Viral Roblox Hits Fuel Record-Surge in Time Spent by Gen Alpha and Z, Drawing Attention of Global Brands
In its annual “State of Brands in UGC Gaming” report, Gamefam finds unprecedented brand presence on Roblox with over 210 brands flocking to the platform in 2025 alone, reflecting consistent growth year after year
LOS ANGELES, DEC. 18, 2025 – Gamefam, the leading immersive gaming and media company for Gen Z & Alpha communities, today unveiled its annual “State of Brands in UGC Gaming” report, including insights into the trajectory of Roblox as the most powerful media platform for reaching Gen Alpha and Gen Z, as well as results from Gamefam’s most successful year to date.
The report comes as Roblox ascended to record, jaw-dropping numbers in 2025 off the back of viral games like Grow A Garden, Steal a Brainrot and 99 Nights in the Forest. At its peak, Roblox saw over 42 million concurrent users (CCU), which is triple Fortnite’s all-time peak CCU and bigger than the peak CCU of all Steam games combined, making it a feat never before seen in the video game industry.
Joe Ferencz, CEO & Founder at Gamefam, said: “Entering the year, Roblox’s growth had been steady and formidable, but 2025 beat everyone’s expectations and elevated the platform to new heights. We’re now in an era of viral gaming on Roblox from Grow a Garden to Steal a Brainrot to the next big title, and new daily usage milestones are being hit every quarter – this is a testament to Roblox’s momentum as a social platform, cultural force, and creation engine for novel IP and community building that no other platform can offer. Roblox is not just where young players and fans are gaming, it is the go-to place where they spend social and leisure time. There’s no time like the present as brands who activate on Roblox will win with Gen Z and Alpha, and those who don’t are already losing relevance. Roblox has become the dominant platform for media for this generation.”
In 2025 so far, over 210 unique brands have activated on Roblox, reflecting consistent growth year after year¹. For many, activations have resulted in notable business impact IRL. Notably, 2025 also brought an uptick in activations across the Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000, with companies like Mattel, Hasbro, Gap, Paramount, and others returning to the platform. When broken down by sector, brands from the media, entertainment and toy vertical hosted the most activations on Roblox this year, followed by fashion and apparel, and then sports. Out of this year’s top 20 highest grossing movies globally, 12 activated on Roblox or Fortnite.
As Roblox’s popularity reaches new heights, Gamefam’s report details key insights for brands looking to break-through on the platform:
The Year of Roblox Virality, from Grow A Garden to Brainrot Craze: 2025 will be remembered as the year when Roblox became the TikTok of gaming – when viral games became blockbusters, one after the next. Grow A Garden led the way as the first viral hit, Steal a Brainrot followed and became even bigger and now 99 Nights in the Forest is in the spotlight. In fact, Steal a Brainrot broke the peak CCU record for any video game ever with 25.4 million players, 78% higher than Fortnite’s peak CCU. Each of these games were released in 2025 and became one of the top 10 most visited games on Roblox within just a few weeks or months of launching, and Grow a Garden already secured a movie deal in November. By contrast, it took years for the other top 10 titles to reach the same milestone. Marketers who don’t know about these games and the pace of innovation on Roblox are out of step with pop culture today.
Real World Sporting Events Cross Over Well Into Roblox – but make sure you “play” it right. The NFL and FIFA scored big by integrating into two of the top sports games on Roblox. For the NFL, they brought Super Bowl LIX to their popular game NFL Universe Football for a limited-time event featuring the Super Bowl teams and exclusive avatar rewards. For FIFA, hit game Super League Soccer offered a 1-1 fit for a FIFA Club World Cup event, given its massive engaged audience of soccer fans. It not only engaged the huge Super League Soccer player base, with more than 5.5 million hours played during the takeover, but also became a major opportunity for commercial partners to activate alongside FIFA in the game including Visa, Lenovo, Motorola Solutions and more, garnering 324 million impressions. The event impacted viewership as 61% of participants noted they watched or planned to watch FIFA Club World Cup 2025™.
Roblox Users Continue To Rock Out. From Virgin Music Group to Kidz Bop to Universal Music Group, music companies and labels are seeing the way to get Gen A and Z singing and dancing is by introducing artists and their music in authentic ways where they already hang out. The numbers were jaw dropping with Lady Gaga recording 90 million visits in a one-week integration in Dress to Impress and Glass Animals recording 60 million visits and 4 million peak CCU in a one-day event in Grow a Garden. Uniquely, with upcoming R&B artist SAILORR, the industry saw one of the first Gen Z artists who grew up playing on Roblox come to the platform for an activation of her own in one of her favorite games Baddies – more cases of Gen Z superstars turning to Roblox are expected. Beyond integrations into popular games, music games also thrived as there was a 39% uptick in time spent in music games in 2025 compared to 2024.
Retail & Fashion Brands Found Their Groove on Roblox. Fashion and apparel brands have been activating on Roblox for several years without effectively building scale, but 2025 proved to be bigger than ever for them. Adidas activated with an integration into Catalog Avatar Creator, a massively popular game for a large portion of the year, earning 1.4 billion visits, which makes it the biggest apparel brand campaign on Roblox to date. The retail results aren’t just measured in visits, but also the buzz and brand lift generated. For example, Old Navy ran a novel campaign featuring a 3-game takeover and a fully integrated program across Roblox, YouTube and TikTok – after which players reported having significantly higher brand love and purchase intent than Roblox players who didn’t participate in the campaign. The event drew 49 million gameplay sessions, with players spending over 236K hours engaging with the Old Navy brand.
