In the blocky world of Chipotle Burrito Builder, players don the uniform of the Tex-Mex restaurant chain to make burritos for virtual customers. The available toppings are taken from Chipotle’s real-world menu. Your shirt and cap are emblazoned with the Chipotle logo. And when the game launched two years ago, the first 100,000 players could earn “Burrito Bucks” to exchange for a prize on Chipotle’s website.
Then there’s Hyundai Mobility Adventure that lets you test-drive models of the Korean manufacturer’s cars. Samsung Galaxy Station gives you a mock-up of the company’s latest smartphone to take around extraterrestrial worlds. Telefónica Town challenges you to climb an assault course built of products from the telecommunication giant’s catalogue. Vans World simply hands you a skateboard with which to bust a few kickflips across a park plastered with the shoe manufacturer’s logo.
These are just a fraction of the corporate theme parks available in Roblox, one of the world’s most popular online video game platforms that brought in an average of 77 million players every day at the beginning of the year. Especially big with children and younger players (58% of users self-reported to be aged 16 and under at the end of last year), Roblox lets you hang out in fantastical virtual worlds and play games that usually involve some combination of jumping around obstacles, finding hidden collectibles, and role-playing different jobs, much as kids might do in the playground.
The platform’s big sell, however, is its rudimentary development tools that allow anyone with even the sparsest computer know-how to create and share their own video games. The toolset is limited by design, but over the past few years has attracted more than just aspiring game developers. It’s made Roblox a favourite playground of corporate advertisers, who have used the development tools to construct branded Roblox games to share among the game’s multimillion-player audience.
These advergames (adverts presented in the format of a video game), typically splash corporate branding over a set of game mechanics simple enough for Roblox’s young player base. And despite broader allegations of a lack of child safeguarding levelled against Roblox (which they deny), corporates are rushing to build them. Brands from Walmart to Wimbledon, McDonald’s to Gucci, Nike to the BBC have all launched advergames on the platform. Some have been visited hundreds of thousands of times, others tens of millions, all while Roblox courts further brand involvement by touting its huge, young user base as a big draw in a crowded advertising market.
“In the context of the attention economy, where consumers are bombarded with hundreds or even thousands of ads a day, capturing and maintaining attention is crucial,” says Yusuf Öç, associate professor in marketing at Bayes Business School, City, University of London. “Even though we are exposed to thousands of ads every day, we don’t remember many of them. Advergames, by integrating the brand message into the game, bypass these filters more effectively.”
Öç’s own research has found that adverts that make use of interactive features such as touching, swiping or tilting a phone screen, can influence a consumer’s preferences and buying intentions. Roblox enables brands to channel those interactive elements in a ready-made, engaging space.
“Roblox’s popularity among younger demographics opens up new avenues for reaching and engaging with the next generation of consumers in a space where they are already active and invested,” says Robert Jan van Dormael, vice-president of marketing consumer audio at the Samsung subsidiary Harman.
One of Harman’s own hi-fi brands, JBL, launched an official Roblox game in February that allows players to gather audio snippets to arrange in custom tracks, and explore a pastel-coloured world to collect a virtual currency that can be spent on cosmetic headphones and portable speakers – all accurately modelled after real JBL products. Since launching, it has been visited by 1.4 million players. And with an average playtime of more than six minutes, its engagement metrics are several orders of magnitude greater than the two or three seconds a person typically spends reading a social media post. For advertisers, that’s valuable one-on-one time with teenagers.
Stealth tactics
There’s nothing especially new about advergames. Back in 1983, Coca-Cola commissioned a reskinned version of Space Invaders that replaced the game’s extraterrestrials with letters of the Pepsi logo. They would reel it out at trade shows to have attenders destroy the rival soft drinks manufacturer before it reached Earth. The same year, Mattel published an official Kool-Aid Man video game to promote the American drink, and mega-popular multiplayer shooter Fortnite has more recently built a commercial empire through endless third-party crossovers.
At the more rudimentary end, companies have, over the last couple of decades, released free promotional games that can be played via their websites. Fast-food chains are particularly fond of using them to promote their products. Rebecca Evans, a postdoctoral research associate in psychology at the University of Liverpool, says studies show that even these advergames, although simple, are effective.
“Exposure to unhealthy food marketing in traditional advergames is associated with greater preferences for, and more positive attitudes towards, marketed unhealthy foods and brands, and also greater subsequent consumption of these foods,” says Evans.
