Washington (AFP)

The collaborative video game platform Roblox, a sensation of confinement among children and young people, made its first noticeable steps on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, exceeding a capitalization of $ 40 billion during the session.

The stock, introduced at a benchmark price of $ 45 under the symbol RBLX, traded at $ 70 (+ 55%) from its first listings.

“Roblox, this video game heavyweight who played babysitters around the world during the pandemic, launches its IPO on Wednesday and the hype couldn't be greater,” commented Boris Schlossberg, of BK Asset Management.

The small independent platform has seen its popularity skyrocket with lockdown and school closures.

It allows its approximately 33 million users - half of whom are under the age of 13 - to play thousands of games but also to become creators of video games which are then shared or even sold on the Internet. service.

"There are billions of games! I play them almost every day on the computer or on the iPad. It's a little addicting, we want to try them all", testified, enthusiastically, Cézanne, 10 years old, a schoolgirl from New York.

Cézanne came to Roblox "a little after the start of the school year when some classmates (him) talked about it".

Accessible on PCs, tablets, mobile phones and Xbox consoles, Roblox also offers simple tools for creating worlds, characters, events, choosing rules and designing a game.

The platform has also become a social network in its own right, "a community" and "a place of human co-experience", in the words of CEO David Baszucki, a 58-year-old Canadian entrepreneur, keen on simulation software who launched Roblox in 2006.

"The question for the future is whether the company can now build its brand on its user base, greatly expanded by the pandemic, to create a sustainable and profitable business," asked analyst Boris Schlossberg.

- $ 100,000 -

On the model of YouTube and its YouTubers, Roblox is also a platform that remunerates, through micro-transactions, its game creators, budding or more sophisticated.

Among its 33 million daily users, according to figures provided by the company to the securities authorities of the SEC, Roblox claims 7 million "creators".

In 2020, 1,250 of them won $ 10,000 from the sharing of their games and 300 pocketed more than $ 100,000.

The group, whose turnover has tripled in two years to $ 924 million, is still in deficit ($ 253 million).

But it saw its paying subscribers almost five-fold over the same period to 490,000.

It generated $ 1.2 billion in app purchases from the Apple App Store.

Its expenses have increased exponentially.

In 2020, developer fees alone exceeded $ 328 million, up 200% year-on-year, the group said to explain its search for funding.

In December 2020, Roblox had pushed back a first IPO project in the face of the seemingly unmatched success of entries in the New York market the same month from Airbnb and the food delivery company DoorDash.

He subsequently raised $ 520 million in early January from investors.

On Wednesday, the company entered the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) via a direct listing, not a traditional IPO.

By using this method, as companies like Spotify, Slack or Palantir had already done, Roblox does not issue new shares.

But the shareholders already present in the capital - the founders, the employees and the first financiers - will be able to sell their stakes on the market and thus recover the money for themselves.

Some analysts feared that the title would be a victim of its success, becoming an action of the "Reddit" type, named after the forum where amateur investors meet who caused a wind of panic to blow in New York at the end of January with the action from GameStop video game stores.

© 2021 AFP