Roblox 2025 Year in Review with SuperAwesome's Chief Strategy Officer
- Stephen Dypiangco
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
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Looking at 2025, it has become clear that Roblox reached a new stage of maturity. What was once seen by some as a novelty, a niche platform, or an experimental channel has emerged as a major ecosystem within the broader gaming and entertainment economy. Brand leaders, gaming executives, and investors are all now taking Roblox seriously, not because of speculative optimism, but because its actual scale, engagement and revenue dynamics are impossible to ignore.
To unpack these developments, I spoke with Nicholas Walters, Chief Strategy Officer at SuperAwesome. Because his team works daily with brands navigating youth engagement, UGC ecosystems, and Roblox strategies, Nicholas has a unique vantage point on where the platform is heading and what the signals in 2025 really mean.
Standout title of the year: Spongebob Tower Defense
When discussing the biggest games of 2025, Nicholas opted to skip the obvious choices of Grow a Garden or Steal a Brainrot. Those have been the dominant cultural hits, and they deserve recognition. But he intentionally chose a different direction:
Spongebob Tower Defense showed brands that Roblox isn’t just a place for a bazillion impressions. It’s a place where you can run a business.
Many brand activations treat Roblox as a reach vehicle, essentially a digital billboard with interactive qualities. Spongebob Tower Defense demonstrated that a brand-driven Roblox game can behave more like a sustainable product line than a campaign. It can attract a long-term audience, drive recurring engagement, and establish consistent monetization patterns month after month.
During our interview, I noted that unlike many rapid-rise hit games that peak suddenly and then taper, SpongeBob has demonstrated endurance. It remained consistently successful across the year. That kind of continuity provides confidence to brands that want not only visibility, but also ongoing engagement and legitimate revenue outcomes.
A year of extreme growth, and a surprise even to insiders
When I asked Nicholas to rate Roblox’s overall performance in 2025, he didn’t hedge:
If you say anything other than "excellent," I don’t know what platform you’re looking at.
The data point that stood out most to him was the 91% year-over-year increase in hours engaged in Q3 2025. For a platform that was already measuring audience engagement at astronomical scale, nearly doubling usage in a single year is remarkable.
As someone bullish on Roblox, I expected predictable, steady platform growth, not this magnitude of acceleration. Nicholas described it as a true “hockey-stick moment,” and I agree with that framing. Something changed in 2025, and it wasn’t attributable to just one factor. It appears to have been a convergence of many things: rising quality of UGC games, improvements in platform discovery algorithms, infrastructure capability to support dramatically higher concurrency, expanding creator incentives, and broader brand investment.
This is what platform momentum looks like when a multi-sided ecosystem starts to take off.
How brand strategy on Roblox is shifting from experimentation to operational investment
Nicholas commented on the budgetary trends he’s seeing:
You’re starting to see budgets move out of the innovation teams and into the investment teams. People are pushing much harder on ROI and analytics.
This is a critical shift. In 2022 and 2023, many Roblox activations were internally categorized as experiments. They were justified by curiosity and PR value. But in 2025, the logic has changed.
During our conversation, I reflected on my experience as a former YouTube creator, and I told Nicholas that I see clear parallels. In the early days, YouTube was also treated as an experimental channel until metrics, monetization, and audience dynamics matured. Eventually, YouTube became a core part of the digital strategy and content infrastructure for many brands. I believe Roblox is moving along this same trajectory, but with the added dimension of interactive participation rather than passive viewership.
User-generated gaming is headed toward the same cultural centrality that user-generated video achieved in the last decade.
Studios and strategic IP partnerships: why Voldex matters
When I asked Nicholas which studios building for brands had a standout year, he acknowledged Sawhorse, but he chose to highlight Voldex:
They’re doing strategic brand licensing with NASCAR, Driving Empire, and the NFL. Those partnerships look like a big growth area.
This was a perceptive observation. While many developers simply build games for brands, Voldex is building an ecosystem of with brand partnerships. These are long-term partnerships that situate IP inside Roblox’s culture and into player identities.
Economic strengthening: DevEx as a flywheel catalyst
One of the most meaningful structural decisions Roblox made in 2025 was increasing DevEx payouts.
This change benefits both the UGC creators designing avatar items and the studios building complete game experiences. Increasing DevEx fundamentally strengthens creator economics, which strengthens creator motivation, which increases platform output, which increases engagement, which increases revenue.
Nicholas concluded that this puts the platform in a strong position:
It’s very difficult to see who catches Roblox at this stage.
Roblox isn’t merely growing. It’s deepening its competitive defensibility through economic incentive alignment. That is how long-term network effects are cemented.
The coexistence of two design philosophies: trend-driven vs evergreen games
Nicholas made a valuable distinction between two models of Roblox game success:
games that achieve rapid growth through algorithms and zeitgeist-responsive design
games that grow slowly through sustained community building and long-term consistency
These two pathways will likely coexist because they serve different purposes. Trend-driven games have cultural relevance and explosive engagement potential. Evergreen games build loyalty, identity, and long-term value. Studios may eventually specialize in one or the other, just as some YouTube creators specialized in high-velocity viral shorts while others built long-form channels with loyal subscribers.
Roblox’s perception shift: from “kid platform” to industry force
Nicholas commented on the changing sentiment within the broader gaming world:
Roblox was seen as a kiddy platform. That’s no longer possible. The numbers have become too big to ignore.
I’ve seen evidence of this myself at the Roblox Developers Conference (RDC). There were teams and executives this year who would have dismissed Roblox outright only a short time ago. Now they are attending in person, in many cases quietly scouting. They are looking not for novelty, but for strategic entry points. This signals a broader convergence: traditional gaming talent moving into UGC environments.
Looking ahead: what to watch in 2026
When I asked Nicholas for a forward-looking prediction, he focused on a specific Roblox feature:
Roblox Moments is going to do something interesting.
Whether it becomes a viral distribution layer, a cross-platform sharing system, or a new form of play expression, it has the potential to reshape discovery and cultural spread inside Roblox.
Nicholas also shared advice that I think developers should seriously consider:
I’d love to see a hybrid TikTok + Roblox studio, something that learns from both algos.
That idea reflects a broader truth: future Roblox success will increasingly require as much audience growth intelligence as game design intelligence.
Final reflections
Talking with Nick reinforced for me that Roblox is no longer in a stage where people are figuring out whether it matters. The question has now become how will it matter.
I am convinced that we will look back on 2025 as the year Roblox transitioned from being an emergent experiment to a foundational digital medium for the next generation of game makers, game players and brands.
Watch my full interview with Nicholas here:
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