Roblox blooms
Has it found a way to cultivate ecosystem growth?
The SuperJoost Playlist is a weekly take on gaming, tech, and entertainment by business professor and author Joost van Dreunen.
In entertainment, as in nature, coordination matters.
Fireflies, for instance, don’t compete by glowing solo. They synchronize. By lighting up in unison, male fireflies create a collective display—bioluminescent signaling—that attracts more mates than any individual effort could.
That’s how Nintendo revitalized the industry in the ’80s: by unifying the marketing effort after audiences had lost interest in the scattered offerings from different vendors and game makers.
So it all felt a bit unnatural to watch the series of isolated gaming events over the past few days. We now live in a post-E3 world. But I’m unsure if we are that much better off.
For decades, top game makers shared a synchronized spotlight: one week where every platform, publisher, and developer joined forces to command global attention. Audiences knew where to look. Media had a clean narrative to follow. The industry presented itself as a unified front.
That’s over.
In rapid succession we had PlayStation’s State of Play (June 4), Nintendo’s Switch 2 release (June 5), Summer Game Fest (June 6), and the Xbox Games Showcase 2025 (June 8). Each came with hours of live-streamed content, interviews, and commentary. But what was meant to generate excitement runs the risk of breeding fatigue.
There were, in my opinion, a few clear winners. Shoutouts go to GameDiscovery Co (for leapfrogging ever other games research firm and featuring front and center at Keighley’s big opening), Chris Dring’s first business conference, PlayStation’s Astrobot (for its expansions), Meta’s Marvel Deadpool VR, and Xbox’s The Outer Worlds 2 (for style points).
But perhaps the avalanche of asynchronous announcements is an fitting metaphor for an industry trying to offset a contraction in demand by flooding the market with abundance. Each firm speaks to its own interests and ecosystem. But no one speaks to the whole.
My prediction is that unless the industry rallies and re-establishes a coordinated, shared marketing effort, fragmentation will soon become a strategic liability.
On to this week’s update.
BIG READ: Roblox blooms
After a rocky stretch, investor sentiment on Roblox has shifted. At the center of this renewed enthusiasm is an unlikely success: Grow a Garden.
The game is exactly what it sounds like. Players buy seeds, plant them, harvest produce, and sell it. It’s calm, creative, and compulsively replayable. But beyond the game play loop, Grow a Garden is being hailed as a turning point for the Roblox ecosystem. To Wall Street investors, it’s a signal that the platform can produce breakout hits with a level of predictability, not just chaotic luck.
For Roblox that matters.
After several quarters of tepid growth, Wall Street has been looking for signs that the company is maturing into a more reliable platform business. Grow a Garden, has helped reset expectations for the second half of the year. It both boosted near-term engagement and revenue and points toward Roblox’s content engine getting more efficient.
In its early years, Roblox felt like a Wild West: uncurated, user-led, and mostly reliant on a handful of viral hits to drive the bulk of engagement. That volatility made it hard for investors, advertisers, and even developers to build around the platform. But things are changing. Thanks to improved discovery algorithms, stronger creator tools, and years of accumulated user behavior data, Roblox is evolving into a machine that can systematically surface high-performing content. It's beginning to resemble a platform in the mold of YouTube or TikTok: chaotic at first, then gradually systematized.
That shift has strategic implications. Predictable hits reduce downside risk. They support more aggressive hiring. They give advertisers more confidence to invest. And they help Roblox management project long-term growth with greater confidence. That’s one reason why Roblox expects adjusted EBITDA margins to exceed 20% in FY26.
Demographically, the company is also aging up. Users aged 17 to 24 now make up over 40% of daily active users. The platform is no longer just a hangout for tweens. Experiences like Grow a Garden are key to that shift because they blend casual social play with accessible gameplay loops that resonate across age groups. Roblox is also pushing deeper into international markets like Japan and Brazil, hoping to unlock the same kind of growth it saw in North America during the pandemic years.
Even so that doesn’t mean everything is smooth.
Bookings were up just 5% year-over-year in Q1 2025. But management has pointed to performance marketing, immersive 3D advertising, and AI-generated content as new levers for growth. The success of Grow a Garden evidences that, at long last, these bets might be working.
Meanwhile, Roblox’s stock has begun to rebound. After going public in March 2021 at $45 a share and soaring to $134.72 later that year, the stock crashed below $40 and stayed there until recently. The rally that followed Grow a Garden’s breakout has helped restore some investor confidence, and not just in the game itself.
If Roblox can reliably cultivate hits like Grow a Garden, it won't just be a gaming company. It will be a platform business with an engine for generating culture, cash flow, and compounding growth. Since Grow a Garden launched, the firm’s share price has gone up 69 percent, from $56.12 to 93.72.
Roblox has started to bloom.
OFFICE HOURS
I regularly get sharp questions via email, and a few of them this week felt worth answering more publicly.
