Roblox is looking to bring order to its brand-creator ecosystem with the platform’s new Brand Link offering.
Roblox’s Brand Link product is primarily a directory of over 200 creator-made experiences on the platform. The offering is intended to streamline the brand integration process for brands, with advertisers able to access the directory and sign integration deals with participating creators. The directory was curated by Roblox’s partnerships team and includes only “studios that meet Roblox’s standards for policy compliance and measurement.” One of its explicit goals is to increase consistency and brand safety for advertisers on Roblox, according to Roblox senior director of global strategic partnerships Lisa Willett in an interview with GamesBeat.
“Essentially, a brand would come to us and say, ‘I want to reach this segment of an audience population,’ — and then we would go through our directory and look at the games that were available that hit high benchmarks for those percentages of populations,” Willett said. “For example: ‘I want to reach 18-to-24-year-old women.’ There’s a subset of games that do that well, versus 18-to-24-year-old men, so we’d look through this directory and we’d find the best matches.”
For now, Brand Link is a private tool that Roblox is sharing with advertisers on an individual basis, rather than a public-facing portal or directory. Roblox has offered a growing list of partners access to Brand Link over the last few months, per Willett, and the company is publicly announcing the product today, June 2. As part of today’s announcement, Roblox is expanding the Brand Link creator directory to include off-platform video creators curated through Roblox’s Video Stars program, which aggregates top Roblox-related video creators from other platforms. Advertisers using Brand Link can also partner with Video Stars creators to promote their brand integrations.
Roblox is framing the launch of Brand Link as a win for both brands and users. For brands, the vetted creator network and policy compliance guarantees create a more predictable path to successful brand integrations; for users, the product is intended to result in higher-quality brand integrations that feel additive to gameplay rather than distracting.
“When we have high-quality developers that we have vetted — we know that they’re safe, we know that they can work with brands — and then you tie the brands together, we feel like the best activations come forward, because you have high-quality developers meeting up with brands in a high quality environment,” Willett said.
Roblox creators with robust brand partnership businesses are excited about the potential of Brand Link. Andrew Bereza, the director of business development for the prominent Roblox creator studio Twin Atlas, described the current state of brand integrations on Roblox as a “Wild West” in an interview with GamesBeat. Bereza said he hoped Brand Link would help advertisers focus on high-quality brand integrations, rather than simply optimizing their budgets for reaching the largest number of players at the lowest possible cost. Brand Link is optional for both advertisers and creators in the Roblox ecosystem, with creators required to opt in to be included in the directory.
“For us, the best collaborations are the ones players experience as part of the world, not as an ad dropped on top of it,” Bereza said. “That’s why Brand Link is interesting. If it helps brands identify trusted studios and creators who can actually build native, high-quality integrations, it could push the market away from pure reach arbitrage and toward better creative execution.”
In recent years, headlines about child safety risks on Roblox have made some advertisers wary of the platform. Brand Link’s promise to deliver higher-quality integrations and guarantee brand safety could help bring more brands into the Roblox fold. But Brand Link represents a double-edged sword for advertisers on the platform.
Although Roblox is not charging advertisers a fee to use the platform’s Brand Link directory, brands that opt into Brand Link’s “white glove” service, which involves management of their integrations by Roblox, are required to spend a minimum amount on Roblox’s on-platform advertising solutions, including video ads and traffic-driving placements, per a Roblox representative. This could result in increased costs for some advertisers looking to integrate into experiences on the platform.
With Roblox planning to take a cut of all on-platform brand integration revenue in 2027, Brand Link represents the platform’s latest move to increase its oversight of advertising activity on the platform. Willett said that the rollout of Brand Link was “separate but related” to the new policy.
“The goal of these is working together to make Roblox safer and more transparent for users and brands, and enable this to be a larger business for Roblox and the creator community on Roblox,” Willett said. “So, yes — absolutely related.”