Roblox wants to repeat its growth in Japan, where both players and money-earning creators are increasing, across Asia-Pacific, a region of about 1.9 billion gamers, Nikkei Asia reported on Nov. 13. The piece draws on an interview with Chief Growth Officer John Ciancutti in Tokyo on Nov. 10 and quotes an executive calling Japan a “success story.”
Roblox’s third-quarter shareholder letter says daily active users (DAUs) in Japan rose 33% year over year in July to September 2026, and hours engaged rose 22%. Roblox data cited in an Access Partnership study shows Japanese creators eligible for payouts grew 415% from Q4 2022 to Q4 2024, while total payouts grew 78%.
The wider region moved the other way. Asia-Pacific DAUs fell 9% and regional bookings fell 7% in the quarter, according to Roblox’s supplemental materials, and global DAUs dropped 9% to 138 million. Japan is also slowing, from 96% DAU growth in the first quarter to 67% in the second and 33% now. Roblox has said its age-check rollout, which runs alongside the child-safety lawsuits it faces in U.S. federal court, slowed new-user sign-ups earlier this year.
Does a 33% gain in Japan mean Roblox is growing in Asia-Pacific? Not in the latest quarter, when the region lost 9% of its daily users, and without a published Japan user count, Japan’s share of the region can’t be calculated. The creator numbers need care too. A 415% rise means 5.15 times as many eligible creators, against 1.78 times the payouts; 1.78 ÷ 5.15 ≈ 0.35, so the average payout per eligible creator was about 65% lower at the end of 2024 than at the end of 2022.
“We have a lot of runway outside of the U.S.”
David Baszucki, co-founder and CEO, Roblox, on the third-quarter call
Roblox counts a DAU as a registered account that logged in on a given day, so the figure doesn’t measure unique people. Region comes from the IP address used when an account was first registered, and the supplemental deck doesn’t list which countries Asia-Pacific covers. The 1.9 billion gamer estimate comes from the report, not from Roblox. None of these figures shows how many people in Japan play Roblox each day or what an individual Japanese creator earns.
For the fourth quarter, Roblox expects bookings of $1.89 billion to $2.00 billion, down 10% to 15%, and assumes the usual seasonal drop in DAUs. Its AI-based Build tool is in alpha in markets including New Zealand, Singapore and Thailand.
