Inside the State of Brands in Virtual Worlds - featuring Warner Bros. Discovery

This transcript was generated from the session recording and lightly edited for readability.

Good morning. Good morning everyone. thank you so much for coming. this is really the launch of our state of brands in virtual worlds and this is a report that we’ve been doing every year and it’s kind of an important report because it’s really the single source of truth of where brands activate in virtual worlds and how often they’re activating and here we’re going to kind of talk about it live and we also have some wonderful panelists who we’re going to have some interviews with Warner Brothers and Pure Joe. So thank you for coming.

one of the things that’s very unique about this particular report that you should all see in front of you, there’s a physical copy is it’s the first time, previously we we work with our data partners, Roblox and Tapetto. and we work with our own technology at Geek to understand all of this data and aggregate it together, but for the first time, we’ve actually worked with over 50 of the top creators and studios that work with brands around this space to enrich the data in this report as well. So, we’re really excited to to reveal the numbers. one of the things that I just want to get through so that we’re all on the same page here and for those watching online, it’s really important to understand definitions. When we talk about virtual worlds, what do we mean?

Well, gaming is obviously a very big industry, but virtual worlds we would describe as userenerated content gaming platforms. So they could be Roblox, Fortnite, Meta Horizon, Zapetto. Those are what we call virtual worlds. They’re not just spaces where people go and play. They’re they’re spaces that people go and socialize as well. And actually, a player is the creator in many ways. In the same way, Instagram, an Instagram user is the creator, too.

when we talk about experiences, what we’re talking about there is we’re talking about the individual experiences inside these virtual worlds. So you might have a virtual world which is Roblox and then you would have an experience which would be grow a garden. they can be branded or non-branded by the way and integrations which you’ll hear about a lot today just because of the market dynamics. It’s where a brand goes into an already existing experience in either Fortnite which would be an island or Roblox which which is an experience. So, UGC items, when we’re talking about UGC items, what we mean is essentially skins, but it could be emotes as well.

and UGC items are across all different user generated content gaming platforms. And then when we talk about brand activations, that could be a brandowned experience, it could be a brand integration, it could be a branded skin. So activations is that sort of word that spans across every way a brand activates inside these virtual worlds. developer studios, developer studios are those companies and agencies that brands work with in order to build their experience or assist them with integrations and creators are those individuals that own experiences. So if you’re doing an integration, you might reach out directly to the person that owns the experience.

Those are creators for this report. happy to say that we included both developer studios and creators. Right. So without further ado, we’re going to go into details of this report. And to take us through it, we have Leia, our senior insights and partnerships manager. Away we go. Leila is is presenting this because she knows everything when it comes to this particular report and and did it in collaboration with marketing.

Hi everyone. thank you Charles. So at Geek we track these branded activations across virtual worlds and we do this across multiple years. And so having this data and this is now our fifth state of brands and virtual worlds report. We can start to understand the real shifts and the trends that are happening in the space. So I’m going to be presenting some of the key findings from our latest report. On the right of the screen here is a counter showing how many players were playing at the exact same time in the top 100 games on Steam on one day, October 11, 2025.

And on the left are the same concurrent players in a single Roblox experience on the same day. Now, while the Roblox experience hit that same number, it didn’t stop there. The Roblox experience actually had 26 million concurrent players, all of them playing at the same time. And this is the scale that we’re operating in now. And this is why brands can no longer treat virtual worlds as an experiment. Now, since 2020, we’ve tracked over 2,800 brand activations in total.

This is across owned integrations and UGC items. And we can really see see the trajectory here. clear growth and it was a very fast moving industry until 2025. We can see a slight dip but this is not the main story. It doesn’t mean that the market is cooling. It doesn’t mean that brands were shying away from virtual worlds now. And I’m going to the rest of this presentation essentially is going to show you why this doesn’t mean that brands were shying away from virtual worlds.

And I’m going to start with this one of the key takeaways from our state of brands and virtual worlds report. Now each year we track brand activations and understand whether they did an owned world or whether they they did an integration. And the key point is coming up here in 2025 where for the first time integrations overtook owned worlds. brands stopped creating well not stopped but they started creating less of their custom standalone builds and instead started tapping into the audiences that already exist. So they didn’t need to reach an audience and try to attract them.

