Gaming is one of the largest entertainment categories on the planet, which should be enough for your brand to offer a branded gaming experience.
There are roughly 3.6 billion players globally, more than the combined population of the Americas, Europe, and Oceania.
By most measures, it should be the default channel in every media plan. And yet, it accounts for only around 5% of global advertising investment. (Havas Play, The Attention Revolution, 2026)
That gap is not an accident. It's the result of a genuine structural problem: gaming is fragmented in a way that makes traditional media planning feel impossible.
Across PC, console, and mobile; across thousands of titles, platforms, and communities; there is no single buying unit, no centralised inventory, no obvious equivalent to booking a page in a newspaper or a slot in a primetime break.
Platforms like Overwolf have made meaningful strides in aggregating in-game advertising, but for most CMOs and media planners, the space still feels like a foreign country with no guidebook.
When attention delivered through gaming is measured in minutes where other formats deliver seconds, the underspend looks even more absurd.(Havas Play, The Attention Revolution, 2026)
So brands face a familiar paradox: a massive, engaged audience they can't easily reach through their existing playbook.
But then you have Roblox
In a fragmented landscape, Roblox is something genuinely different. It is a single, unified platform with over 380 million monthly active users and 144 million people logging in every single day. (Roblox Corporation, Q4 2025 Shareholder Letter)
Users spent 124 billion hours on the platform in 2025, more than the total hours logged across Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined. (Matthew Ball, State of Video Gaming 2026)
Average daily time spent sits at around 2.8 hours per user. (Roblox Corporation, Q3 2025) Roblox is not just challenging Netflix for total engagement; it is starting to win.
If you are trying to reach a young, highly engaged audience and you are looking for one place where you can show up with real scale and real attention, Roblox is it.
The comparison that feels most apt is YouTube in 2010: a single destination, a massive and growing user base, and a category of brand partnership that most marketers had not yet fully figured out. The brands that leaned in early built equity that has compounded ever since.
The same opportunity exists here, now, on Roblox, for branded gaming experiences.
And importantly, while the audience skews young, it is not exclusively so. The fastest-growing demographic on Roblox is 17 to 24 year olds, with 27% of verified users aged 18 and over. (Roblox Corporation, Q4 2025 Shareholder Letter)) This is not just a kids' platform. It is a cultural platform.
Two ways brands can show up
Roblox is not a single format. It is a channel. And like any channel, there are different ways to be present in it, each suited to different objectives.
The first is owned and operated: build your own world. This means creating a branded gaming experience that lives on Roblox as a permanent asset, something players can return to, share, and engage with over time.
Done well, it becomes part of the platform's fabric, discoverable by millions of users who may never have encountered your brand elsewhere.
This is the model we use when we build for clients like the NHL and DreamWorks: bespoke, immersive worlds that are true to the brand's identity and designed for long-term engagement. An owned experience is, in effect, owned media - a channel you control, that works for you around the clock.
The second is campaign-based: show up for a moment, land a message. Not every brand objective calls for a permanent presence.
Sometimes you have a specific campaign window, a product launch, a message you need to land with a specific audience, and a time-limited branded experience can deliver that with extraordinary efficiency.
The most awarded example of this model is a campaign we built with IKEA and Mother London. Rather than a traditional recruitment campaign, IKEA opened a fully functional virtual store on Roblox, complete with seven job-role mini-games, an authentic Swedish Bistro, and real paid positions for ten virtual co-workers.
The result: 178,000 applications in two weeks, more than Love Island and The X Factor combined, a 50% increase in real-world job applications, and over 16 billion earned media impressions. (The Gang / Mother London, IKEA Co-Worker campaign results, 2024) It won Gold at The Drum Awards and a Bronze Lion at Cannes Lions 2025.
The campaign worked not because it was a stunt, but because the format fit the objective perfectly: let people experience what it is like to work at IKEA, rather than just telling them.
These two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Some brands start campaign-based and graduate to always-on. Others build a permanent world and use campaign moments to drive spikes in traffic. The channel is flexible enough to accommodate both.
Branded gaming experience as a deeper opportunity: a new dimension of brand storytelling
Here is what is easy to miss when you frame this as a media question: branded gaming experiences do not just give you a new place to put a logo. They open up a fundamentally different relationship between a brand and its audience.
Traditional brand storytelling, whether broadcast, social, or scroll-based, is largely one-directional. You produce something. The audience receives it. Even at its most interactive, it is a monologue dressed up as a conversation.
A branded game changes that entirely. Through game mechanics and playable loops, you are creating a system that your audience navigates, one that communicates your values, your personality, your product story not through what you say, but through what you invite people to do.
When a player levels up inside a virtual IKEA store by mastering the kind of lateral career move that defines IKEA's culture, they are not being told that IKEA is a great place to work. They are experiencing it. That distinction - between message received and message lived - is where branded gaming experiences earns its edge over almost any other format.
It is also a format that generates genuine time spent. Not an impression measured in milliseconds. Not a video that was technically "viewed" while someone scrolled past. Minutes. Sessions. Return visits. The attention brands struggle to earn elsewhere, gaming delivers as a function of good design.
So: what does your brand look like when you make it playable?
If you have a campaign that needs to reach a young audience with genuine engagement, not just impressions, what does it look like as a game?
If you have a brand story that feels like it loses something in a thirty-second format, what opens up when you give people a world to explore instead?
If you have been watching the attention gap between where your audience spends its time and where your media spend goes, what would it take to close it?
These are the questions we love working through with brands and creative agencies. At The Gang, we build games for brands - from permanent owned experiences to campaign-based activations - and we do it with the strategic and creative rigour the best brand work demands.
If you want to explore what a branded gaming experience could look like for your brand or your next campaign, get in touch. We would love to talk.