A new survey from Open World is busting myths about Roblox and the user-generated content space.
During a panel session at GamesBeat Summit in Los Angeles last month, Open World executive vice president of research and analytics Kerri Norton joined Kahlief Adams, the founder and host of the Spawn On Me podcast, to break down a comprehensive survey designed to capture the reality of Roblox players’ in-game behaviors, as well as their feelings about in-game brand activations and campaigns. The survey, shared exclusively with attendees at GamesBeat Summit, was designed by Open World in collaboration with GamesBeat, gleaning insights from Open World’s behavioral dataset, which collects real-time in-game activity data and survey responses from a network of over 3 million gamers. Here are some of the key takeaways.
The “graduation” myth is wrong
Among the “big three” UGC platforms of Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft, Roblox has long been viewed as the platform geared towards the youngest users, influencing both the brands that choose to engage with the Roblox audience and the ways those brands decide to show up on the platform.
Many publishers assume that Roblox players are destined to “grow out” of the platform, moving on to other UGC platforms like Fortnite or triple-A titles. Open World’s survey found that although players said that they expected to grow out of Roblox, the reality is that Roblox’s retention levels are ranked within the top five of the roughly 8,700 games included in Open World’s dataset.
During the GamesBeat Summit presentation, Norton credited Roblox’s high ranking across qualities like variety, accessibility, and creativity for contributing to its impressive retention numbers. Although Roblox was not the top-ranking game in any of these categories, its combination of these elements forms the secret sauce that keeps players coming back again and again.
“When we look at the survey data, and we look at our current user-to-lapsed-user rate — so your ratio of retention or whatever you want to call it — we see that Roblox has the highest current-to-lapsed ratios,” Norton said during the panel. “It’s about 174 percent compared to Minecraft, Fortnite, even GTA.”
Roblox’s older audience is growing and valuable
In recent years, Roblox has touted the growth of its 18-to-24-year-old demographic — one of the most desirable to advertisers. Open World’s survey backed up this narrative, showing that 34 percent of Roblox players are between the ages of 18 and 24, exceeding the 29 percent average across Open World’s dataset. This represents 50 percent year-over-year growth in this audience category for Roblox, according to Open World’s data.
“We have to change the narrative,” Norton said during the presentation. “I know that when people think of Roblox, they think of that 10-year-old on the couch with their mom or dad’s iPad, but that’s not who Roblox is going after, and that’s also not who’s playing.”
Roblox players’ appetite for genres is unusually broad
Open World’s survey found that the Roblox audience has unusually diverse taste, with Roblox player affinity across all genres exceeding players’ overall affinities for each genre. The most popular games on the platform are shooter, sandbox, and simulation titles, but genres like horror, racing, and survival also enjoy widespread support on Roblox.
“Often, Roblox gets bucketed as a simulation or sandbox game. It’s very much not that, and the players are not just your simulation/sandbox players — they’re players who love all sorts of games,” Norton said in an interview with GamesBeat.
Roblox players are primed to jump to other games like GTA — but will likely boomerang back to Roblox
All eyes are on the impending release of Grand Theft Auto 6, with reports indicating that the game will have an unprecedented amount of user-generated content features when it comes out this November. But while some players are likely to leave Roblox for GTA 6, Open World’s retention data shows many of them are likely to come back to Roblox. After Rainbow Six Siege spiked in popularity in late 2024, for example, Roblox was the platform that benefited most from lapsed Rainbow Six player activity, with Roblox becoming the number one destination for former Rainbox Six players in July 2025.
“People who play Roblox, do play these triple-A, high-quality games — but at the end of the day, they’re still going back to Roblox, and it’s more of a boomerang effect versus a linear graduation effect,” Norton said in an interview with GamesBeat.