Instead they were showing up in the places that the players were already in. And it’s not just the brands that are seeing this shift as well. From the survey, one of the insights is that 97% of them also shifted their business models and operations from purely building custom standalone branded worlds and now they support and manage brand integrations as well. And it didn’t stop there as well. The entire creator ecosystem is opening up to meet this increasing demand from brands and integrations.

Now this slide shows that in 2023 there were 87 unique experiences that hosted brand integrations and the orange dots are ones that did so for the first time in that year. In 2024 this went up to 144 and in 2025 this went up to 173 and 74% of these did so for the first time. So again, it’s not just brands that are creating this shift. It’s the entire infrastructure of the integration ecosystem that is opening up to meet this demand. And just at a at a brand side as well, we know that the brands are shifting their strategies, the developers are shifting their business models, the creators are opening up their spaces to allow these brands to come in, but it’s also the decision makers at the brand level that are shifting.

And from this survey, 87% of developers said that they’re working with marketing teams at at the brands and 68% are working with gaming teams. But these structures didn’t always exist. They were 61% of the developers that we surveyed said that the brand commissioning team has actually changed compared to previous years. And we see this as well in our own clients and own brand conversations. We’re moving away from innovation teams into marketing.

so we’re moving across the or the organization chart from innovation to performance. Now, where is all of this brand activity happening? Well, predominantly two platforms, Roblox and Fortnite. And these two platforms take 88% of all of the market brand activations. But this wasn’t always the case. In early years, we saw that brands when they were still testing the space. It was a very experimental and test and learn channel, they were trying out different platforms.

Some were web 3 focused, some were VR focused and it was again still a very test and learn phase. They were trying to see what worked and back then it was still very much innovation and hype piece that they were after. Whereas now, Roblox and Fortnite are the platforms that support more performancedriven objectives. And that’s why brands are leaning towards these two platforms. And the developers mirror this as well.

98% of developers and creators that we surveyed are building on one or both of these platforms. And again, this wasn’t always the case. We saw that developers had previously done integrations and brand activations on the likes of Sandbox, the Centraland, Obsess, Imperia. But again, all of these haven’t really caught up to the performancedriven objectives that brands are chasing and that Roblox and Fortnite can provide. Now I want to talk a bit about some of the brands that are entering the space but not in the sense of which industries but more whether they’re a new brand so entering the space for the first time or a repeating brand who’s coming back and doing it again.

Now in the early years naturally as a a market that was still trying to mature we saw a lot of new brands and they were taking up the majority of the pie. It was still an experiment phase. However, in 2024 and 2025 is really where we start to see a shift. Brands saw what’s working and are coming back. In 2025, 37% of all brands had done it before. So, they were coming back to do it again. They saw that it worked and they’re coming back.

Now, with this increase in repeat brands, it doesn’t mean that the market is now saturated and the market is closed. On the contrary, all of these brands that we see here on the stage entered virtual worlds for the first time in 2025. 203 new brands in the space. It’s still very much an open market. Now, when a new brand comes into the space, it has a decision to make, of course, based on its objectives, based on its budgets.

Will it do an owned world or will it do an integration? Now, in the early years, owned worlds was the predominant strategy. This was the way to show up, and it was the playbook. You want, you were a brand, you wanted to show up on Roblox. You created an owned world. And it worked. Players were excited about seeing their favorite brands popping up into the spaces that they liked. And it was novel back then.

Integrations were barely existing. But in 2024 is where we really start to see the balance shift. We’re seeing more and more integration start to appear. Brands are moving away from building their custom standalone world that require significant budget, significant timelines, and a lot of investment and buyin at the brand level into integrations which are much quicker to iterate, much quicker to achieve with lower budgets, and you’re already tapping into an audience that is existing. And on the flip side of this, one of the insights from the survey is that 57% of developers that we surveyed saw fewer brandowned worlds launched.

and of those that did end up proceeding, 53% saw reduced brand budgets. But this isn’t to say that owned worlds are dead and no brand is doing it and no brand should do it and no brand is succeeding at it. It’s just that the strategy, the default strategy for brands entering the space is shifted. Now, behind me here is a leaderboard of the top brandowned experiences on Roblox that launched in 2025. And we can see these numbers are crazy.

How to Train a Dragon is getting over a 100 million visits in the year. Now, I’m just going to look at the top five here for a minute, and we can really see a pattern here. All of these brands are media and entertainment IP. And this isn’t a coincidence. This is a sector that is used to this. They have been tapping into gaming spaces for decades. They understand trans media, from the earliest Superman game in the 80s and the 90s, and they understand fandom as well.