Does Apple’s acquisition of RAC7 signal a broader push into game studio ownership, or is it more consistent with their history of ‘acqui-hires’ and light-touch content involvement, particularly in support of Apple Arcade and new platform features?
You’re correct that a single swallow does not make a spring. One paltry acquisition for a trillion-dollar behemoth does not herald a full-scale push into first-party publishing. If anything, Apple is a platform ecosystem first and foremost and unlikely to abandon that strategy. What’s different is Apple’s growing attention for gaming after a rich history of indifference. Even judging from this week’s Apple event, music and television are a far greater priority.
Further, it turns out that RAC7’s isn’t Apple’s first studio acquisition. Previous deals have flown under the radar (h/t Matt Ball), consistent with Apple’s pattern of strategic acqui-hires. So, no, this doesn’t mean Apple is becoming the next Microsoft, building a vertically integrated publishing empire. But it does suggest that Apple is changing its stance toward gaming.
This week’s hotly anticipated announcement regarding its new games app tells you exactly how far Apple has yet to go. The updated app offers little beyond vanilla leader board. The label ‘social play’ is doing a lot of work here. Apple’s gaming strategy is from 2004 and even then AOL had more functionality.
More to the point, out of its entire 55 minutes showcase, gaming (a $14 billion a year revenue stream for Apple) took up about two whole minutes compared more than double that for its TV offering. And I also counted 8 minutes for its Vision Pro-related announcements. It tells you where Apple’s priorities are.
So, yes, it’s far too early to be sure if Apple has started taking gaming seriously. But given that Apple’s existing platform strategy is starting to show its age, any indication of a rejuvenated approach is noteworthy.
Next, I previously predicted that Apple may acquire Unity for a variety of reasons. Since my prediction, Unity share price is up from $21 a share to $24. Clearly, my analysis now moves the stock market and I should register my analytical capabilities with the SEC. Even so, someone disagree with my prediction.
Given Unity’s faltering track record, its ad-centric pivot, and Apple’s historically closed approach to developer support, does it really make sense for Apple to pursue deeper integration with Unity, or does that partnership expose more structural misalignment than synergy?
On the surface, Apple and Unity don’t look like natural partners. Apple has a long-standing reputation for closed ecosystems, opaque developer relations, and rigid platform policies. Unity, meanwhile, is a company in flux, overextended on ad tech, under-performing on execution, and struggling to realize its own strategic goals.
But that’s precisely why the fit may work. Apple doesn’t need Unity to be perfect. It needs Unity to be useful.
Unity remains the dominant creation tool for mobile and indie games, powering around 70% of mobile titles. That toolset already exists, is widely adopted, and would be expensive for Apple to replicate. From a pure platform economics perspective, acquiring or more deeply integrating Unity offers Apple a ready-made infrastructure to support interactive content, especially in areas like Apple Arcade or Vision Pro.
Yes, Apple’s developer enablement track record leaves much to be desired. But that’s exactly the point: can Apple evolve beyond its current “platform-as-levy” model into something more generative? The original promise of Apple was to empower creators, not just tax them. If it wants to remain culturally relevant in a world increasingly defined by interaction and immersion, enabling creative tooling at the foundation level is essential.
Unity beat expectations in Q1 with $435 million in revenue, driven by stronger-than-expected ad performance from its early machine learning-powered advertising, Vector, rollout. It is reportedly delivering a 15 to 20% uplift in installs and IAP value but keep in mind that external data hasn’t yet confirmed this boost. Regardless, guidance for Q2 was cautious, with flat ad growth and lower EBITDA expectations, placing the firm’s future success firmly on Vector’s ability to deliver. That wager makes it an unattractive asset for most, but a compelling one for Apple.
So no, it’s not an obvious cultural fit. But it could be a strategic one.
NEWS
GameStop reports loss, acquires more crypto
Posting a surprising turnaround in Q1 2025, GameStop reporting $732 million in sales, down -17 percent from last year, but swinging to a net profit of $44.8 million, thanks in part to cost-cutting and a sharp reduction in operating losses.
After stripping out a $35 million impairment tied to international restructuring, according to its press release, adjusted net income hit $83 million, compared to a $36 million loss last year. The company now holds a massive $6.4 billion in cash, up from just $1 billion a year ago, giving it significant financial firepower despite ongoing declines in core retail sales.
The firm completed the divestiture of its Canadian subsidiary, Electronics Boutique Canada, in May and has since acquired a total of 4,710 Bitcoin.
PLAY/PASS
Pass. One of the co-creators behind The Sims, Tim LeTourneau, passed away.
Play. SAG-AFTRA has reached a tentative agreement with major video game companies, potentially ending a nearly year-long strike over AI protections and performer compensation that began in July 2024.
UP NEXT
The pod. It’s back.