More sophisticated advergames, like those that appear in Roblox, could have even greater effects on shaping consumer preference: “Something called ‘meaning transfer’ can happen, where positive feelings towards the game are transposed on to the advertised brand or product,” says Evans. “The advertising is more integrated or subtle, so young people are less likely to recognise it as advertising, to think about it critically, and engage consumer defences: what is the real motive behind this advergame or brand world?”
It is an especially pertinent question in the case of Roblox, which doesn’t require brands to disclose their advergames as adverts. To adults and children alike, the corporate-produced promotional worlds of Roblox look nearly indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of other games made by ordinary players. It gives them a camouflage that allows companies to present more effectively their messages, products and brands to those who may otherwise show little interest.
But what some have seen as an effective new realm of advertising, others consider a potential danger to vulnerable consumers. In April 2022, the American advertising watchdog Truth in Advertising (Tina) filed a complaint with US and UK advertising regulators claiming Roblox allowed advertising to be surreptitiously interlaced with organic content, and that the tens of millions of children who played Roblox every day were being immersed in adverts without their knowing.
Roblox has since revamped its advertising guidelines and requires any adverts on the platform to be clearly disclosed and hidden from all users under the age of 13. But not in the case of advergames.
“Because Roblox does not appear to enforce its own advertising standards and has reportedly taken the position that branded virtual worlds on its platform don’t constitute advertising, other brands have simply continued deceptively marketing to kids and other users unfettered,” says Tina legal director Laura Smith. She would like to see regulators step in “with a heavy hand” to control the presentation of these advergames to children.
Yet how that happens in the UK is itself a muddled question. The Advertising Standards Authority tells the Observer that it hasn’t seen any examples of Roblox advergames where it needs to take action. It says that, while Roblox is played by children across the UK, it is a US-based corporation and so is, by default, not within the regulator’s jurisdiction. Compare that to television adverts that are subject to the ASA’s clear, robust, 153-page Code of Broadcast Advertising, which includes a whole section dedicated to protecting children from “physical, mental or moral harm”.
The ASA could take action under certain conditions. But in practice, says Geraint Lloyd-Taylor, a partner at the law firm Lewis Silkin, it would regulate these sorts of advergames only if they were controlled or funded from the UK, were placed on a UK-based platform, or appeared on a UK-hosted website – leaving the majority of Roblox advergames to slip through the cracks.
It’s an omission that the charity 5Rights, which advocates for children’s digital rights, thinks highlights the blind spots of current regulation: “Our issue is not whose responsibility it is, but that it must be someone’s to ensure that children are not exploited for commercial purposes,” says executive director Leanda Barrington-Leach. “Disguising ads as games and marketing them to children is not acceptable and the UK regulatory authorities must hold all stakeholders, from the advertisers to the platforms, responsible for respecting children’s rights.”
A Roblox spokesperson compared the way advergames are played on its platform to the way people interact with brands elsewhere, such as watching a film inspired by a brand’s IP. They further added: “For independently created brand content that is published to the platform, Roblox provides creators and brands with educational information, based on regulatory guidance, to help them determine whether their content is an ad, as well as the ability to disclose advertising content on the platform.”
Virtual expansion
In the meantime, the Roblox advergaming industry is only growing. The Gang, a Swedish game development studio, was established in 2019 to create branded Roblox games on behalf of other companies, and has since worked with the likes of Amazon, Spotify and Fifa. It estimates that the number of advergames on Roblox has now reached over 500 – up from about 150 at the end of 2022.
But don’t expect every brand to appear on the platform. “Unlike traditional media where audiences are broadcast to, on Roblox players have to choose to go into and interact with a branded game,” says managing director of The Gang, Max Proctor. “No one is forced to consume branded content. That means brands have to create good enough content that audiences want to interact with.”
Some companies are already looking for new ways to expand the current advergame model. Last month, Ikea launched a branded Roblox world where players could experience not the shopfront itself but the “working world of Ikea”, and announced that it would be hiring a handful of people to role-play employees of a virtual store. Before that, Walmart announced it would be the first retailer to sell real-world stock directly through the platform.
For Öç, interactive platforms such as Roblox – or streaming services that have already begun tentatively rolling out playable adverts for adult subscribers – are pointing the way towards the future of digital marketing. “As other digital and traditional ad formats become less effective due to advertising clutter and the overwhelming number of ads that consumers encounter daily, platforms that offer engaging, gamified experiences provide a valuable alternative” – even if it’s a marketing model which has been trained on unsuspecting children.
