Roblox downsizes talent acquisition team | Pocket Gamer.biz

Roblox has let go of 30 employees in its talent acquisition division.

Roblox is one of the world’s largest and most successful metaverse platforms, and one that’s operating in an increasingly crowded market as consumers and organisations worldwide are taking their first steps into the metaverse. As such, the company seems to have shifted its focus from expansion to revenue.

“The aggressive growth targets Roblox was operating against in the past few years required a heavier investment in our TA organization,” a Roblox spokesperson told Techcrunch.

“With our commitment to getting our cash compensation growth in line with our bookings growth by the end of Q1 2024, we now need a smaller Talent Acquisition organization to meet our adjusted hiring needs. This action is the result of the reduction in our hiring targets to better align with our growth goals.”

The possibility of a hiring slowdown was first floated in the company’s recent Q2 earnings call, where CFO Michael Guthrie discussed Roblox’s ongoing efforts to reduce costs.

“We will see leverage against pretty much all of the cost areas over the next 12 months. We think we’ll see a little bit of leverage in cost of goods sold because we’ve slowed down hiring, leverage against our compensation expenses because infra, trust and safety, we slowed down a little bit there. We’ve already closed the gap pretty meaningfully on both of those two.”

Trouble in the metaverse?

Roblox continues to prove popular with consumers, reporting an average of 66 million daily active users (DAU) earlier this year. However, this isn’t reflected in consumer spending. Average bookings per DAU stood at $11.92 in Q2 2023, representing a 3% year-on-year decline. The quarter also saw the company report a net loss of $282.8 million, compared to $176.4 million in Q2 2022.

The company has also seen some recent struggles with how it pays its creators. Generally an items creators receive 50% of the revenue, but if those purchases are made in a different in-game “experience”, the item creator receives 20% while the experience developer receives 30%. Attempts to enforce a pop-up directing users to the item creator’s page to make purchases are currently being reevaluated, as the creators of so-called “Wardrobe Experiences” protested that the implementation could impact their games.

We listed Roblox as one of the top 50 mobile game makers of 2023.