So they understand how to translate IP across platforms and across channels and particularly into gaming. Now I just want to stay on the industry level just to really look at which are the most active sectors in virtual worlds from 2020 and we’ve been tracking this. So there are a few highlight sectors that I want to focus on. The first being fashion. Now fashion was a very early entry into the space. a sector that is particularly interested and always has been in innovation, hype, PR, always chasing the next new thing and this hasn’t changed.

However, when it comes to virtual worlds, that growth has started to slow down. It’s no longer new. So, they’re chasing the next thing. Another sector that I want to focus on is sports. One that has seen significant growth in virtual worlds. And this is one where, again, they’re trying to chase the engagement off the court, off the pitch, between seasons. And so, sports organization, leagues, teams, clubs, and even athletes are tapping into the spaces where players are already engaged.

Another one that I want to highlight is retail. One that is kind of an unsung hero here. retail for the first time in 2025 entered the top five most active sectors in virtual worlds, one that went from almost zero. And this is an industry that is interested in distribution, product discovery, and now they’re able to translate their virtual worlds into real life commerce more easily. And I want to just go back to the brand side for a minute and look at the number of total unique brands that are activating in virtual worlds yearonar.

Now yes there is a dip but this isn’t the main story. The interesting part is when we look at how many times each brand is activating on average in 2025. On average a brand activated 1.8 times. This is the highest we’ve ever seen. So again, this is coming back to my original point that, while we did see a dip in 2025, it doesn’t mean that the market is cooling. Not at all. It doesn’t mean that brands are shying away from virtual worlds.

On the contrary, they’re actually doubling down. And this is where brand activation has been moving from volume to value. And this really becomes clear when we look at the top five brands in terms of number of activations each year. In 2021, you only had to do three activations to be one of the most active brands in the space. Just three. That was it. And the bar for leadership has been increasing year on year.

In 2024, you needed around 15 to 16 experiences to be one of the top five. In 2025, you need 30. Now, Walmart has been doing a lot of activations in the space this year with 32 act brand activations in a year. And this is an a company coming from the retail industry. So it’s not even you know one of the big entertainment IPs that is leading this charge. But brands are understanding what’s working. And Walmart has been in the space for a few years now.

Definitely seeing the successes and the performance objectives that they can achieve and are doubling down and coming back to do it time and time again. So where does this go next and what does the next year look like for us and for the space in general? Well, we have three predictions at Geek. The first is that a third major platform will emerge as a contender in 2026 and it will break the Roblox and Fortnite duopoly. Now, the 88% dominance of Roblox and Fortnite in terms of brand activations isn’t sustainable, specifically as this space garners more attention from a a numerous number of contenders that can emerge primarily from social media, traditional social media companies, AAA game studios and entertainment distributor distributors who are already building momentum and brands are taking note.

The second geek prediction we have is that audience first integrations will replace reach first activations. Brands will stop asking how many players can I reach with this one activation and instead they’re going to start asking where which experience has the target audience that I’m looking for and I’m going to tap into this audience. The third geek prediction we have is that studios and developer studios particularly will shift from builders to owners. Now in the last few years, specifically last year and particularly on the Roblox platform, we’ve been seeing a lot of news on mergers and acquisitions from developer studios who have been buying experiences, some for tens of millions of dollars. So this isn’t, child’s play anymore.

And we expect that we expect this to accelerate in 2026 where a small handful of developer studios are going to own a significant portion of experiences across virtual worlds. Now I have just a few summary slides. the first one is that 88% of all brand activations happened on Roblox and Fortnite. And this is platform consolidation. Integrations continued to grow and we saw a strong decline in owned worlds.

This is a fundamental shift in the way that brands are approaching virtual worlds. For the first time this year, integrations overtook owned worlds. And brands are activating more, not less. They’re not shying away from virtual worlds. And finally, more experiences are hosting integrations than ever before, and more experiences are doing so for the first time. Thank you. FANTASTIC. HUGE. WELL, thank you for that huge round of applause, Leila.

Well done. What great work. and as you can see, you have deeper insights in the physical report that’s been distributed. really, really exciting points there that have been made. Right, we’re going to move on to the next part of this which we’re going to speak to Monica who is from Warner Brothers. Come on up, Monica. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Very cool. okay. So, Monica, first thing I want to ask you is for Cartoon Network, why is it important to establish some sort of presence on Roblox?

