Why Kids Entertainment Can't Ignore Roblox
- 10 hours ago
- 5 min read
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If your business depends on connecting with kids, Roblox is no longer optional. It’s becoming foundational.
That's because Roblox is one of the most popular online destinations where today's young audiences are forming preferences, spending time, and developing emotional attachment to IP.
That being said, not every company needs to be on Roblox. B2B SaaS companies don’t. Weight-loss brands don’t. But for businesses built on kids, play, IP, toys, and fandom, the calculus is different.
For those companies, Roblox is increasingly a must-have channel, not a nice-to-have experiment. And the risk of ignoring it isn’t short-term underperformance. It’s long-term irrelevance.
The Hidden Risk: Waiting Too Long
The most important question for senior leaders isn’t “Should we be on Roblox?” It’s “What happens if we’re not?”
Roblox doesn’t compete for shelf space or ad inventory. It competes for time. And Roblox is winning a lot of time in their players' waking hours. In fact, the average Roblox player spent 2.7 hours per day on the platform in Q4 of 2025.
Now more than ever, discovery, socialization, and play are happening inside games first, and Roblox is one of the largest environments where that’s occurring. By the time declining brand relevance shows up in ratings, toy sales, or brand affinity studies, the shift has already happened.
This is the same pattern the kids entertainment industry has seen before with YouTube. Roblox is simply the next iteration in this user-generated content (UGC) paradigm shift, but more interactive and more immersive.
Why Roblox Has Reached This Moment
Three factors have pushed Roblox from “interesting” to “strategically important.”
Scale: Roblox reached 144 million daily active users as of Q4 2025, up 69% year-over-year, and shows no signs of slowing down. That alone demands attention.
Global Reach: Roblox isn’t concentrated in a single market. It has strong audiences across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, making it especially valuable for IP with international ambitions.
Cultural Gravity: Roblox sits at the center of youth internet culture. Roblox-related content generates over one billion views per day on YouTube and TikTok. For kids, Roblox isn’t just a game. It’s where culture, humor, and social language are formed.
Together, these dynamics explain why more kids entertainment companies are leaning in now.
What Kids Entertainment Execs Are Missing
One reason Roblox has been slow to penetrate senior conversations is that it doesn’t map cleanly to traditional categories.
Roblox is not just a game. It functions as:
A distribution channel for IP discovery
A live service environment for ongoing engagement
A fan development engine that builds attachment over time
A testing ground for characters, mechanics, and formats
In many ways, Roblox behaves more like a hybrid of YouTube, live service gaming, and consumer products than a traditional entertainment platform.
Once viewed through that lens, its strategic relevance becomes much clearer.
Kids Entertainment Companies Already Active on Roblox
This shifting of brand resources towards Roblox is no longer hypothetical. Major kids entertainment and toy companies are already investing meaningfully on the platform.
Moonbug has built Roblox experiences tied to its IP and extended that activity into YouTube, helping fuel gaming-focused content growth. They have a game Find the Blippis on Roblox, and their Blippi Plays YouTube channel has over 302K subscribers. The channel's most popular video with 5 million views features Blippi playing a Roblox hide and seek game.
Paramount's SpongeBob SquarePants has found success across multiple Roblox experiences, including a top-performing tower defense game with its own YouTube presence. SpongeBob Tower Defense has over 570 million lifetime visits, and the associated Krabby Krew YouTube channel has 144 thousand subscribers.
Universal Pictures has used Roblox to support multiple franchises and film releases, while DreamWorks Animation has active experiences tied to its IP. How to Train Your Dragon has 140 million lifetime visits, and content from the game is featured on the Universal Kids YouTube Channel.
Miraculous has maintained one of the longest-running Roblox presences, accumulating hundreds of millions of visits and expanding into multiple game formats. Miraculous RP has 915 million lifetime visits.
Sesame Street has explored educational experiences on the platform. The most recent is Sesame Street Neighborhood.
Netflix recently brought breakout IP Kpop Demon Hunters to Roblox through a standalone game, with strong engagement following major content updates.
Mattel has launched Roblox experiences tied to Barbie and Monster High.
Takara Tomy has built a popular competitive experience tied to Beyblade called Beyblade X-Battles, which has 100 million lifetime visits.
These aren’t isolated experiments. They’re early indicators of how kids IP strategy is evolving.
Roblox IP Is Going Hollywood
What’s increasingly interesting is that the flow of IP activity is no longer one-directional. Roblox-native IP is beginning to move outward into traditional media formats.
Creatures of Sonaria is in development as an animated series with Wind Sun Sky.
Jailbreak is also being explored as a broader media property.
Films are in development based on Roblox-born hits like Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot.
Will all of these IP remain relevant long-term? That’s uncertain. Roblox trends move quickly, and it's hard to building lasting success online. But the fact that these conversations are happening at all signals a major shift in how seriously platform-native IP is now being treated.
Strategic Paths Forward
There is no single “right” Roblox strategy. But most kids IP organizations fall into one of three paths:
Marketing-led presence: Short-term activations supporting films, shows, or launches
Product-led worlds: Persistent Roblox experiences designed to grow alongside the IP
Platform-native incubation: Using Roblox to test and develop new characters and formats before expanding elsewhere
Each path requires different capabilities, timelines, and success metrics. The key is intentionality, not experimentation for its own sake.
The Real Roblox Bottleneck Is Within Organizations
For many organizations, the biggest challenge isn’t the platform. It’s internal.
Roblox sits at the intersection of marketing, digital, licensing, consumer products, and games. Without a clear owner, progress slows. In many cases, external partners move faster than internal teams simply because they’re structured to do so. Senior leadership alignment matters more than platform knowledge.
Why Roblox Is Surfacing at Kidscreen
Kidscreen has historically been focused on content, licensing, and distribution.
Roblox forces a broader conversation:
Interactive IP
Persistent worlds
Creator ecosystems
Community-led growth
That’s why these discussions are increasingly showing up at Kidscreen and similar industry forums. The industry is being forced to reconcile old models with new consumer behavior.
What Comes Next
I’ll be speaking at Kidscreen Summit in San Diego this month in a session called What You Need to Know: Kids & Roblox about how Roblox fits into the evolving kids entertainment landscape, including:
How kids actually use the platform
What types of experiences are resonating
Key platform developments shaping the ecosystem
I’ve also collaborated with Kidscreen on two Roblox-focused sessions:
Roblox Ready: Smart Pathways to Brand Activations: Service providers will share how they’ve helped brands succeed through custom games, integrations, animation, and licensing.
Participating companies: Sawhorse Productions, Epic Story Worlds, Wonder Works Studio, Exclusible, Moonbug Entertainment, Barrier Four, Skylight Media Group.
Mixer with the Makers: Roblox Creators: A relaxed mixer where developers showcase their games and field questions directly.
Participating games: Adopt Me!, Shovelware's Brain Game, Brookhaven, Dandy's World, Gacha Online, Emergency Response: Liberty County, Japan Claw Machine Arcade, Survive Overnight in a Mega Store
I’m also organizing a casual UGC gaming meetup during the event for those who want to continue the conversation. Here's a link to RSVP for that meetup.
The Question Senior Leaders Should Be Asking
The question is no longer whether Roblox matters.
It’s whether your IP strategy reflects how kids are actually discovering, engaging with, and forming preferences today.
If your biggest franchise launched now, would Roblox be part of it on day one? That answer will matter more with every passing year.
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