The official “KPop Demon Hunters” Roblox experience is keeping fans of the franchise engaged with an update that includes the Saja Boys and other assets from the popular film.
Since its launch last month, Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters” Roblox experience has become one of the most popular Roblox experiences on the platform. After launching as a beta test over the holidays, the experience rapidly reached a peak of over 13,000 concurrent players on New Year’s Day, forcing its creators at the Roblox development studio Twin Atlas to keep the “beta” in its title or give up its hard-earned search engine optimization, despite the fact that it has entered full release. In the month since its launch, the experience has reached nearly 14 million total plays.
“If you type ‘beta,’ we’re the top game, because of that,” said Twin Atlas chief design officer Alex Hicks in an interview with GamesBeat. “So, it might be one of those situations where we just have to leave there for a year or two.”
Today, January 30, Netflix is capitalizing on the success of the official “KPop Demon Hunters” Roblox experience by launching its first-ever content update, which brings the animated film’s demonic boyband antagonists, the Saja Boys, into the game. New content included in the update includes multiple outfits representing each member of the Saja Boys — including Jinu, Romance, Abby, Mystery and Baby — as well as a new dance inspired by the song “Soda Pop,” among other assets. (A Netflix representative shared a description of the update with GamesBeat, as well as images and graphics, but otherwise declined to comment on this article.)
“People are asking us, ‘where are the Saja Boys? We want to play with the Saja Boys,’ — so, obviously, that had to be the first major update that we do,” said Twin Atlas director of business development Andrew Bereza in an interview with GamesBeat. “But we’re basically planning to release content updates more or less every two weeks.”
The story behind Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters” Roblox experience
Twin Atlas did not initially develop its “KPop Demon Hunters” experience with the intention of integrating Netflix’s IP into it. The concept came up in a meeting with Netflix, during which Twin Atlas members showed members of the Netflix team a work-in-progress experience titled “Anime Life.” Netflix was a fan — and gave Twin Atlas about five weeks to transform the game into an official “KPop Demon Hunters” experience.
A unique feature of the official “KPop Demon Hunters” Roblox experience is that its gameplay is based on dancing to fight. The dances and movement inside the experience are heavily inspired by the animation of “KPop Demon Hunters,” with Hicks and Bereza telling GamesBeat that they respectively watched the film three and five times during the development process.
“That was just really exciting to put together, because I thought, ‘When are we ever going to have a chance to build another game where dancing to fight off monsters is a core mechanic?’ Probably never,” Hicks said. “So, that was a really unique loop, just to get to build from the start.”
Netflix provided a considerable amount of assets to aid in Twin Atlas’s production of the Roblox experience, including non-public resources like the film’s art style guides. Notably, the experience includes two instrumental versions of songs from the film — more than the zero official songs included alongside the official release of “KPop Demon Hunters” assets inside Fortnite. The developers’ point person for the project on the Netflix side was Netflix social manager for games Megan Yoon, whom Bereza and Hicks described as their “internal champion.”
“They were very open to letting us build what we needed to build to make a popular game, and I think this is a huge lesson that other brands need to learn from, which is that you can’t come to Roblox and tell people how to make a game on Roblox, because that just won’t work,” Hicks said.
As Netflix looks to grow its audience by bringing more gamers into the fold, the company is using a multi-platform strategy that includes both Roblox and Fortnite experiences, as well as games published in-house on its owned and operated gaming tab. By aligning with highly engaged super-fans, the Roblox experience is helping Netflix build momentum for “KPop Demon Hunters” between film releases.
“Netflix remains ruthlessly analytical and laser focused on engagement in the games space, and doesn’t have arbitrary guardrails for what is on or off platform,” said Enders Analysis head of media technology and games Gareth Sutcliffe in an interview with GamesBeat. “Roblox activations will remain in the games and marketing portfolio for some time, as it’s more than a quick execution sandbox given its current high growth trajectory. The brand support tools Roblox is bringing online combined with the overall UGC model are substantively complementary rather than competitive.”