What’s what’s the reason for for being there? I think we when you have a brand that speaks to kids but also multiple generations you you can’t ignore Roblox it’s like ignoring what the audience does, wants, plays, behaves. So for us it wasn’t a choice let’s try. We love to try and do things. It was an obvious next step. So those worlds have been live now for a few years and we we moved with the audience and and also we have done some research what the audience wants that was with the Ben 10en world and they clearly say we love Ben 10en we would like to see it in Roblox.

It was basically audience driven audience told us first hey this is where we are. The second thing which I thought is really important, Roblox became almost number one discovery platforms and I found it very interesting where what we heard before we have learned that we needed to be there to be seen and discovered because they we we basically always competing for for time right and then they moved to Roblox they were there well we need to be there

so it was really essential to be there to be discovered And obviously our strategy has shifted slightly. Now we have to make sure that we there we engage them.

yeah but I think it’s a very very important strategic pillar for us to to to engage with them.

So I suppose even now I mean when did Ben 10en go into Roblox? Was that 2020 or it’s quite early on? I mean I think Roblox is sitting at over half a billion monthly active users. The reason why you went in is it’s completely unignorable not to go in because of the number of people that are there. Is that right?

Well, firstly, the numbers Roblox has generally are so ginormous that even if you do a small activation or a small virtual world, you’re exceeding in numbers. Yeah. So, and then of the you

it feels you cannot not be there. And and the second thing is now there are so many it it’s really easy I find as a marketeer to generate awareness. We have so many different platforms. You can go anywhere. You have YouTube. You you literally being aware though with this competitive landscape with this incredible oversaturation of messaging etc. for any audience

So we now went into okay we need to engage them so they actually convert.

So they have to be and this is what Roblox gives us.

Yeah. So it’s moving from that just look if you want awareness you can buy ads on YouTube and all of this stuff but bringing it down the funnel into more of that consideration to stage where the consumer is living in your brand in a way or living in the IP that you’re giving them. I suppose based on that recent report that we’ve released with the numbers and I’m being very conscious that Warner Brothers is an entertainment business which we’ve said has lend itself more to own worlds but maybe you want to talk about that why you’ve gone more of the own world route as opposed to the integration route. Firstly, I want to really emphasize the they don’t they are not mutually exclusive. We’ve done both.

but our primary strategy and efforts went for branded branded worlds for multiple reasons. when we research and your team will know that there is an incredible amount of Cartoon Network or Ben 10 worlds which we don’t own which we have zero control about the quality. So when we did research to

sorry so those were experiences that you didn’t build the audience is creating it because you hadn’t been there officially.

Yeah. Which we take as a huge compliment.

free work almost. Well, it’s fantastic except we don’t get anything from it, right? And this is not the principle of whatever we all doing. But on a serious note, yeah, it’s fantastic. They are there. But we also have spoken to to our audience, core audience and they said we expect a certain quality from you

and that was what we have delivered within our own world. We so own worlds give you ownership control I suppose

control you quality control and then you also have learnings you can you you I feel we speaking to the audience every day so recently we have our generic audience but then they engage with one particular miniame so you can take the data the the you know the behavior and build upon it so this is really important for us but I would and also the other thing is on when you take an integration it does seem much more costefficient because it’s a one hit in one budget one campaign now a world you spread it across 12 months and you have a platform we have this is for us mo mostly a marketing platform extraowned

I mean I often compare it to an owned world would be your Instagram profile and an integration would be influencer marketing in a way

which doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t spend extra money on integration on someone else’s profile because etc. For me, our own world is a little bit. Nobody questions why we as brands are doing YouTube verticals, branded channels. This is such a DNA for every markete. I bet I could ask everyone, do you have a YouTube dedicated? Nobody questions that, right?

That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t still spend some money to drive reach. So this is what we do and we adopt those tactics every day you know and some things work in a in our own world some really don’t. So we have Superman promotion which is costefficient because the theatrical division expends with us and it’s much more cost efficient we can deliver the audience they still will do an integration somewhere else.

Yes. Yeah. One of the things you’ve just triggered me, Leila, take a note. Maybe one of the things we should be doing is measuring those that have own worlds who are also doing integrations because I’m sure there’s a massive overlap. As you say, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive and they work in tandem together.

