Hindenburg Research shorts Roblox, alleging inflated metrics

This was based connected its explanation that the metric is not a measurement of “unique individuals accessing Roblox”, Hindenburg said, adding DAUs could see bots oregon alternate accounts.

A Roblox spokesperson denied the allegations.

The institution is the latest people of Hindenburg, whose reports person knocked shares of firms owned by billionaire-investor Carl Icahn, India’s Gautam Adani, arsenic good arsenic AI-server shaper Super Micro Computer.

“Roblox is lying to investors, regulators, and advertisers astir the fig of “people” connected its platform, inflating the cardinal metric by 25-42%+,” Hindenburg said.

The abbreviated seller alleged it has recovered instances of bots from antithetic countries that usage alternate accounts to “farm” for goods successful games connected Roblox.

The level promotes games that bash not request progressive information from users and artificially inflate engagement by tying developer payouts to that, the abbreviated seller said.

Unlike accepted video crippled companies, Roblox relies connected user-generated contented to thrust engagement and makes astir of its wealth from in-game spending connected its virtual currency, Robux.

It raised its yearly bookings forecast successful August owed to beardown in-game spending. It had 79.5 cardinal DAUs, arsenic of June 30.

“There are galore absorbing points successful that report, but they look to misunderstand a batch astir however games work,” said Wedbush Securities expert Michael Pachter.

He said Hindenburg measured engagement based connected a “session”, but gamers usually log connected and disconnected aggregate times a time and play much than 1 game.

“The Hindenburg trial looks similar it measured league magnitude for a azygous crippled for each user,” Pachter said.