Besides brand experiences, the studio creates its own games to help it better understand the Roblox audience. Its most successful, Strongman Simulator, has had 1.2 billion visits and is consistently ranked in the top 50 Roblox games. “We use our own games to test, then we can do crazy things for brands,” says co-founder and CEO Marcus Holmström. “Our games don’t have to work, so we can test and fail. With brand projects, we want to know what works before we do it. I think that’s been one of the keys to success. We test, test, learn and apply.”
Roblox: A hard nut to crack?
When Holmström first ventured into building Roblox games in 2019, he thought it would be easy. A serial founder, he sold his second marketing company in 2003 and turned to investment, joining the board of gaming organisation A Sweet Studio. After its sale, Holmström and A Sweet Studio’s CTO and co-founder Gustav Linde came together to launch The Gang, working with a small team of game designers specialised in high-budget, high-profile gaming.
They learnt the hard way. “2019 was before everyone was talking about Roblox, so the competition looked very, very easy,” Holmström says. “The games didn’t seem well made, with low-quality art. So we were like, we’re gonna nail this, we’re going to become number one, easy!”
However, The Gang’s first game on Roblox, he admits, was a “total crash and burn… Everyone hated the game. We had tried to build it for a more mature audience, and we made it in the style of regular games, rather than looking at Roblox or other UGC platforms specifically,” he says.
It was a good lesson. Holmström and his team flew to Silicon Valley to meet with Roblox and understand what it was all about. They took down the game they’d built and rebuilt it, following Roblox’s advice. “It was a good learning experience, to understand that we didn’t actually know anything. It’s good to admit that, right?”
Holmström realised that if he and his co-founders could misunderstand Roblox, so would brands trying to enter the platform. His mission was to get to know Roblox users and translate brands into experiences these users might want to be a part of.
“Roblox users are not after a PR campaign. That’s like watching the commercials instead of the movie,” Holmström says. “Brands may believe that people are just going to come to their Roblox world because they are iconic as a brand. But even if that happens, if it’s not a good experience, they’re going to leave the area and leave a negative review.”
Interactivity and gamification
Vans was The Gang’s first big brand partner in 2020. “We wanted to include the iconic skateboards and the checks, but take it further,” Holmström recalls. “So when you enter the world, your avatar holds a skateboard right away. You click one button and then you can skate around and it goes faster. You can also create your own Vans shoes for your avatar, picking the model, the design and the colourway.” Vans World has had over 100 million visitors to date.