Roblox (RBLX -13.54%)Q4 2024 Earnings CallFeb 06, 2025, 8:30 a.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning. My name is John and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Roblox fourth-quarter and fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call. [Operator instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Stefanie Notaney.

You may begin your conference.

Stefanie Notaney -- Director, Financial Communications

Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our Q&A session to discuss Roblox's Q4 and full-year 2024 results. With me today is Roblox co-founder and CEO, David Baszucki; and CFO, Mike Guthrie.

Our shareholder letter, press release, SEC filings, supplemental slides, and a replay of today's call can be found on our investor relations website. Our commentary today may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. A description of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions are included in our SEC filings, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.

We disclaim any obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics can be found in our press release and supplemental slides. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dave.

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you all for joining us today. We're excited to share our outstanding results from Q4 and once again want to highlight our surpassing all of our guidance metrics, everything we provided on our Q3 earnings call, and our 2023 Investor Day goals.

And we're going to lead you through a bit of our continued journey on moving to a goal of having 10% of the gaming content ecosystem running through our platform. But let's start a bit with some of our results. Once again high growth rates across really all of our key financial and operating metrics and surpassing our guidance in every single data point where we provided guidance in our Q3 earnings call. Q4 revenue $988 million up 32% year on year, ahead of our high-end of guidance of $960 million, Q4 bookings $1.36.2 billion, up 21% year on year, ahead of the top-end of our guidance, which was at $1.361 million, DAUs in Q4 $85.3 million, up 19% year on year.

I want to highlight once again in Japan and India, two very large markets for us, growth over 50% year on year. Also highlighting as we continue to expand the range of ages on our platform, over 61% of our total DAUs are over 13, and over 13 saw 26% year-on-year growth. Hours, 18.7 billion hours of engagement in Q4 up 21% year on year, similar plus 50% in India and Japan, once again strong growth over 13. On the cost and cap expenditure side, we've continued to be very diligent.

Except in one area, DevEx was up 25%. We shared over $922 million with the developer community in 2024 and in Q4 we shared $280 million through DevEx, which was up 27% year on year. That's an all-time high and it's really part of our commitment of moving as much money through our platform to creators. On trust and safety and infrastructure, this is our whole cloud.

This is all of the AI supporting safety and civility. This is all of our LiveOps. This was up 2% year on year and down 2% versus Q3. I want to highlight this is all because of efficiency.

We're improving quality on all metrics. This is as we improve the way we drive quality and efficiency with AI and the way we run lean infrastructure. That was 13% of revenue and 9% of bookings which decreased to the last year. And I just want to highlight a lot of AI-driven modernization with quality that we'll share a bit more.

On personnel costs not including stock-based compensation $200 million, once again driving on operational excellence we were at 20% of revenue and 15% of bookings. This decreased relative to the previous year both as a percentage of revenue and bookings. On operations, Q4 cash was up 29% year on year to $184 million. Free cash flow Q4 $120 million, up 54%.

Once again, all of our metrics above guidance, free cash flow above the high end of the guide at $115 million. For the year free cash flow up over five times from $124 million in 2023 to $641 million in 2024. Let's pop into our roadmap in 2024 really at the start of the year in our first earnings call, we shared a commitment to perf quality LiveOps discovery and economy. All of these initiatives we believe contributed to our continued growth and I want to highlight once again up and down our stack throughout the year app launch time, crash rates, frame rates, overall app quality, all we believe contribute to higher engagement and spending.

And a little highlight on infrastructure quality. In December our uptime hit five nines 99.999% uptime, which is really a new high point for us and once again signifies our commitment to engineering excellence. On the LiveOp side, in 2024 we introduced platform LiveOps. We saw a large content slate from the creators supporting LiveOps.

We've seen a lot of great content breakout this year. Fisch emerged as a breakout hit. We've seen NFL Universe pop into the top 25 as far as bookings on the platform. We've seen SpongeBob from Paramount pop into the top 25.

More to come on that as we talk about content. And finally, on the discovery side, we shared with all of you a commitment to transparent discovery that optimizes personalized results for everyone. I want to highlight that in-experience hours for experiences beyond the top 1000 grew faster than our top 1000 this year and that's a highlight to discovery matching people with great content. On economy, we at the start of the year shared a commitment to driving bookings per hour with a lot of improvements to our economy.

We launched dynamic price floors. We moved our UGC economy to UGC for all, which means we opened up our Avatar Marketplace to all creators. We launched inexperienced price optimization as well. This has driven monetization everywhere.

Bookings per DAU, bookings per hour and bookings per payer all increased in 2024 relative to 2023. And recently in Q4 we began to offer more Roblox for users buying on platforms other than mobile, essentially giving Roblox out roughly proportional to the cash we get in during the purchase and this has improved the share of economics as well that we share with the developer community. On ads and brands we've seen e.l.f. Beauty on the platform.

Amazon is now buying ads on our platform. MrBeast in conjunction with Beast Games going live on TV and on streaming brought MrBeast experience. We've hired a lot of key leadership in our ads engineering and prod orgs. We're now live with Shopify integration and a cool cultural moment.

Five of the 10 top-grossing 2024 movies had activations on Roblox, including recently Beetlejuice and Wicked. In safety constantly shipping improvements. We had over 40 releases this year and we launched our party product as well, which brings people together on the platform and made improvements in how we treat people of all ages as part of that. On the AI side, I just got the recent update on the number of AI pipelines and systems we're running on the platform.

It's over 200 now. We've been doing this for over four years behind the scenes on our safety and civility side. And an example of the innovations we're making is our voice safety model has been -- we open sourced it on Hugging Face because we want other people to take advantage of our expertise in voice safety. It's been downloaded over 20,000 times.

We launched Avatar auto-setup in Q4 which takes any really industry 3D Avatar model and turns it into a fully functional Roblox avatar, skinning, boning, adding facts to the face, making it support facial animation. This is a real early signal in the ability of Roblox to use AI to ingest text, images, 3D objects and convert them really into functioning Roblox objects. And also Roblox Assistant is fully launched in Q4. It allows conversational creation inside Roblox Studio.

Stay tuned because a lot more of that's coming. At RDC, we shared a vision that we believe we're going to see 10% of all gaming content running on the Roblox platform. Today our market share is 2.4%, which speaks a bit to the available headroom we have as we drive our platform. We see a fundamental shift incurring in the gaming ecosystem driven by our vision of technology.

And that's a vision of 3D streaming, supporting instant connection with 3D content. It's instant connection on any device, anywhere in the world. It's enabling developers to publish once to a cloud and once again have their content live, any language, any platform, and ultimately powered by AI. And finally, this is not video streaming.

This is 3D streaming with very low latency, local simulation of Avatar, and very responsive 3D interactions. So this has really added a lot of clarity to just for all of you and for how we're working with our creators, so stay tuned on this. I want to share a bit of what we got planned for 2025 and beyond as part of this goal really of getting 10% of gaming on our platform. We're really watching the genres on Roblox.

Some of our genres, like Avatar Simulation, are arguably already pretty huge relative to that gaming ecosystem. But there's a lot of opportunity for us in role playing, in sports and racing, in action and Battle Royale. We're really going to be driving platform tech, including perf and quality. perf and quality.

We've announced an affiliate program to support on and off-platform acquisition and supplement the organic growth on our platform. We're continuing to expand our economy and we shared more about this with paid access games and our ad economy. And then finally I want us to just give a little highlight of the future of AI on our platform. Just like in the early days of Roblox when this immersive 3D online multiplayer simulation that we created started to support new genres of gaming that have been popping up on Roblox, we believe AI will continue to do that.

Our expectation is in Q1 we're going to be shipping text generation available inside Roblox experiences. That means creators will be able to take advantage of this and make AI-based characters. So we could imagine a virtual George Washington teaching Roblox in history driven by TestGen as a service. We have also shared that we have so much 3D data.

We're going to be making available a 3D foundational model that is 3D native and state-of-the-art transformer-based that has been trained with our data. We're going to make this available in Studio and in Q2 we expect to extend 3D creation and 3D generation in experience. That means a fashion creation game will start to allow everyone not just to mix and match an outfit, but to generate 3D outfits with a text prompt. So stay tuned for that.

Finally, on safety, the foundation of our company, we have huge ambitions for the year and I want to highlight safety and civility at Roblox isn't just under 13. When we think of safety and civility, we're talking every single age on the platform and building that in. So stay tuned on that. We continue to produce more and more operating leverage even as we bring in world-class talent.

We're expanding and improving infrastructure, trust, and safety systems and we're driving the economics. I'm going to hand over to Mike, but I do want to highlight, we continue to drive top-line growth at 20% plus while we increase cash flow and while we're on to really this goal of 10% of gaming, which is almost a four x for us as available headroom. With that, over to Mike.

Mike Guthrie -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Dave, and good morning everyone. I'm just going to make three quick comments before we jump into Q&A just to make some clarifying statements. Number one is that 2024 was really an important year for us from a financial standpoint. This is really the year when bookings caught up with the investments that we made post-COVID and into early 2023.

We talked about scaling margins and scaling cash flow and free cash flow and in 2024 we really delivered on those and generated very, very high operating and free cash flow across the course of the year. So we're really happy with that. Importantly, what that means is, for Dave's earlier comments, as we pursue our plan to get to 10% of the market at pretty high growth rates of bookings, we have an ability to invest very consistently in the things that drive value at Roblox, which is engineering excellence, trust and safety and infrastructure, and the developer community. And so while we had a real step function in margins this year, we delivered about two to three years worth of margin improvement per our guidance in November 2023.

We can continue to do that while making really significant investments. And so from an operating standpoint, that feels good to us as a leadership team and a real consistency in those investments to continue to drive growth with margin. Number two, I want to make sure that the fourth quarter we have clarity on two things. First would be bookings.

In Q4 last year we launched a new platform which is PlayStation. We always want to launch new platforms. We're excited to do that and typically that grows the overall size of the market and is positive for the business. At the same time we also had a significant update on Xbox.

So console for us in October and November last year in particular was very strong and we lapped that in the fourth quarter. So just a little bit of clarity, we touched on a little bit little bit of this in the letter. In the fourth quarter, mobile and desktop bookings grew 26%, so very high growth in the things that were not lapping the difficult compares. For the month of December exclusively, mobile and desktop bookings were 27% growth and prepaid and console were 22% growth.

So prepaid and console we lapped the launch of PlayStation, the October and November impacts there. We also lapped a large prepaid card purchase in November. But by December and as we exited the quarter and into the first quarter, very high growth in mobile and desktop which has persisted across Q3 and Q4 and prepaid and console then started to pick back up into the 20% range. So we get a very healthy exit to the growth rate once you take into consideration lapping PlayStation and again that continued into the first quarter.

So that's number two. Number three, just as it relates to consensus and our in our guidance, we just want to remind everybody, in the fourth quarter we have over the course of a year, let's just say working capital is not a big -- doesn't really have a big impact on the business. But in Q4 and Q1, working capital actually has a very large impact on the business. So there's a -- in your model there's a difference between your EBITDA and our cash from operations that is working capital.

In Q4 negative working capital, so there's a big spread and then in Q1 positive working capital as we collect all the activity that happened in Q4, especially around the holidays. So just vis-a-vis your consensus, which was at the high end of our implied guidance, I think we were about 9% ahead of your EBITDA numbers. So I just wanted to make sure everybody understands the working capital flow and how that works. And you're going to see a lot, of course, that cash flow is going to come back into the company in the first quarter.

So those are my three comments just to put everything into context. And now we'll love to take your questions.

Questions & Answers:

Operator

[Operator instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Omar Dessouky with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Omar Dessouky -- Analyst

Hey, team. Thanks for taking my question here. I wanted to maybe get -- help us think of a framework of how you're going to get to 10% of the video game market. So if we were to think about the existing video game markets in tiers, obviously there's mobile and PC Console, but within, for example PC Console there are different levels of production value like AAA, AA, A within it, which of those tiers of production value would you expect Roblox developers to start to emulate so that you could potentially take share? And the reason I say take share is because it's well known that the video game market hasn't been growing very rapidly, whereas you're growing 20%.

So it would seem that Roblox developers would potentially take share from the existing video game market. Just help us think about the future direction of content that's going to help you get to that 10%.

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Hey, Omar. Thanks for highlighting this and let's take a step back. I want to share how we have been thinking of it and there are various lenses on this. First off, when we think about people creating 3D games and experiences and you mentioned taking share, we actually just want many of them creating on Roblox.

They're creating in other places and so this isn't necessarily taking from them. We're seeing more and more licensed platforms once again like NFL Universe or SpongeBob, Tower from Paramount, just showing up on our platform side by side the rest of the game industry. Financially, the way we see this growing is an internal model, genre-by-genre and the size of each of those genres and our penetration in each genre leading to ultimately 10% of the market running on our platform. I'll give you one example.

Battle Royale on low end mobile is a sizable chunk of this and we could reel off the top four to five Battle Royales around the world. We shared at RDC and we continue to share that we're driving the technical innovation to support Battle Royale on a low-end 2 gigabyte RAM Android device in a very difficult networking market like India with no compromise. We believe our Battle Royale ultimately on Roblox needs to launch faster, run at higher fidelity, and work better in a bad networking condition than a traditionally precompiled monolithic Battle Royale. So stay tuned on that.

But simultaneously, the architecture we're developing, which is a 3D streaming architecture very closely connected to the cloud, also leads to the notion that that same Battle Royale that's running on 2 gigabyte Android should run on a high-end gaming PC and stream higher quality assets with the exact same code base. So we are not going to compromise either on low-end Android perf, which is the mobile segment, or the high-end PC quality, because cloud is going to be ultimately very important in dynamically adjusting the quality of these experiences. And then I would say in the third segment we are also starting to see even more puzzle-type games on the platform. So we believe it's imminently important for us to make the technical breakthroughs that support which has traditionally been monolithically downloaded experiences in a 3D streaming context without any compromise for quality.

This is complemented by a roadmap on economics you saw with paid access games that's moving all the way up to 70% in certain situations. This is complemented by search and discovery to help bring these features forward. And then I would say behind the scenes you will see us working with high-end developers who traditionally launched in other ways on the Roblox platform. So we're taking this very seriously internally.

We are watching the metrics quarter by quarter, genre by genre to make this happen.

Omar Dessouky -- Analyst

Well, great. Thanks for the comprehensive answer. I think that gives me a great clear direction for research here. I appreciate it.

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Omar.

Operator

We'll go next to Cory Carpenter with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Cory Carpenter -- Analyst

Thanks, good morning, I wanted to ask on advertising, you didn't touch on it much in your prepared remarks when you talked about 2025 initiatives. So hoping you could just maybe frame your plans for the ad business this year and any help you can give on quantifying the ad contribution you're expecting in 2025, that's, that's embedded in your outlook? Thank you.

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

I'll go first. We shared that when we feel advertising is big enough, we'll break it out. I'll let Mike talk about it. We're just in the middle of adding to our portfolio of ad products, including streaming video ads and possibly user-initiated video.

We are already building an increasing business on sponsored tiles on our homepage. We are live with shopping ads. I want to highlight the potential here with five of the top 10 movie releases using Roblox to boost engagement and understand what's coming. Of course, we won't say whether that's correlation or causality, but we do think it's really exciting.

So I do feel we're on a great track. The team we supplemented with amazing talent. I think it's simply we're not ready to break it out yet. Mike?

Mike Guthrie -- Chief Financial Officer

Correct. And there's very little in the numbers that we produce today in terms of our guidance for '25.

Cory Carpenter -- Analyst

OK, helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Clark Lampen with BTIG. Please go ahead.

Clark Lampen -- Analyst

Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I have two. Dave, on personalization and discovery, you guys have obviously been very successful in rolling this out over the course of the year, and it's objectively been accretive to the player experience your business bookings growth.

Have you seen as a consequence of this though, any signs from a developer standpoint that the community is maybe being taxed a little bit by a higher life services burden? I guess said differently, is there any way for you to monitor and potentially avoid burnout as the pace of content creation potentially picks up? Second question, Mike. As we're thinking about rate of margin improvement that's sort of baked in and what's forecasted for 2025, is there any way of framing for us how much of the improvement might be a result of direct cost leverage this year rather than opex leverage? Since you didn't hire a whole lot in 2024, I would imagine that that's going to pick up in 2025. Thank you both.

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Yes, I'll start on search and discovery. First, I want to highlight a couple of things. The creator community, who we meet with personally and talk about this a lot, really values transparency in our search and discovery algorithm, so they can see what we're rewarding. We've made a commitment at RDC to be hyper transparent in that, and stay tuned because we believe we can be very transparent in what we're rewarding for organic discovery as well as how we run organic search.

That's complemented with LiveOps where we do at times feature updates. I want to highlight we encourage all Roblox creators to iterate and make many small updates rather than giant monolithic ones. It's the way we build Roblox. We're shipping many times a day.

We ship safety advancements 40 times a year. And so I don't actually think we're encouraging burnout. I think we're encouraging a healthy way to do engineering.

Mike Guthrie -- Chief Financial Officer

Clark, I'm going to answer your question. I want to make sure I get it right. So this year coming up, as I said earlier in my opening comments, we're in a position now where growth and expenses contract much more closely with growth in the top line because we had such a step up in margins. This year based on the top-line growth that we expect we can hire pretty aggressively vis-a-vis the last couple of years.

We can add headcount costs in the mid-to-high teens and still have very good cost leverage this year over last year. So that's number one, that's on the fixed cost side. Number two, infra trust and safety, we continue to drive down cost to serve and we still believe there's pretty a significant amount of improvement that we can drive in that cost line. And so just those two, you were saying direct versus opex, they're both operating expenses, they're more fixed costs.

That's how I think of it. And then I just want to add and sort of embedded in what I said at the beginning, we have had variable costs in the business that have been our developer exchange and our cost of goods sold. And for quite a long time we've talked about the potential of unlocking operating leverage and cost of goods sold. We're still early in that journey, but differential pricing is certainly a first move toward that.

And so while what you see in our guidance is driven really by hiring an IT&S, Infra Trust and Safety operating leverage, just investing at a slightly lower growth rate than what we expect on the top line, there is the possibility that we start to see some real operating leverage in COGS and that that allows us to do a few things that we've talked about for years. One is sharing a little bit more of the developer community while sharing incremental margin effectively with investors and on our P&L as we report cash flow. So that's why we really feel like we're in an enviable financial position. Did I answer your question?

Clark Lampen -- Analyst

Yes, you did. I think the question was essentially gross margin leverage relative to opex. And it sounds like, if I have it right, a lot of what you're modeling in here is opex leverage you'll sort of wait and see whether there is COGS leverage over the course of the year or incremental COGS leverage. Is that correct?

Mike Guthrie -- Chief Financial Officer

Correct.

Clark Lampen -- Analyst

OK. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Cost with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Matthew Cost -- Analyst

Great. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. The first one is just on the DAU trajectory, I think there was a slight step down from 3Q to 4Q.

It seemed to be across most of the regions. So what were the puts and takes in the DAU step down from 3Q to 4Q, any regions to call out or content that drove that platform that's worth noting? And then just secondly, I think, just building on Clark's question a little bit, as I understand it, I think there would be kind of some benefit to the amount of developer exchange fees going out to the developers, which means a higher cost to Roblox as a result of differential pricing. Over time, I would imagine as you get more consumers to shift to that payment model, that's a good guide for COGS. It probably is a good guide for your margins.

But in year one, as you look at the guidance for 2025, is differential pricing good for gross margin this year or bad at that initial first 12 months? Thank you.

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Hey. I'm going to start to picture on this and just share what you may be seeing hints of in our results over the next four to five years as we move to 10% of the gaming content space running through our platform. We want to move as much money as we can through to the developer community as part of it. It's great economics.

It helps drive growth on the platform. You will see us relentlessly work on COGS as a percent of bookings, on personnel cost as a percent of bookings and Infra Trust & Safety without compromising quality as a percent of bookings because what that leaves behind that is cash and what we can move to our developers. So the more we drive this, the better. The move to rationalizing Roblox pricing, where we roughly correlate the amount of Roblox given to the amount of raw cash we receive, is great economic policy.

It's really increased the amount of money ultimately flowing through developers because it drives their COGS down a bit and we've seen consumers respond in a rational way in a way that has also contributed to growth. So on that side, I would hope at the big picture you would see DevEx as a percent of bookings. Mike, you can comment, just continue to slowly march upwards if we do our job right.

Mike Guthrie -- Chief Financial Officer

That's right and that doesn't mean margins will go down at the same time. We're talking about efficiency in the cost structure that allows us to do both. The guidance implies that we're still in the 100 basis points to 300 basis points range that we talked about back in late 2023. Obviously this year 2024, the number was quite a bit higher than that, but embedded in that to get specific is primarily the operating expenses that we talked about.

Another way of saying that is, we're sort of carefully watching COGS leverage. We're optimistic about COGS leverage. We're not modeling it in and guiding to it today, but it's exciting to have that lever. We haven't had that in the past.

On the user side, in Q4 again, lapping the launch of PlayStation in a pretty significant step up in Xbox, it's a platform that we saw a lot of sign-up activity, we saw a lot of new DAUs and so we have to really lap that as coming into to January into sorry Q1 of 2025. In addition, just as a call out specifically, we talk about a little bit in the letter, Eastern Europe growth was quite a bit slower on DAUs, driven primarily by Turkey, which is the first full quarter where Turkey has been off. And if you look at the growth in users in Europe versus the bookings growth in Europe, it's pretty significantly different. So where we have had a hit on DAUs in Eastern Europe, it is fortunately a part of the world where the economic impact is just not nearly as large as the impact on users.

So we're going to work hard to be live and compliant around the world. We think that will ultimately help user growth to grow. But overall healthy user growth in the rest of the world and certainly we're seeing strong engagement and strong monetization, which turns into strong bookings growth.

Matthew Cost -- Analyst

Thank you so much.

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

I want to just highlight how little we are penetrated in India right now with north of 50% DAU growth, which you'll see complementing as that market grows.

Matthew Cost -- Analyst

Got it. Thanks a lot, guys.

Operator

We'll move next to Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Ken Gawrelski -- Analyst

Thank you. Good morning. Two, if I may. First one, what are you hearing from developers about the cost and the time to develop new game features with all the AI power tools that you discussed at length on this call? How should we think about the adoption of and how should we think about the adoption rates of these tools? Is it significant already? Is it very early days and do you expect an acceleration there? And is the greater impact on the overall Roblox ecosystem better earnings for developers or enhanced game development or is it really both? Maybe that's my first one.

And the second one is more just maybe, Mike, if you could walk us through kind of the puts and takes as we think about the first quarter guidance. You talked about in the letter, some of the dynamics between early in the quarter or later in the quarter. But can you just talk about it may be a bit more extensively just so we understand the different dynamics in that 1Q bookings guide? Thank you.

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Hey. First I'll start with developers and their economics and I do want to highlight people are taking note of what we believe is the economic opportunity. A very large property on Roblox, Brookhaven was just acquired by a very, I think, thoughtful and smart kind of property owner, so I want to highlight that.

Hey, this is. I think these all multiply together. If we achieve our goal, which we believe we will, of routing 10% of the gaming market content ecosystem, that in itself multiplies to four x roughly the money flowing through developers. I just said about 15 minutes ago we would like to increase the share of bookings flowing to our creators as well, so those two things multiply together.

And then I think the triple whammy is, we are already in a position where many top experiences created on Roblox are much more efficient than the traditional gaming space. And this is because our cloud is integrated with our engine, our auto-translation is integrated with our engine, creators who launch and share experiences like Brookhaven, which is arguably one of the largest avatar simulation experiences in the world, much bigger than most stand-alone avatar simulation experiences is really was created and run by a very, very small team and was running around the world translated on every device, so it really is a triple whammy. AI adds to that on top of that and so it's really a fourth multiplier. We're seeing more and more creators adopt our assistant in Studio.

We're going to see more and more of that. I do want to say that we're optimistic that the overall market for jobs in the experience creation space, if anything, we believe will grow, not shrink with AI. We're optimist about this, we think. For example, I'm going to Dubai next week to talk about the opportunity for really a creation economy there because the jobs supported by our platform are going to continue to grow.

So I think it's actually a quadruple whammy with AI acceleration. Over to Mike.

Mike Guthrie -- Chief Financial Officer

OK, Ken. What is embedded in guidance for the first quarter? So the bookings guidance is about 22% to 24%, 24.5% top-line bookings growth. That's informed by really the exit rate of Q4 and what we saw across the quarter as we adjust for the launch of PlayStation and some of the other things that we've already talked about. On the margin side, continued growth.

And what's implied here is again better than the 100 to 300 basis points that we've come to talk about. It's more like, 300 to a little over 400 basis points improvement. So we're still seeing pretty high improvement in the margin guidance that's implied here. What else is implied for the quarter and then for the full year? January, which of course now we've seen is -- our expectation is that's probably the highest growth rate of month for the quarter.

The comps are a little bit easier, of course, early in the quarter as you all remember from last year, it gets tougher in March because we do lap Easter this year. So Easter last year was in Q1, so we'll lap that in March and then we'll have the benefit of having Easter in April and not comping against April in Q2. So overall, because the exit rates are really good and just what we've seen in January has been very strong, that is embedded in the guidance. I also looked, Ken, specifically, I looked at your model a few days ago and I feel like seasonally you've got it right, because during the course of the year our current expectation is growth rates in the first half of the year will be higher than in the second half of the year, primarily because of Q3.

We just had such a strong third quarter, so we're going to lap that now. We knew when we printed Q3 that we were going to lap Q3 12 months from now. So we're working on a lot of initiatives that we hope will allow us to drive growth above and beyond what's sort of embedded in the full-year guidance and the Q1 guidance. But that will be the toughest quarter to comp against for sure.

We're optimistic we can do a good job there and for the overall year growth, we're optimistic. And right now, I think, highest growth in Q1, very good growth in Q2 and Q4, and Q3 is the quarter that we have to lap a very large number and we're ready for the challenge.

Ken Gawrelski -- Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

We have time for one more question from Brian Pitz with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Brian Pitz -- Analyst

Great. Thank you. Two questions, please. One, any insights into how much contribution to bookings is expected from paid access games this year and thoughts on how they may potentially be cannibalistic to your core business? And then two, given the biggest question and pushback that we still receive, which is around the age-up thesis on the platform, maybe an update on your thoughts on latest initiatives there in terms of driving the development of more, mid core, hardcore gaming content and could an acquisition actually make the most sense to accelerate the development move in that direction? Thank you.

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Wow. Hey, we don't see your thesis in our numbers, so I do want to highlight this summer, for example, we shared the growth rate of our over 13 and all over universities in the United States people are playing dress to impress while they were in class. So we see continued growth in 13 and up. It's growing very, very rapidly and we're seeing more and more properties like NFL Universe that are appealing to older experiences.

On the paid access side, there is a pipeline of creations right now getting lined up for launch on paid access. We don't see this once again as cannibalistic. We see the overall $187 billion gaming content market in the world, including freemium experiences, including paid access experiences, including experiences that monetize by advertising. And we're offering world-class systems that cover all of these.

It's actually inconceivable that we would go after 10% of the world gaming market without a wide range of economic opportunities. So we see it as accretive, not as cannibalistic.

Mike Guthrie -- Chief Financial Officer

Hey, Brian. Just one last comment. I appreciate the question in the -- and what you described as pushback and that's great because we're now seven, at least for me, seven years into people pushing back on aging up and we just continue to age up. So my prediction will be in year eight we will continue to age up and build.

Our incredible creator community will build content based on the technology that we're producing that will be increasingly attractive to older users. And in 12 months from now, we'll have the exact same question, but I appreciate you bringing it up.

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you. Great question.

Brian Pitz -- Analyst

Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Mike.

Stefanie Notaney -- Director, Financial Communications

Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us today and I will hand it off to our operator John, to close out the call.

Operator

[Operator signoff]

Duration: 0 minutes

Call participants:

Stefanie Notaney -- Director, Financial Communications

Dave Baszucki -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Mike Guthrie -- Chief Financial Officer

Omar Dessouky -- Analyst

Cory Carpenter -- Analyst

Clark Lampen -- Analyst

Matthew Cost -- Analyst

Matt Cost -- Analyst

Ken Gawrelski -- Analyst

Brian Pitz -- Analyst

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