The investor demand for fast-growing young companies has been so off the charts that Roblox decided in December to delay its listing because it was too difficult to price its shares accurately. When Airbnb and DoorDash went public last year, their share prices immediately soared, raising questions about whether there was a new stock market bubble. Roblox’s performance was another sign of an increasingly hot public offering market. “It’s just raining money on these people, on these companies.” “The game industry’s swimming in cash,” said Joost van Dreunen, a New York University professor who studies the business of video games.

The company went public in a direct listing in which no new shares were issued. That valued Roblox at $45 billion, up from $4 billion just over a year ago. The Silicon Valley company closed its first day of trading at $69.50 a share, rising from a reference price of $45 that was set on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the pandemic’s booming effect on gaming was even more starkly on display when Roblox, a gaming platform aimed at children, went public. Sony, which released the PlayStation 5 in November, recently reported a 62 percent profit jump while Microsoft tallied $5 billion in quarterly gaming revenue for the first time, helped by sales of its new Xbox devices. A record $56.9 billion was spent on gaming last year in the United States, up 27 percent from 2019, according to the NPD Group. When the pandemic forced people indoors a year ago, many passed the time by playing games on their iPhones, building gaming computers and exploring the latest blockbuster titles on their Xbox and PlayStation consoles.įor video game companies, that has meant gushers of cash.

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