Gamefam closes year of growth with 5 of top 15 branded games on Roblox
Gamefam said that its branded games on Roblox and Fortnite have exceeded 2.7 billion brand engagements in 2024. …
Gamefam, a metaverse media company for Gen Z and Alpha communities, said in its second annual report that its branded games on Roblox and Fortnite have exceeded 2.7 billion brand engagements in 2024.
The State of Brands on Roblox and Fortnite report noted that Gamefam, which makes games on Roblox and Fortnite, is the No. 1 fastest-growing private company in the media industry in 2024, according to the Inc. 5,000 list.
Gamefam continued to lead with their development of fan-favorite standalone brand games, holding claim to five of the top 15 brand games of all time on Roblox. During the year, Gamefam’s Sonic Speed Simulator became the first brand game ever on Roblox to cross a billion visits, said Joe Ferencz, CEO of GamesBeat, in an interview with GamesBeat.
“It was a huge growth year for the company. Our portfolio is now at 63 million daily visits, including either ownership or exclusive partnerships with a suite of the top 25 games on Roblox,” Ferencz said. “So that’s been really exciting to see that happen, and the reason why is that our live ops practices and our brand partnerships business are extremely attractive to top Roblox developers to collaborate with.”
He added, “We’ve been able to connect not only our own portfolio, but also a partnership portfolio that extends into the tens of millions of daily visits and tens of millions of DAU so that’s been really exciting.”
With Roblox and Fortnite exploding in popularity and their corresponding rise in meaningful advertising and marketing opportunities, 2024 proved to be a crucial year for brands, Hollywood studios and talent to think strategically and leverage these platforms to engage younger generations.
As brand marketers become more familiar with activating on Roblox and Fortnite, Gamefam has led the charge in helping them shift their thinking from just showing up to building programs that generate measurable scale and impact.
At the same time, Gamefam continued to generate return-on-investment for brands with custom integrations and activations within its portfolio of the most popular Roblox and Fortnite games that maintain massive player bases, generating 1.7 billion brand engagements in 2024 via this approach.
Ferencz said the integrations can take a number of forms. With Ubisoft, Gamefam partnered to put the French game company’s Brawlhalla into popular Gamefam games. That guarantees that a certain size of audience will notice the brand integraiton, in comparison to starting a brand new game.
“We have five of the top 15 Roblox games of all time, so we advise few brands to make a standalone game,” Ferencz said. “Roblox is still a relatively small revenue stream by global gaming standards for individual games. The entire payout pool for roadblocks will probably hit $1 billion to developers this year. It’s highly levered to the top-end games, and with a $1 billion payout pool total that’s still significantly smaller than any of the top individual mobile free to play games.”
He added, “So we’re advising video game companies: You need to be on Roblox, but you need at this time to make sure that you’re driving back to your core business streams while starting to think about how Roblox can be a revenue generating platform in its current setup for you over the next five years.”
Gamefam’s strategic vision for brands and ensuing success have led to a sea change with over 400 brands activating on Roblox to date, nearly doubling last year’s total and showing a 560% increase from 2022. Similarly, Fortnite saw massive brand interest with a 330% increase since 2022 in the number of brands that created games or integrations on Fortnite.
“Roblox and Fortnite are the preferred media platforms for Gen Z & Alpha, and brands need to have a metaverse strategy in order to retain and gain cultural relevance with the younger generations,” said Ferencz. “With over half a billion monthly active users across Roblox and Fortnite, the time for brands to be on these platforms is now or they risk falling behind the competitors who are moving quickly to establish share of voice, mind and heart with today’s most valuable consumers and fans.”
Gamefam’s 2024 achievements
Topping the Charts and Reaching New Milestones with Hit Roblox Games: Gamefam was the developer and operator behind four of the top 10 brand games on Roblox (by total visits in 2024) including Mattel’s Barbie DreamHouse Tycoon (No. 1 brand game on Roblox in 2024), SEGA’s Sonic Speed Simulator (No. 2 in 2024, No. 1 brand game on Roblox of all time), Paramount’s SpongeBob Simulator (No. 8 in 2024), and Paramount’s TMNT Battle Tycoon (No. 9 in 2024).
Maximizing Cultural Moments (like the Super Bowl) Through Roblox: Building on the Super Bowl LVII success (No. 1 Roblox concert of all time), Gamefam again partnered with the NFL and brought them together with Paramount to launch a five-game Super Bowl LVIII quest on Roblox. The NFL and Paramount reached the next generation of football fans as this 30-day activation became the No. 1 multi-game brand event on Roblox with over 75 million total visits and 985 million minutes of brand engagement.
