Picture this: football, Roblox, and SpongeBob SquarePants.
Weird? Very. But Gamefam CEO Joe Ferencz says it was a winning combination that helped the startup score big during this year’s Super Bowl. Gamefam created the surreal five-game metaverse competition (which apparently involves SpongeBob avatar rewards) in partnership with Paramount and it turned out to be among the startup’s biggest hits of the year.
“We delivered 75 million visits to this promotion, and almost 350 million brand engagements in one billion minutes of play time,” Ferencz gushes. “Those stats would have made it the number ten all-time branded game on Roblox.”
That’s kind of a big deal—even if you’ve opted to stop caring about “the metaverse” since it fell out of vogue. Turns out, there’s life in the metaverse after all, at least in some corners of it.
Gamefam, whose backers include Bessemer Venture Partners and Play Ventures, today released its annual report, “State of Brands on Roblox and Fortnite.” The report paints a clear picture of an industry that isn’t dead by any means: By 2030, Gamefam projects that there will be 900 million metaverse gamers and the market size will reach $168.4 billion.
Gamefam, which works with companies to introduce their intellectual property to Gen Z and Alpha on metaverse platforms, has worked with Disney, Mattel, and Fifa. These companies are interested in Roblox, as they try to get in front of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. (Gen Z and Alpha spend 39% more time on Roblox and Fortnite than TikTok and YouTube, according to Gamefam’s research.)
"Roblox is becoming an absolutely critical media platform, period,” said Ferencz, who’s been the CEO of Gamefam since 2019.
Roblox stock is up more than 30% over the course of this year, and it has 90 million daily active users, up about 29% year-over-year, per Gamefam’s report. In 2025, Ferencz expects that Roblox will attract more attention from brands.
“Every major brand and IP owner is going to start understanding that Roblox is the next YouTube,” said Ferencz. “Roblox is no longer a niche or subculture, but has become culture itself for Gen Z and Gen Alpha.”
I asked Ferencz about the now-tarnished word “metaverse.” Though he ultimately prefers UGC (user-generated content) gaming, he isn’t hung up on terminology.
"The term metaverse was highly polluted by the NFT craze, which may or may not be coming back,” said Ferencz. “Nonetheless, the fundamentals of NFTs are that they’re a collection craze, for the sake of a collection. That’s great when it’s working. When it’s not, it doesn’t work. There’s no fundamental intrinsic value to these things, right? But when it comes to Roblox and gameplay—entertainment does have intrinsic value. People need entertainment. People need fun."
And what’s more fun than SpongeBob in a football helmet?
ICYMI…My colleague Leo Schwartz scooped the news that Slow Ventures is raising $275 million across two new funds.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.
Nina Ajemian curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
