Mar 12, 2021, 09:18am EST | 2,349 views Roblox’s IPO Makes It Worth More Than EA, Take-Two And

Paul Tassi Senior Contributor Games News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet.

Roblox ROBLOX

Roblox, the sleeping giant of the gaming industry, has awoken with a new IPO that has put its current market cap far above more well-known, older rivals. Since going public this week, Roblox has amassed a market cap of $40.6 billion. To put that in context, the current market caps for other industry rivals include:

EA (FIFA, Madden, Battlefield, Apex Legends) – $37.4 billion

Take-Two (Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption ) - $18.9 billion

Ubisoft (Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Rainbow Six) - $8 billion

Square-Enix (Final Fantasy, Avengers, Tomb Raider) - $6.6 billion

CD Projekt Red (, 2077) - $5.7 billion

Major game companies that are worth more right now? That would only be a select few including:

Activision (Call of Duty, Candy Crush) - $72 billion

Nintendo (Mario, Zelda, Animal Crossing) - $66.1 billion

It’s a bit hard to explain Roblox to outsiders, but it represents a sort of creation engine along the lines of Minecraft where users create content that can do effectively…anything. It lets users make and release their own games and content within Roblox that other users can enjoy, and the game has ballooned since its PC release in 2006 to become the $40 billion juggernaut we see today in this IPO. It boasts truly wild stats like 164 million monthly active users, dwarfing most other video games in the industry, and allegedly half of all US kids under 16 play the game. Roblox ROBLOX

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The term “Metaverse” is thrown around a lot in the current gaming landscape, but Roblox certainly has a partial claim to that concept. A game like Fortnite may be busy collecting every licensed IP you’ve ever heard of to assemble them all in one place, but Roblox has been the kind of creation engine that Fortnite is only just starting to be for years, and it has allowed for explosive growth unlike anything else in the industry.

Is a $40 billion market cap overvaluing Roblox? Should a company with a single free to play game be worth twice what the maker of GTA 5 is worth, the best-selling AAA game of all time by several orders of magnitude? That’s something for the stock market to sort out, but there’s no question that Roblox has put the time in to warrant this kind of success, and it has quietly been amassing a truly astonishing amount of players including being the main gaming experience for hundreds of millions of children worldwide. I don’t know what Roblox’s stock will do going forward, but the future of the industry is going to be built on the backs of games like this, and it’s why Microsoft buying Minecraft several years ago for $2.5 billion looks like a steal. Roblox is only just getting started after 15 years, and it will remain a key part of the gaming landscape indefinitely, that much is clear.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series, and The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.

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Paul Tassi

I’ve been writing about video games, television and movies for Forbes for over 10 years, and you may have seen my reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and . I cover all… Read More

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