The almost highest earning game in the U.S. went down for the whole weekend due to a "technical issue". I'm not sure what kids did with all that free time, but what I do know is that going down for so long can't be cheap.
If you recall, in last week's episode we looked at the highest earners, and Roblox was #2, right behind Candy Crush.
So my immediate thought was "how much are they losing in in-app purchases". We can answer that question by looking at previous weeks, which is exactly what I did.
$6,500,000
That's what we estimate Roblox lost, in net revenue, during the outage. I calculated it by taking the average earnings for the Friday - Sunday combo over the last few months. And that's a conservative estimate.
Was Wade Watts too close to winning and the metaverse needed a break? Or did he win and decide to turn it off on weekends? (did you catch the movie reference?). Regardless, that's not a small loss.
There's been a lot of talk about the metaverse lately, and this downtime is a good reminder that reality is real. If we do end up in a Wall-E-like utopia (more likely, a Matrix-like one), incidents like this won't be tolerated by users or advertisers.
December saw a curious split: downloads dropped 2% while revenue sat at $1.3B. ChatGPT and TikTok dominated both charts as the mobile industry enters a new maturity phase.
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