all stay healthy and live our lives more or less done with COVID comparisons here pretty soon.

Bernie McTernan, Analyst

Great. Thank you both.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Thanks.

Operator, Operator

We'll move next to Eric Sheridan at Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Eric Sheridan, Analyst

Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe talk a little bit about what you're building on the advertising side as another means of monetization. And how should we be thinking about to make sure both investments on the advertising side, building relationships with advertisers and what you see as some of the revenue output of that as we look out over the next couple of years? Thanks so much.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yeah. I want to highlight the opportunity on our platform, both for traditional experienced developers who are new developers creating new games and experiences on our platform as well as brands who are establishing presence for people to interact with clothing, people to interact with music, people to interact with beauty, people to interact with a wide range of things and potentially even monetize within those experiences. Traditionally, a lot of these experienced developers and brands have been saying how do I boost more, how do I get more traffic to my experience? How do I reliably bring in one million users to get this experience? And this is the wonderful opportunity for native immersive, non-intrusive advertising in our platform. Imagine we are at one of our most popular Roblox experiences. Imagine a AAA partner had a small pop-up in the town square and players would be able to choose to stop by, use that pop-up or portal, or door, you name it, to jump over to one of our brand experiences, experience something new, pick up some free merchandise, and back, pop back to the experience they are playing. This is a very scalable potential way to incorporate gently, both paid as well as performance and brand advertising. Given that we did 4.7 billion hours of engagement in the month of July, even at a very conservative mean, gently trying this with top-notch brands, you can see the potential there relative to the advertising per hour. I said it before, this has been always a visionary type of advertising. It’s exciting because it doesn't get in the way of a user or add friction like some other types of advertising. We believe it will last in a fun and positive way that complements our experiences.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

And you ended up your question on, are we scaling up the team internally to cover the brands? Is that the last part of your question?

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yeah, I'll take two things, and then Mike, maybe finish. We are building traditionally what has powered Roblox is the notion that at its foundation we built self-service. Self-service is always more difficult to build than bespoke things. Roblox's success is we are a self-service platform for experienced creators. The product direction for this advertising system will also be self-service, but it will be complemented by our amazing brands. We have a great team. It's scaling. We have amazing people who are working with the Gucci and the Tommy Hilfigers in this new form of advertising on the platform. We expect to continue building this amazing brand team. It will not be a sales team; it will be a consultative team to help people who are doing self-service and exploring our platform.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Yes, I'd just add, it is a thing that's been in place for a while. These discussions with brands have been going on for quite a while. We really do see it above and beyond just a sales organization that is very strategic. We've been talking with brands about the overall benefit of immersive engagement on our platform in multiple ways. You've heard us talk about this before. We have had incredibly high-quality brands more or less experimenting on our platform in a new medium, which is really exciting. We've not rushed to monetize these too quickly. I think we've learned the time, and the team has done a great job, and the quality of the brands that we've been working with has just been first-class.

Operator, Operator

We'll move next to Matthew Thornton with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

Matthew Thornton, Analyst

Hey, good morning, David and Mike. This is Steve Parke on for Matt Thornton. Two questions, if I could. Can you talk about how we should think about the incremental monetization efforts and their impact in the second half of 2022? Samples being sponsored or commercial ads and commerce. Also, how should we think about what normal seasonality is for August and September? And any growth comparisons you would call out for the second half of 2022? Thank you.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Hey, Steve, let me take the last question and work in reverse. We noted in the letter that there was Omicron happening in Q4 of last year. So we're just making sure that everybody is aware in doing their own homework as we go into the fourth quarter. Obviously, we've got a lot of momentum from May to June, June to July. We expect that to continue; the normal shape of the curve in terms of the third quarter is what you saw last year, which is that from July to August, specifically, August is flat to slightly down 2%, let's say, off of July; that’s sort of the normal seasonality. That’s really because people start to go back-to-school. Later in the month, you start to see the absolute numbers go down. That doesn't mean the growth rates will go down; it just means the absolute numbers will go down. It ends up being somewhere around 1% to 2%. September is full-blown back-to-school, and on a sequential basis, typically, last year, as an example, we were down 15% in September from August. But that’s totally normal seasonality completely expected. So, I think the shape of the curve this year will be very, very similar. Q4 last year, we had an unusual October. So I just want to make sure everyone goes back and does their homework. We had an outage. We reported a lot of information in October last year. November, things start to pick back up around Thanksgiving, and then December is obviously a huge month with the holidays. I suspect we’re going to see the exact same trends this year because generally, those are business seasonal trends we've seen over the years.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yes. I just want to highlight, we'll be testing our immersive advertising system sometime this year; we believe. Right now, we don’t expect that to contribute to our bookings. I do want to highlight the things I have mentioned that are iterative improvements that we're constantly making, including translation quality, search and discovery quality, and efficient frontier; those types of things may have small incremental improvements, but that's something we're doing all the time.

Operator, Operator

We'll move next to Brandon Ross with LightShed Partners. Please go ahead.