Bringing the Box Office & Streaming to the Metaverse: Gamefam worked with studios behind movies and shows to promote their content to millions of players on Roblox and Fortnite before, during and after their global premieres.
Specifically, Gamefam worked with Sony Pictures to build a 4-game takeover on Roblox for The Garfield Movie, resulting in the biggest multi-game movie campaign on Roblox with 31 million visits. Additionally, Gamefam partnered with Paramount to develop the first playable story to promote the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles streaming series on Paramount+. Gamefam developed other unique integrations and experiences for all of the top studios, for movies including Sony Pictures’ Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Disney’s Inside Out 2 and Disney’s Moana 2.
Rocking on Roblox: Following last year’s success with Saweetie’s Super Bowl LVII concert (No. 1 Roblox concert of all time) and Cher’s holiday album launch activation, Gamefam continued to jam out with Gen Z & Alpha in the metaverse.
In 2024, Gamefam and Warner Music Group teamed up again to bring seven-time Grammy winner Coldplay to Roblox for the first time with a multi-game takeover to celebrate the launch of the band’s new album Moon Music. The campaign resulted in 25+ million visits and 295 million minutes of brand engagement, equivalent to listening to Moon Music 6.7 million times.
Helping Brands Achieve Scale on Roblox and Fortnite: In 2024, Gamefam worked on over 60+ campaigns and games. Gamefam launched the first official Roblox game for Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants, teamed up with gaming icon and legendary streamer Ninja for his first-ever Fortnite game takeover in Gamefam’s popular Infinite ZoneWars 2.0, and created integrations for countless brands including Samsung, Moose Toys, Skechers, Lego, FIFA and Spin Master.
In recognition of the company’s trailblazing work, Gamefam was honored with 30+ prestigious awards in 2024. Those included Great Place to Work, Inc. 5000 (No. 1 fastest-growing private company in the media industry), Fast Company Best Workplaces for Innovators, The Stevie Awards for Great Employers and Deloitte Technology Fast 500, among others.
In 2022, Gamefam faced complaints about its pay and crunch from employees/contractors who were unhappy, but Gamefam said it has tried to address issues in bringing more professional practices to its workforce; it noted its Great Place to Work survey showed 90% of employees said this year it was a great place to work, up from 81% the year before.
Gamefam and many of its partners were named winners of advertising campaign award programs including the Clio Sports Awards (4x winner), Clio Entertainment Awards (3x winner), The Drum Awards (5x winner), Webby Awards and Campaign Tech Awards, among many others.
For the past few years, Roblox and Fortnite have been solidified as the preferred platform of choice for Gen Z and Alpha, with users spending 144 minutes per day on Roblox compared to TikTok (112 minutes per day) and YouTube (70 minutes per day), according to Qustodio.
This year, Roblox exploded to more than 89 million daily users (29% increase YoY) and was an instrumental tool for brands looking to reach Gen Z and Alpha.
Brand games on Roblox accumulated over 1.4 billion visits with 15.8 billion minutes spent in these games. This is especially meaningful at a time when traditional kids’ TV ratings have collapsed up to 90%.4
While this space is still new, brands are already learning about what is working most effectively for them. In 2024, there was a shift in brands building integrations rather than standalone games.
For all brands, especially IP that is non-endemic to gaming, integrations allow them to reach communities of millions of players in the leading games on Roblox and Fortnite, delivering meaningful and active engagement at scale.
This year, 57% of brands built integrations, and 43% built standalone experiences whereas in 2023, 37% of brands built integrations and 63% built standalone experiences. The 20 percentage point increase in brands building integrations proves marketers understand activations within popular games deliver immediate value.
Ricardo Briceno, chief business officer at Gamefam, said in a statement, “The shift toward integrating into popular games with millions of daily users, rather than building standalone experiences, makes sense because brands are recognizing the value of reaching players where they already hang out. By embedding themselves into these vibrant communities, brands not only create meaningful, authentic engagement but also secure their long-term connection with the generations shaping today’s culture and tomorrow’s discretionary spend.”
Roblox had a lot of issues this year with parents complaining about child safety. By November, the company updated its child-safety policies and launched new tech. Ferencz said his company works to adhere to all of Roblox is Terms of Service and safety compliance protocols. But he said Gamefam goes farther than that by helping the children’s advertising review unit so it can help brands understand safety protocols on Roblox. He’s also on the board of a local nonprofit in Los Angeles.
