Roblox Enters Stock Market, Ends the Day Bigger than EA

Roblox is the biggest game you never talk about. While it doesn’t have the star power of, say, Fortnite, or the gamer chops of League of Legends (pft), it’s still one of the biggest games in the world, with millions of players across the United States and a thriving community of players who are, generally, just shy of their teenage years… which is probably why you’ve never talked about it. In any case, in spite of the fact this is a game clearly aimed for kids, now adults have a reason to care, because it just launched its Stock Market debut, becoming a publicly traded company.

Now, that could be a really bad thing long-term: the minute you become a publicly traded company, your priorities immediately (and legally) shift to “maximizing money for your shareholders”, and the way Roblox will do that could very well ruin this game’s child-friendly and gentle business model. But in the meantime, the important news to take away from this is that at the end of the day, the company’s value settled at $69.50 a share. When you put all the shares together, it means Roblox is worth a whopping $38.26 billion, which, for the record, means its one of the largest and most popular video game publishers on the market, with a value that outpaces Ubisoft, Take-Two, CD Projekt, and even EA.

However, it’s uncertain if this momentum will keep up: at present, Roblox isn’t actually making that much money, given the child-friendly and gentle business model I referenced earlier. If Roblox proves unwilling or unable to actually change things up and start making serious money, I imagine that those stock prices will fall in a big hurry, and this whole situation will be made even worse.

But who knows — maybe Reddit can do something about that too.