Brandon Ross, Analyst

Thanks. Brandon Ross. Just looking at your DevEx fees, I think this is the first quarter that they actually went down as a percentage of bookings, as far back as we have a window into. Can you talk about what you expect the cadence of DevEx to be over time? And how much pressure you feel as perhaps, Epic rolls out the next version of Fortnite Creative and potentially more significant creator splits. How much pressure do you feel to match or move towards those splits? Then I have a follow-up.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

So our DevEx numbers as a percentage of bookings have been pretty consistently growing over time, as we've suggested for literally years. We wanted to share more and more of the economics with the developer community. I’m looking at the supplemental materials that we posted on our site. If you look at that over the last three years, as a percentage of bookings, numbers have gone from about 15% to 23% in Q1 and 22% last quarter. I wouldn't read much into a 100-basis point movement in a 90-day period. DevEx is a variable cost that is driven with bookings. It goes up as bookings growth on an absolute dollar basis; it could come out a little bit as bookings come down. But generally, we've leaned in pretty heavily to this. The sheer growth in our developer community is phenomenal; all of the sheer amount of creativity and new content is absolutely incredible. The economics for our developers are getting better and better. When you look at the currency earned by the 1,000th developer on the platform, those numbers are growing incredibly robustly. We can just see bigger and bigger communities making a full-time living on the Roblox platform, and we're incredibly excited about that. We have a unique value proposition with our developers. It's not about absolute take rates; it's about the level of service and the quality of that service. We continue to build great relationships with our community, and we'll continue to push more and more towards them over time. We've said that we would be pushing towards 25%, and we're obviously in that zip code right now.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yes, four years ago at the Roblox developer conference, I made a wild conjecture that we'd see a developer studio with more than 100 people. It has actually come through much sooner than we thought it would happen. We're going to continue to see these larger studios go well beyond 100 people in the studio, highlighting the economic support they're getting from creating on our platform, as well as more developers down around 1,000 or even 10,000, who are starting to make money, filling out that super long tail of talent that’s starting to build on our platform.

Brandon Ross, Analyst

Great. And then in your letter, when you mentioned the highest, most engaged and most profitable cohorts that you have, I noticed they were both male cohorts. It got me wondering what the overall split is between male and female on the platform. What would it take for you to bring females up to parity with male engagement?

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yeah, I want to highlight long-term, I don't know the exact ratio at the top of my head right now. I don't think we've ever shared it. Over the years, Roblox has more and more converged to exactly 50-50 on the platform. The reason is these types of platforms support everything from traditional game play to social gameplay to things spanning from sports to fashion to beauty to vehicles; you name it. We're pretty optimistic that long term, the direction continues to be towards 50-50, with a wide range of types of activity on a platform like Roblox. I think that shows in our internal numbers.

Brandon Ross, Analyst

Thanks, Dave.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Thanks.

Operator, Operator

We'll move on to the next question from Eric Handler with MKM Partners. Please go ahead.

Eric Handler, Analyst

Yes. Good morning, and thanks for the question. Two questions. I wonder if we could start with, it seems like there's a lot of announcements in the last month or so of new brands getting involved in Roblox and the metaverse. I'm curious, are there enough developers out there to support all these inquiries from the various brands?

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yes. What I believe we're seeing right now, and we saw this with print a long time ago. We saw this with video more recently, and we're going to see this with immersive 3D going forward. There is a traditional structure of service bureaus, of developers, creators who help either with graphics and video or 3D production. Our talent hub is serving the purpose of bringing these brands together with our creators. They have an active market for people to connect here. Many of the brands that are starting to shop on our platform are doing it unannounced, which means they’re doing it in a self-service way; they are finding developers out there either on their own or through our Talent Hub to help them or they're developing that expertise in-house. We think this highlights the future where our traditional developers have been 100% experienced developers for play or for social, but there's an emerging class of developers who are brand support developers, who will complement those traditional experienced developers.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Yeah, Eric, I think these are just a classic behavior of the market in a sense. It’s a great question. Right now, we would hope almost that there's more demand than there is supply, because that will be a signal to the community that this is a business they can expand into. I was talking to a venture capitalist the other day who has now invested in a Roblox studio, which is again a dynamic that we feel is very healthy. Part of what they said was there's a really interesting balance between their investments and the experiences that they've built in support of brands. That’s the dynamic we want to see. As that demand comes from brands, it will spur on more developers. If we are potentially capacity constrained on developers right now, that's just the market dynamic that will obviously clear itself up over time and that’s a really good signal.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Yes. We can see some of these larger studios hiring new college grads with computer science degrees, bringing them on board and training them in their corporate best practices for using the Roblox platform.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

I wouldn’t be surprised to see agencies offered this as well.

Eric Handler, Analyst

Well, that was going to be my next question. Have you had any discussions with the big ad agencies about maybe even setting up some type of metaverse development studio?

Mike Guthrie, CFO

I can pass that question to Craig Donato. He might discuss it during Investor Day. While I know there have been conversations with agencies, it’s uncertain if that specifically relates to our direction. Let’s save that discussion for next month when we can explore it further.

Eric Handler, Analyst

Thank you very much.

Mike Guthrie, CFO

Thanks.

Operator, Operator

And we have no further questions in the phone queue. I'll turn the call over to Hans Gunawan for web questions.

Operator, Operator

I think we have time for one more question from the web. Dave, this is a question for you from Harco Patterson from So Far So Good Incorporated. Are there any plans to collaborate with educators and local departments of education to integrate actual great appropriate supplemental education tools that may or may not be academically focused and lesson plans throughout the school year?

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Hey, great question. Thank you. The vision for platforms like Roblox goes beyond coding and computer science; it gets into simulation and ultimately allowing people to be together. I'll highlight one example of a partnership that is so appropriate for Roblox and can help so many students around the world. That is our partnership with FIRST Robotics. FIRST Robotics has traditionally been an activity that involves the creation of Roblox and testing them, competition, and it requires hardware, it requires kits for building Roblox. What we are doing with FIRST Robotics is partnering, and they’re creating a simulation that mimics Roblox robot construction and testing and competition virtually on Roblox rather than in the real world. This is a great example of an educational opportunity for many students around the world who may not have had access or opportunity to participate in a FIRST Robotics activity that cannot do it on a platform like Roblox. We're really optimistic about the range of educational opportunity.

Stefanie Notaney, Director of Financial Communications

Well, that's a wrap for us. Thank you all for joining us today.

Dave Baszucki, CEO

Thank you, everyone.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. And that does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.