“We are doing everything we can, both in collaboration with Roblox and with our brand partners to ensure we are at the highest standards of children’s safety,” he said.
More Brands Will Turn to Roblox and Fortnite in 2025
With more than 1,000 total brand games and campaigns from 500+ unique brands appearing on Roblox and Fortnite to date, expectations for 2025 are higher than they have ever been. As marketers now understand their audience-building and engagement potential, Gamefam expects to see a bigger influx of investment from brands on these platforms.
2025 will offer a breakout opportunity for sports properties and brands that are non-endemic to gaming across spaces like consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, restaurants and technology, among others. Early predictions for the rest of the decade continue to be highly positive, with the metaverse as a whole projected to have over 2.6 billion users by 2030.
The popularity of Roblox and Fortnite with young demographics mean difficulties for brands in traditional spaces. Ferencz said that young folks are really sort of living in inside these worlds, and they’re not coming out for streaming videos and things like that.
“That is the propellant for for the brands here. If they’re not engaging with the new generation, that’s that’s doom for them because their brand will disappear as those people get older. If you’re not gaining relevancy on Roblox and Fornite, you are losing relevancy on Roblox and Fortnite,” he said.
The Roblox and Fortnite generations are necessarily playing console games or mobile games as much. That could be a whole generation of fans that multi-generational brands like Disney are missing out on.
“They’re watching video content on YouTube and TikTok, and they’re in a closed loop of UGC gaming culture. And so we have been passionate about helping the brands and characters and gaming companies that we love start to navigate and capture value in this space,” Ferencz said.
With TMNT, Gamefam made a playable cutscene and the campaign generated 37 million visits. Brawlhalla was integrated with the popular TMNT game, allowing Brawlhalla to get a lot more views/plays (and rewards for players) than it otherwise would with a brand new game.
In a campaign that combined SpongeBob with the NFL and Paramount in the first quarter of 2024, Gamefam delivered a five-game cross-platform quest that generated 350 million validated brand engagements for a billion minutes of face time with Roblox players, Ferencz said.
“We won three Golden Cleos just this month for this campaign,” he said.
Talent search
As for the talent, Ferencz said the company has a lot of leadership from game companies like Electronic Arts and Zynga while it also has a lot of Roblox natives who grew up making Roblox games. There are more than 100 people at the company, but Ferencz does not share the exact number.
Gamefam also has its new Gamefam Creator Fund that is investing in indie Roblox development teams. The investments from the past six months have resulted in games with about 8,000 concurrent players to date, Ferencz said.
“I think we really believe that when it comes to original IP on Roblox, you cannot compete with the Roblox developer community. There are just too many smart, motivated developers working around the world to make things that you would never have thought to make, and that is what powers Roblox,” he said.
And if he can’t beat them, Ferencz will join them, sometimes by acquiring promising games and matching them up with a brand. War Tycoon is a good example of that, as Gamefam acquired it a few years ago and it has grown revenue around 800% since the deal.
Predictions for 2025
Here are Ferencz’s hot take predictions on how the Roblox and Fortnite will impact the marketing and media world as well as broader culture:
“Roblox will become equally important to YouTube and TikTok for Hollywood movie marketing, specifically as in-game integrations like Fandango start offering a direct purchase funnel with strong measurable impact.”
“2025 will be when in-game advertising on Roblox becomes a must-have piece of the media plan for every Fortune 100 brand looking to reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers.”
“Roblox will break 500 million monthly active users in 2025, on its way to 1+ billion by 2030.”
“In 2025, one or more of the big four US sports leagues (NBA, NHL, MLB, NFL) will use Roblox or Fortnite to break major news about the league, its teams and/or players.”
“By 2026, Fortnite’s Disney platform will become a top three digital entertainment experience for six to 12 year olds.”
“An original IP born from Roblox will become a blockbuster animated film by 2030, alongside apparel, toys and other IRL spinoffs.”
“Marketers are realizing Roblox and Fortnite strategies are necessary to reach new, young audiences in active ways, which is way more effective than the passive marketing we’re used to seeing,” he added. “Metaverse gaming isn’t a fad, and it’s not going to stop with Roblox and Fortnite… we have our eyes on platforms like Everywhere and Horizon Worlds as the next frontier for Gen Z and Alpha engagement. With Gamefam’s expertise and top portfolio in metaverse gaming, we’re in the best position to deliver unique and captivating brand experiences with massive scale and groundbreaking IP collaborations.”
