It has been a very tough past year for Roblox , the enormous, all-encompassing game that has more players than every title on Steam combined. Its stock has fallen 71% over the past year, and 36% in the last month alone.

What’s happening? The company has a number of explanations for investors as of this past earnings report:

“We attribute the unforeseen monetization shortfall to a greater-than-expected shift of engagement from high monetizing 2025 vintage viral games to a combination of new and evergreen experiences with lower hourly monetization,” said Roblox CFO Naveen K. Chopra.

“This underlying mix shift was compounded by changes in our recommendation algorithm, which optimizes for long-term retention and is, therefore, providing more impressions for highly retentive games at the expense of near-term monetization.”

In other words, people aren’t playing enough of the games that make lots of money, shifting to ones that don’t. And some are leaving the platform entirely. Roblox did not provide guidance for the rest of the year, unsure how the rest of 2026 will go. Year-to-date, its stock is down 55%

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Roblox peaked at 152 million daily active users in 2025, but investors are not keen to have seen that it has fallen by 30 million as of this year. And this fall? It’s an opportunity for perhaps an unlikely player: Xbox.

Xbox bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion back in 2014, a steal for one of the most popular games in the world, and essentially Roblox before Roblox . It is the best-selling video game of all time, with 400 million copies sold (albeit at a lower price than competitors like GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 ). It is one of Xbox’s biggest assets, and the new administration of the brand has stated outright that it is now going to try to capitalize on that more than it has been.

New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma recently listed four pillars/objectives/priorities for Xbox going forward:

  • "CORE: Strengthen our platform, led by console"
  • "CONTENT: Grow great games into global franchises"
  • "CREATION: Make Minecraft the world's creator platform"
  • "CONNECTION: Extend the worlds that fans love"

Minecraft takes up an entire slot by itself and is the only game actually named on that list. The idea is that it is an undervalued asset, and obviously Microsoft has been watching the precipitous fall of Roblox over the past year. Clearly, Roblox is still enormous with those numbers, but it certainly is a chance for Microsoft.

The idea here is to lean more into User-Generated Content (UGC) like Roblox and other rivals like Fortnite , which have embraced that idea to both increase engagement and earn money from its players’ creations. That, of course, has created some measure of controversy about what games succeed and how parties can be compensated, but it is certainly a driver of growth. Or at least it has been.

Industry estimates still indicate Minecraft is a monster in the industry with several hundred million players a month. That’s certainly under Roblox , but the baseline is there, and it’s not like players have fled in droves over the past decade and a half. The opposite, really. If Microsoft can figure out how to meaningfully invest in Minecraft to start to eat Roblox’s lunch, especially if things keep going poorly for the game, it could be the kind of thing Xbox needs to spark some measure of a turnaround.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .