Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news, roadblocks is paying a price for children's safety. It's not prompted after the company credits for your bookings forecast. Making clear though that that new age verification and child safety features that they've embedded, they're creating some friction for user growth. CEO David Zooki joins us now, and you made really bold statements in the investor letter saying this is worth it. This is worth it long term because it's building a safer global
standard of safety. Talk us through when you will see actually that friction die down.
Hey, great to be here at highlighting coming off a great quarter forty three percent year on your bookings growth, bookings of one point seven billion dollars more than twice. What we've shared with investors is our long term growth trajectory. And yes, we've highlighted our commitment to setting the global standard for healthy, safe, age appropriate digital engagement. We have rolled out age check all around the world this quarter. We now have over sixty five percent of US users
who we have age checked. But we did highlight in our earnings call there is some short term friction from communication and other factors. We believe though this is worth it. We are well on our path to ten percent or more of the global gaming market and more of that of us, and we want to bring along all of our under sixteen users as well as the over sixteen who are growing very rapidly.
How about bringing along the industry, Dave, Because you're a first adoptor here of this technology that can help age verify. Do you think others in gaming will have to do this? Do you think others will experience such friction as you come out of it.
I want to highlight if you go to our corporate site and read our values, one is take the long view and the others respect the community. We've continuously innovated on safety since we started in the company, and as the technology got good enough to age check, we've leaned into it. This is an addition, of course, to our industry leading text filtering, the fact that we don't allow image sharing on the platform. This has allowed us to do several things. In addition to age checking, We're going
to be introducing kids accounts and select accounts. We're able to do this within our same app because we are age checking. Also because we're age checking, we can now identify the eighteen and up players on our platform, and we've introduced some interesting economics for them. So we do think we're setting the industry standard and we have this commitment to what we call the global standard.
Dave, good Morning. You came on the program three weeks ago and I asked you if you would kindly model for us at that moment when you were announcing the new policy and new platform changes with safety in mind, how that would impact user behavior. And that's kind of played out in the earnings print, right, Just explain that the interaction between the policy that you put in place and why it would impact user metrics and behaviors to the platform.
Well, I want to highlight we're using age checked and we're asking our users to age check if they want to use the communication functionality on roadblocks. So in Australia we're over seventy percent age checked, in the US over sixty five percent. But that does highlight there could be roughly thirty five percent of our users in the US who currently are not communicating on our platform. We believe
that can contribute to some short term friction. In addition, as we go along on our eight in an over segment, we've shared that more and more, we're using our recommendation algorithms to support long term retention on the platform more than shorter term monetization. These both have contributed to short term friction.
Dave, let's talk about Roadblocks's future and Roadbox Reality. This seems like a big play, a big upgrade from Roadbox Studio. We talk all the time to Unity. I am very into unreal engine right and how that impacts my experience in the games that I play. This presents an opportunity for you to do work with some of the big budget developers. Could you just explain the pathway to that well.
I want to highlight two separate levels of this. We have continued to release over the last quarter and will continue functionality that is very unique to Roadblocks. Roadblocks is a game engine, a client, a cloud, and together we're committed to publishing once and having whatever you publish work both super high quality on a gaming PC, but also perform very well on a two gigabyte Android phone. Those
are very different configurations. We want to support both with the same build as well as when our creators build on Roadblocks, they go around the world. The future for us is a hybrid architecture, and what we want to do is make it easy for creators to create experiences that are ultimately multiplayer and photorealistic and do it very
easily by powering it with AI. So we have combined really a hybrid architecture we're starting to show it off that combines our multiplayer synchronization with cutting edge real time video world models. We believe this is the ultimate hybrid architecture to democratize photorealistic multiplayer I like that about.
The democratization and making sort of the building of games open to many. How do you think about the pricing structure briefly, Dave.
We've said initially roadblocks. Reality will not be free. I mean, real time video AI modeling in the cloud is expensive. But just like with the rest of the AI world, these prices are going to come down and down. I want to highlight this is complemented really with our vision for creation, and if we look at what's happening in the coding space over the last six months, more and more software engineers are literally having AI run overnight doing
multiple iterations to help build software. Gaming is much more complex. It involves software, three D assets, NPCs, real time operations, terrain geometry. We're really pursuing that same vision that agentic multiple iteration AI work. With Roadblock Studio, we started introducing things as innovative as using NPCs to help test software, and we believe we're uniquely poised to help creators build more quickly, higher quality, and more diverse experiences.
David Zuki, CEO of Roadblocks, thank you very much