Roblox serves as a global hub for self-expression and cultural trends, with 70% of Gen Z Roblox users wearing branded virtual apparel to preview and guide real-world purchases.
Roblox today released its 2025 Roblox Replay, offering a granular look at how users expressed themselves and engaged on Roblox this year. Driven by over 274 million daily avatar updates and more than 50 million searches each day, the findings illustrate Roblox’s evolution into a global hub of identity, creativity, and real-time cultural trends.
The report surfaces two defining behavioral trends: the blurring of digital and physical self-expression, and the rise of a curious and trend-spotting community that increasingly turns to Roblox as a reflection of global cultural moments. Key findings from the 2025 report include:
Self-Expression Blurs Digital and Physical Worlds
- Digital fashion is driving real-world brand awareness, with Gen Z using virtual apparel to discover labels and even guide physical purchase decisions. Of Gen Z users surveyed, 70% percent have worn branded digital fashion, and 64% said it made them more likely to consider a brand in the physical world. This dynamic also shapes purchasing decisions, with 88% using digital fashion to preview before buying physical clothing.
- Avatar expression is shaping real-world identity, with many users updating their looks frequently and gaining confidence offline by trying new styles online first. As a whole, Roblox users updated their avatars an average of 274 million times daily, and 87% said experimenting with their avatar’s style made them feel more comfortable expressing themselves in the real world.
- Emotes have evolved into a primary communication tool and drive major search and marketplace behavior. The rise of user-generated emotes (avatar movements like jumping or dancing) reshaped how users interact with the platform, pushing verbs like “dance” to the top of Marketplace searches in the back half of the year.
The Discovery-Driven Community
- Users are actively exploring the platform, with most daily searches focused on broad genres and themes rather than specific titles. Users conducted over 50 million searches a day, the majority focused on broader topics like horror or roleplay.
- Top searches reflect a dual appetite for nostalgia and novelty, with long-standing classics and newly launched experiences driving significant engagement. The top three most searched experiences were 1. Brookhaven (created in 2020), 2. Grow a Garden (created in 2025), and 3. Steal a Brainrot (created in 2025).
- Roblox continues to function as a cultural barometer, with search spikes mapping directly to viral trends, memes, and global entertainment moments. This cultural pull is reflected in the data, where breakout moments like 67 (or six seven) or the “KPop Demon Hunters” release, drove some of the highest search surges of the year.
The momentum behind these behavioral shifts was reflected in Roblox’s growth which included 88.7 billion hours engaged in the first three quarters of 2025 and a peak of 45 million concurrent users in August. Roblox experiences continued to redefine scale as well, with the record for the most concurrently played video game broken twice, most notably when Steal a Brainrot drew more than 25 million concurrent users in September.
“Users on Roblox don’t just play; they actively shape culture and even guide physical world purchasing decisions based on their virtual identities” said Roblox Vice President, Head of User and Discovery Product Raj Bhatia. “For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, Roblox has become the dominant digital space where identity, culture, and community show up every day. And they’re not just consuming culture; they’re shaping it.”
In summary, these milestones reinforce Roblox as an immersive 3D world where identity, creativity, and culture converge. Looking ahead, Roblox will continue investing in new avenues for expression and creator empowerment, including upcoming updates to avatar movement and makeup in 2026.
Additional Resources
About Roblox
Roblox is an immersive gaming and creation platform that offers people millions of ways to be together, inviting its community to explore, create, and share endless unique experiences. Roblox’s vision is to reimagine the way people come together—in a world that’s safe, civil, and optimistic. To achieve this vision, Roblox is building an innovative company that, together with the community, has the ability to strengthen the social fabric and support economic growth for people around the world. For more about Roblox, please visit corp.roblox.com.
ROBLOX and the Roblox logo are among the registered and unregistered trademarks of Roblox Corporation in the United States and other countries. © 2025 Roblox Corporation. All rights reserved.
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Methodology: This research relied on two complementary data sources: aggregated Roblox platform search data and a national survey of Gen Z Roblox users. Platform insights were derived from Roblox search activity collected between January 1 and November 9, 2025. Due to the high volume of platform-level search data, analyses for the top search results were conducted using a 1% random sample, providing a reliable directional view of search trends while enabling efficient processing at scale. Ipsos also conducted two online quantitative surveys in May 2025 and August 2025 among 1,600 U.S. Gen Z respondents ages 13–28, with quotas applied to achieve a 50/50 male/female split. All participants were required to have used Roblox within the past 30 days, and respondents were recruited through Ipsos’s online research panels with controls to ensure representation within the target age range. |
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251216215439/en/
Contacts
Roblox Communications
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