The new awareness of the platform among brands is not only attributable to Roblox going public - many brands, according to Douthwaite, are finding in their own market research that their younger customers are discovering their products through Roblox.
Because a brand can build a game from scratch on the Roblox platform, “it’s just a much more open canvas here,” he said. He said that Roblox also presents unique opportunities for brands because it is so customizable. Given the ease of creating digital products that a player can wear on their virtual avatar, “certainly fashion and apparel brands have been early adopters of the virtual space,” said Matt Lang, strategy director at the marketing agency imre. (That breaks out into $15.48 per active user in the last quarter.) Much of that Robux money goes into virtual accessories that users can attach to their avatars. Last quarter alone, Roblox users spent $652.3 million buying Roblox’s in-game currency, called Robux. A shorter-term investment is a timed event - a concert, for instance, or a product launch of some sort, either centered around a brand or sponsored by a brand.Įspecially intriguing to brands is the massive business Roblox has built around in-game transactions. They could create a branded game within Roblox, which would involve semi-regularly updating the game for the players.
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Douthwaite’s company has designed games for media and education companies like GoNoodle and the TV series Master Moley.įor brands that want to become more active on Roblox, there are generally two different trajectories.
“A lot of brands come in and they know they want to be on Roblox, and they’re not sure how,” said Andrew Douthwaite, VP of Roblox content at kids’ research and development studio Dubit. But after the company’s $41 billion public debut in March, Douthwaite said that he’s seen increasing interest from companies across all industries, including a mix of toy brands, media companies and real estate property companies, about marketing on Roblox. Roblox is still in its early stages of evolution as a marketing platform. That, paired with the fact that its age demographics are also increasingly skewing away from just children, has made brands especially keen to test it out. As its user base grows, so has the amount of money being spent on in-game purchases throughout the platform. In April 2017, it had just over 30,000 monthly active users four years later, in April 2021, that number had gone up over sixfold.
Roblox is far from new - it’s been around since 2006 - but it has grown rapidly, especially in the last several years. But the fact that a major fashion brand like Gucci is investing in Roblox underscores how, in recent months, retail brands have increasingly been eyeing ways to build out a presence on the platform. Modern Retail reported in November on the potential for branded Roblox games to become a new advertising strategy.
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