Roblox Has Over Taken Social Media for How Kids Spend Time
Roblox is the platform of choice for Gen Z and Alpha, with users spending 2.7 hours per day on Roblox² compared to TikTok (2 hours per day), Instagram (1.3 hours) and YouTube (1.2 hours per day)³. This year, Roblox exploded to more than 151 million daily users (70% increase YoY) and was an instrumental tool for brands looking to reach Gen Z and Alpha. The top 5 brand campaigns on Roblox from properties like Adidas and Wicked resulted in over 3 billion visits combined, displaying how brands can benefit from the virality of the most popular Roblox games. This visibility is especially meaningful at a time when traditional kids’ TV ratings have plummeted⁴. Notably, Roblox content also spills into other platforms. On YouTube, Roblox-related content surpassed 1 trillion lifetime views this year, a milestone that’s only been met by one other game – Minecraft – in YouTube’s 20-year history.
2026 Projections and Anticipated Trends
Early predictions for the rest of the decade continue to be highly positive, with UGC gaming as a whole projected to have over 943 million users by 2030⁵. Drawing from over 6 years of experience as a leading media company on Roblox and other UGC gaming platforms, whose portfolio attracted over 16 million daily gameplay sessions this year, Gamefam’s CEO Joe Ferencz shared the following predictions about the ecosystem’s trajectory:
“This era of viral gaming on Roblox will offer the biggest IP collaborations for brands. Roblox offers a platform where brands from food to financial services to apparel can host brand collabs with the most adored global IPs like the Ninja Turtles and Sonic that can’t be achieved at scale on any other platform. We’ve done it time and time again at Gamefam, including our recent IP mashup for Ubisoft’s Brawlhalla with the Ninja Turtles. In the next five years, real-world IPs will gain massive clout by collaborating with IPs on the platform like SpongeBob and Roblox original IPs like the next Grow A Garden and Steal a Brainrot.”
“Roblox’s cultural impact will get louder – from brick-and-mortar merchandising to movie deals to cross-social content. As the number one media and social platform for Gen A and Gen Z, Roblox will continue to take attention away from Netflix, YouTube and TikTok as the go-to source of cultural and creative output for these generations.”
“Roblox gameplay will grow up alongside Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z. Roblox is a community-first platform, and it will definitely adapt with its aging-up audience with the advent of new relevant genres, gameplay and social features that fit their needs. At the same time, Gen Beta will come on board over the next decade or two and may be the most Roblox-centric generation yet.”
“Brands will learn that the way to win is to fish where the fish are, not by trying to dig their own ponds. The most efficient and effective way for most brands to come onto the platform is by integrating into already-popular games, which offer massive scale from the first day of a campaign. A select few mega-hit IPs like Sonic or Barbie will thrive with standalone brand games, but most standalone brand games will not scale.”
Gamefam is the leading developer and brand strategist driving Roblox forward for brands like Old Navy, FIFA, Paramount, Kidz Bop, Mattel, the LEGO Group and more. During a year when Roblox set new records for daily active users, Gamefam led the charge with 10 of the top 200 Roblox games of all time and 6 of the top 25 brand/IP Roblox games of all time, including Sonic Speed Simulator (#1) and Barbie DreamHouse Tycoon (#6). In 2025, Gamefam’s Roblox portfolio recorded over 5.8 billion visits, amounting to over 37 billion lifetime visits to date. The 50-plus game portfolio drew on average 61 million hours of gameplay every month this year.
This year Gamefam and its work with leading franchises on Roblox have received unprecedented recognition, with 30+ prestigious awards in 2025. These include the Digiday Awards (Moose Toys), The Drum Awards (Moose Toys, Paramount), SportsPro Media Awards (FIFA) and Campaign Tech Awards (Coldplay), among others. As a company, Gamefam was once more recognized among the Inc. 5000 (#7 Fastest Growing Media Company), Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators and for the first time Fast Company’s Next Big Thing in Tech and Lightspeed/Nasdaq/GamesBeat Game Changers. Gamefam’s top two executives were honored by awards like Adweek Innovator 50, Adweek’s Sports Marketing MVPs and Campaign 40 Over 40.
To learn more about Gamefam, visit our official website and follow us on LinkedIn and X.
¹ Source: Roblox Brand Tracker
² Source: Roblox (Q2 2025)
³ Source: Qustodio (2024)
⁴ Source: The Wrap (2024)
⁵ Source: Statista (2025)
About Gamefam
Gamefam is the leading immersive gaming and media company for Gen Z and Alpha communities. Pairing expert brand strategists with world-class developers, Gamefam successfully delivers strategies for its brand and IP partners through an industry-leading network of games across Roblox, Fortnite and other platforms, driving reach and scale with 360-degree amplification programs informed by proprietary insights and measurement solutions. Established in 2019 as the first professional Roblox developer, Gamefam has now become the largest and most successful metaverse media company, with over 37 billion lifetime visits and 16 million average daily visits across its 50+ live-operated game portfolio on Roblox, Fortnite and other platforms. Gamefam has delivered winning metaverse strategies, games and campaigns with top IP partners including Paramount, Warner Music Group, the NFL, Netflix, Mattel, Sony, Sega, Samsung and Crunchyroll. The company successfully created three of the top 10 branded Roblox games of all time; three of the top five Roblox concerts of all time; and the first-ever brand integration into a Fortnite game. Gamefam’s top branded and original franchises include Sonic Speed Simulator, Twilight Daycare, Barbie DreamHouse Tycoon, SpongeBob Simulator, Deadpines: Zombie Survival, Obby But on a Bike HD, Super League Soccer and Car Dealership Tycoon. Gamefam has been honored by Great Place to Work®, Inc. 5000, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, LinkedIn’s Top Startups, The Clio Awards, The Webby Awards and more. For more information, visit www.gamefam.com.
Media Contact:
Kenny Mintz
Gamefam
kenneth@gamefam.com
