When it comes to in-game ads, gamers are hungry for rewards — and Lionsgate is taking note to promote The Strangers: Chapter 2 on Roblox.
The second film in the Strangers horror film series premiered on September 26. Two weeks later, Lionsgate is looking to take advantage of the Halloween season to advertise the property across five Roblox games, including top titles such as Build an Island and more horror-focused experiences like Skinwalkers.
To motivate players to engage with the Strangers campaign, Lionsgate partnered with the Roblox tech and development companies Super League and Virtual Brand Group to implement a rewards system, with users gaining virtual currency in exchange for playing mini-games, watching trailers and following Strangers on TikTok, which players can spend on real-life prizes like movie tickets and signed T-shirts. In two weeks, the campaign has generated over 85 million impressions, according to Virtual Brand Group CEO Justin Hochberg.
“Forget trailers. Forget socials. We built the sequel you can try to survive,” Hochberg said.
The “Strangers 2” Roblox campaign taps into the growing phenomenon of e-commerce on Roblox, with the platform rolling out an official Shopify integration in May to empower creators to sell real-life products directly within their experiences. For Strangers 2, however, Lionsgate took a slightly different approach, encouraging players to navigate to an outside website to earn and spend their rewards.
As Roblox looks to bring some order to the chaos of its branded experiences — assuaging marketers’ growing confusion over the wide variety of advertising options available on the platform — Lionsgate’s approach shows how brands and marketers remain split on the best ways to show up on Roblox, with some pursuing their own proprietary solutions despite the Shopify integration.
“The rewarded aspect lets fans choose their own ‘thank you’ for engaging with The Strangers: Chapter 2, from avatar items to movie tickets and exclusive signed merch,” said Super League CEO Matt Edelman in an interview with GamesBeat. “It transforms passive awareness into active participation, allowing Lionsgate to turn movie fandom into tangible value.”
In 2025, rewarded content is becoming a hot topic in gaming advertising environments including both Roblox and Discord, the latter of which hosted a panel on the phenomenon (which was moderated by yours truly) at last week’s Advertising Week conference in New York City. During the talk, which centered on how entertainment advertisers use immersive environments such as Discord to reach fans, Paramount Pictures vice president of digital marketing Brandon Nichols flagged rewards as a key factor behind the success of his company’s marketing campaign for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning earlier this year.
“In ‘Mission,’ we offered this value prop to consumers,” Nichols said. “I like to try to identify your audience, and the ways in which you can bring them into your IP and make them feel like you’re part of their world. We’re always trying to identify those opportunities and just be authentic to our story, and I’ve seen great success in that.”