Tennis and K-Pop debut strongly, and paid promotion drives significant traffic.
For this edition of our monthly Roblox brand rankings, we've updated and expanded our list. Instead of looking at 20 brands, we've doubled the amount to 40 in order to give you a more complete look at the companies and industries building and gaining user attention on the platform. Expanding the list also allows us to shine a light on other types of brands in the space that we may not have listed previously, such as the education-focused Boston Museum of Science, which received funds from the Roblox Community Fund.
You may notice that we've also reformatted our charts, adding in several new data points: developer, lifetime visits, and average playtime. While we didn't find every single developer for each game, we did track down almost all of them. This info is interesting because it allows us to see not only which developers are making the most branded experiences (studio output), but also how those developers' games are performing in terms of key metrics (studio quality).
The list is sorted by monthly views, but the other data points provide added dimension to defining success on Roblox. As always, we believe that it's important to see which games are effective at player engagement (avg playtime) and which have built up the largest amount of visits over time (lifetime visits), a metric that indicates overall reach.
Notable New Entrants
Here are the brands that caught our attention this last month, either by launching a brand new experience or by us becoming aware of them for the first time.
6. AO Adventure, Australian Open
Developer: The Gang
As we previously outlined, the Australian Open had a very successful launch to its branded experience AO Adventure, driven by offering fun, unique free UGC virtual items. The game's developer The Gang seems to consistently release branded games with strong mechanics and giveaways that drive millions of visits right away. So certainly, a lot of the credit should go to them.
7. NCT 127
Developer: Dubit
This music-themed experience from a popular K-Pop band had a very strong start, driven by a concert performance. Apparently, this is the first Roblox experience dedicated exclusively to a K-Pop band. We've seen Spotify bring K-Pop musicians into its Spotify Island previously, but that was a just a temporary theme. As a fan of both Blackpink (my kids and I saw them last November in New Jersey) and BTS (my kids and I watched their Vegas show streaming on tv), I would love to see more K-Pop bands activate on the Roblox platform. I'm sure their fans would come out in a big way to check those out and purchase virtual merchandise.
12. Sesame Street Mecha Builders
Developer: Whacky Wizards
This game has been on Roblox for a couple of months, but it flew under the radar and didn't catch our attention until recently. We're impressed by how it has accumulated over 17 million visits to date, which is quite strong. It will be interesting to see if the game can sustain engagement over a long period of time. (BTW, one of my claims to fame was recording a YouTube video with Cookie Monster back in the day).
28. H&M
Developer: Dubit
Since starting off rather slowly, H&M's experience has grown significantly thanks to offering free UGC virtual items for players to earn. At the start of February, the game had reached 774K visits, and as of February 7th, it has over 1.4M visits.
We've heard from other brands that delivering value is one surefire way to gain the support of Roblox users. So the more brands can give away free virtual merchandise or even free burritos IRL like Chipotle, the happier Roblox players will be. And if they're really happy, players will create content on TikTok and YouTube to spread the word about your awesome brand.
On the Rise - Strong Growth
Next, we'll look at several games that stood out from the pack for their strongly increase in monthly visits. Why did each of these branded experiences suddenly have a spike in traffic? Let's dig in.
18. Build-A-Bear Tycoon, Build a Bear Workshop
MoM Change: +126%
Developer: Gamefame
The game has a 85% rating, so that's strong. But that doesn't explain why the game had such a spike in visits month-over-month. My mind always goes towards some sort of game update happening, so I looked around the game page itself, which did speak to a major update right up top in the description...
But it's hard to know when the update was published. After all, the page says the game was updated on 2/6/23, which is in February, not January (when the data we have is from).
So the next step was to look at the brand's Roblox group to see if there's any info we can learn there, and lo and behold there is...
Now we can see that there was a major update announced on January 7, 2023, which offered players a new animal and a new outfit to enjoy.
Looking on Twitter finally provides another strong possibility that explains the recent success...
There you go. The company ran paid ads on Roblox, likely to drive traffic to its experience. Since this tweet was from Jan 31, which was within the reporting period, my guess is that paid ads played a big part in the traffic spike.
I looked on TikTok for related brand videos and didn't find much, so that adds further fuel to the theory that the increased traffic to the experience was likely paid traffic on Roblox.
29. Bakugan Battle League
MoM Change: +110%
Developer: Melon
How did this game, which has a low 2.8 minute avg playtime, get such a boost last month? Using similar sleuthing skills as above with Build-A-Bear, we can see that Bakugan also released an update...
What's SUPER INTERESTING about this description is that they tied together the physical and digital worlds together at Target stores with a QR code. Not sure this drove a ton of traffic, but it's a very inventive way to drive IRL store visits and potential purchases by offering a free UGC item on Roblox. Now that's clever innovation!
But did that drive a ton of traffic to the game on its own? Possibly. But likely not entirely.
We can see that Twitter has the answers yet again...
A Roblox YouTuber used #ad, indicating that he was paid to promote Bakugan. So there you have it again, paid promotion (in this case influencer promotion) was used to drive traffic to the game. That's at least part of what happened here.
We see further evidence of this within the YouTuber's account, where he posted a video about Bakugan...
Decreasing Traffic - Substantially Less Users
On the flip side, what were the games that took a major fall in terms of traffic, and what led to those decreases?
20. FIFA World, FIFA
MoM Change - -72%
Developer - The Gang
The reason for this decrease is likely due to the Men's World Cup tournament ending in December. Since the hype surrounding the popular sporting event died down, it naturally makes sense for this experience to see traffic drop off sharply in January.
The Women's World Cup is coming this summer, and FIFA most certainly has plans to connect that with their Roblox game. It will be interesting to see if they can recapture the audience attention they so effectively harnessed with the men's tournament. Roblox's platform is roughly 50/50 male to female, so there's certainly a lot of opportunity for FIFA to connect with female players here.
31. Nickverse, Nickelodeon
MoM Change - 72%
Developer - Dubit
Nickverse went from about 2.2 million visits in a month all the way down to 630K visits. The game's developer Dubit touted the game hitting the 10 million visit milestone on January 17th, and now the game has about 10.3 million visits.
So perhaps Nick did a big marketing push in December, but not in January? Maybe they used ads on Roblox to drive paid traffic during the holidays? That's what our theory would be.
Top Industries Finding Success
Not every company across every industry needs to create a branded Roblox games. But here are the industries that are most active as well as seeing the most success reaching young, global audiences via metaverse gaming:
Entertainment: 11
Sonic the Hedgehog, Warrior Cats, Hello Kitty, Miraculous, Ben 10, Nickelodeon, Mechamato, Wonder Woman, Cartoon Network, Bakugan, Sesame Street
Apparel: 9
Shein, Alo Yoga, Vans, Tommy Hilfiger, Givenchy, Puma, Gucci, Nike, H&M
Music: 6
NCT 127, Tate McRae, Denzel Curry, Tai Verdes, The Chainsmokers, Spotify
Sports: 4
Australian Open, FIFA, NFL, Manchester City Football
Toys: 4
Squishmallows, NERF, Hot Wheels, Build-A-Bear
What industries and trends are most interesting to you? Leave a comment, and let us know!
Stephen Dypiangco is the CEO of Metaverse Marcom, a strategy and consulting firm helping entertainment and sports brands enter the metaverse.
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