Yes. And the other thing is we have our own world. It is you have to look at this. I I draw this comparison with YouTube for many times because we always have this conversation inside the company. But you have your own world and and you you you activate something which is really important but you still will take and spend some money to drive into this world.

So I think the ecosystem on Roblox is also something which one should really look at. It’s not just being there. It’s just how do I move the audience? How I make them aware. Now Monica, we have a lot of brands in the audience with us today and there’s lots of brands watching online from all different areas from you know I’m not aware and I want to get involved right the way to someone like yourself who I’ve been inside Roblox for 5 years what would you say is the core learnings that you’ve taken what you know cast yourself back to going in the for the first time going in what would you like to hear from someone who’s been involved D for for a considerable amount of time.

We had a lot of learnings. Firstly is look at the platform

properly. Meaning talk to companies like yourself.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You pay me. I mean great advice.

don’t be afraid. There’s very low risk especially if you know kids not a kids brand you can adapt and do not look at this one and done that was the big learning we optimizing we had to adapt our structure it is a permanent work

it doesn’t mean it’s a permanent investment but you have to have so look at this from a perspective understand is your audience there and where else is your audience in which experiences how can you collaborate with them. That was one and really important and we had a lot of conversations about this. We are incredibly precious about our brands

and we and Roblox is very specific. So do not try to take your brand and bring it to Roblox. No, try to Robloxify your brand and look at the audience, the community. biggest learning for us was wow this is such a great feedback opportunity you know you don’t have to build the perfect world from the beginning you can optimize it assume that you have to always give the audience something so it’s a living living world

so really listen to those creators that are

and in the clip I don’t know if people spot it there is superman now Superman is such a huge brand and I was incredibly impressed and happy that the theatrical team said, “Oh yeah, we know he can’t look like he looks in the movie. He is blocky and he is Roblox.”

Flexible with your brand, look and feel. It doesn’t it doesn’t lose lose its identity by by making it adaptable to the game play. I just feel it’s very important to immerse yourself in the Roblox world, not try to bring your brand and understand everyone who is there to

I suppose you it’s similar for most social media platforms. If you were to take a YouTube stat strategy to Tik Tok, that’s not going to work. You need to understand the Tik Tok platform and adapt yourself to that platform.

And we we have done this all brand and marketeers have done this. You have long form.

And you but you do clips for Tik Tok or you do YouTube shorts. We all have really adapted to the platform. First thinking.

barrier. But it’s not only for those people who want to build a Roblox world. It’s

it’s a lot within the company. It’s a mind shift. You have to really nurture that the understanding. I’ve got one final question which is kind of two questions. one of the things that I’ve heard is always challenging is when you’re at a brand internally explaining what you’re doing to your to to your colleagues in terms of we’re in roadblocks and we got this many visits and isn’t that great? How do you navigate that and explain what you’re doing and the value of what you’re doing to the wider business goals?

And then secondly, I’d love to just hear what’s next for Cartoon Network on on the platform. What what plans have you got? Have you got any exclusives to share?

so, the the internal conversation, it’s very much what we had. I I use comparisons. I use things which became natural like social media, Tik Tok and and try to explain as I said data not opinion matter. It’s much easier to trial something and bring big numbers to the table and and and convince your key stakeholders. it there is no recipe how to do it. So, it can be I have also really looked at some brands.

Or Ninja Turtles. Apologies that they are entertainment. There’s so I think really important point is there’s no cannibalization between you have to be there. So, they are on YouTube, they are in PlayStation, they are on Fortnite, they are on Roblox, they also console games etc. So when you look at the trajectory where they engage, I I think it’s really important to it’s easier for me when you get to position it in the normal is is it normal marketing platform?

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. When when you draw out the data and compare it against traditional platforms, you snaked out of the last question I gave you.

So an exclusive I cannot say an exclusive but I can I can I can say that we believe in this but we’re learning every day. We have had success. we are looking at the game on the overall world and I think that it’s really important to stop when it doesn’t achieve what you want or evaluate the change it. And yes, we’re building a new world. We’re launching hopefully mid this year and it’s one of the as I find coolest shows we have.

No, no, no, no, no. That’s enough. That’s enough for the audience. They you’ve given them enough. Monica, thank you so much for your time. Round of applause.