Key takeaways
Roblox’s homepage recommendations pick games in two stages. Any source of players, bought or brought, can get a world considered. Only the cohort Roblox sends itself decides how far it goes.
Roblox’s own documentation: ranking “depends entirely on the engagement and retention of users who come to your game through Recommended for You.” Players acquired from ads, friends, search or social media are not counted.
The recommendation system is the richest and most durable source of players on the platform. No media plan competes with it on reach or longevity, and the players are organic.
Our line between a branded world that is alive and one that is merely on the platform is 200 average concurrent players over 14 days, which is about 28,800 visits a day at a 10-minute session.
Roblox’s adventure-genre benchmarks put day-30 retention at 0.12% at the median and 0.8% at the 90th percentile. Of 10,000 bought players, 12 to 80 are still there a month later.
Since RDC, Roblox is testing recommendations that reward a game for the new players it brings to the platform. If it becomes a feature, the traffic a brand brings itself starts to count past retrieval.
A paid seed has one job: enough players, fast enough, for the platform to notice. The plan should attach criteria to when that is and stop there.
The instinct for paid media works for other channels
A brand launching a Roblox world probably defaults to what it does with any launch. It puts media behind it, reaches the audience, drives the first wave and keeps the spend up until the product carries itself. Whilst that's the way most paid channels are run, Roblox doesn't work that way because of how the platform grants visibility.
Different kinds of player for different stages
Roblox's own documentation describes how its homepage recommendations choose a game¹. First, the system picks out games worth considering (retrieval). Here, almost anything counts. In Roblox's words, "signals from sponsored ads, curation, search, charts, friends, teleport, notifications, curated games, and other social media sharing can accelerate your consideration," and "even a small number of people playing" is enough to get a game looked at.
Then how the players Roblox sent behave in the game (ranking). Distribution "depends entirely on the engagement and retention of users who come to your game through Recommended for You." The platform "doesn't count the engagement, monetization, or retention of users first acquired from ads, curation, friends, search, social media, or any other source."
So a brand's media on the platform can get the world through the door. What happens after that is an audition in front of the players Roblox chooses. Roblox sends a cohort, watches it and sends more if it is engaged and returns. The signals it watches were published on 15 June, measured over 28 days²:
whether players come back,
whether they play when shown it,
how long they stay,
whether they bring friends,
whether they spend.
Paid media has no impact on this stage.
The source of players that scales
It is important to highlight just why this audition matters so much to a game. The homepage is seen by 123 million players every day and the system can put a game in front the ones it expects them to like it¹. The system is the richest and most durable source of players on the platform - no media plan competes with it on reach or longevity. Crucially, all of them are organic (read free) players, which is also what monetisation in a branded world is for.
Against that backdrop, a launch strategy should have one clear focus. All decisions across the build, the first minutes of gameplay, the initial paid seed (and when it ends) should be aimed at one thing: giving players a reason to come back so the system keeps sending more. A world that does that gets millions of players delivered to it. A world that doesn't sustains players until the media budget runs out.
What 'staying alive' means in branded-game terms
When we ranked the 229 biggest branded worlds on the platform by concurrent players, the distribution showed a clear split: a top tier, a gap, then a long tail of worlds nobody was in. That split is why most branded Roblox worlds don’t survive their second year. The gap sat at an average of 200 concurrent players across 14 days, so that is our line between a branded world that is alive and one that is merely still on the platform³. This is a modest number for a Roblox game in general. Concurrent players is a snapshot: how many are in the world at any one moment. To keep 200 in the world around the clock, each staying 10 minutes, a world needs 200 new arrivals every 10 minutes, which is 1,200 an hour and about 28,800 a day. Shorter sessions need more arrivals, longer ones fewer: 48,000 a day at six minutes, 19,200 at fifteen.
A paid seed audience delivers players once and Roblox's own benchmarks show how few of them stay⁴. Here is what 10,000 bought players amount to in an adventure game with 10-minute sessions.
10,000 bought players | Median game | Top tenth of the genre |
|---|---|---|
Share of one day’s alive-level traffic (28,800) | About a third | About a third |
Day-30 retention | 0.12% | 0.8% |
Still playing a month later | 12 | 80 |
To stay alive on paid traffic alone, a brand would need to buy hundreds of thousands of players every month, because almost none of them would still be there 30 days later. The number of new players only works if the platform is sending the players and the platform only sends them if the audition goes well.
How bought players behave
GEEIQ, which cited our Edition 4 survival analysis last month, has published a finding from its own tracking: across seven Roblox experiences, session time fell around 30% during paid-media periods while new users rose around 20%⁵. That data is from 2024 and the sample is small. Part of the dip is pure numbers, since new arrivals always play shorter sessions than returning players, so a burst of them pulls the blended average down.
GEEIQ's conclusion is about reporting: keep paid visits on their own line so they don't muddy the picture. Ours is about when to stop buying. Roblox's own documentation says player behaviour varies by source and it evaluates ranking only on the cohort that arrived through Recommended for You. So a dip like GEEIQ's appears on the brand's blended dashboard, but is absent from anything the ranking stage looks at. Bought players don't take part in the audition so they also don't hurt it.
What Roblox announced at RDC
On 11 September Roblox said it is testing recommendations that reward a game for "how many new players a game brings to the platform."⁶ A Roblox creator's audience is already on the platform, but a brand can bring theirs, as new players, to Roblox. Packaging, store, social and TV reach households the platform has no inherent route to.
This would be the first time a player's origin counted beyond the retrieval stage. Bought and brought traffic do the same job today, which is getting the world considered. If the test becomes a feature, the traffic a brand brings itself helps with the ranking stage too, and the paid on-platform traffic still won't.
Knowing when to stop
The media budget on a Roblox launch has one job: enough players, fast enough, for the platform to notice and send its own. Roblox suggests a small number of players will do, so that only requires a seed budget. It is a fraction of what a Roblox integration costs against building a world. Everything that follows is paying for players the ranking stage doesn't evaluate. The brand's own fans still matter as a launch cohort, as people who bring friends and as revenue. They are not the reason the world will or won't be shown to strangers.
Running media is fine. The mistake is running it the way every other channel rewards, where more spend buys more reach for as long as the budget lasts. On Roblox the budget stops buying anything the ranking stage sees the moment the platform has enough players to form a view. The launch plan should attach criteria to when that is and stop there.
What to check in your plan
The 'when to stop' plus two other things. Use the channels the brand already owns to deliver players to the world, because that traffic costs nothing extra and may soon be the kind the platform rewards. And judge the world on the Home Recommendations signals rather than launch-week visits, because visits are the one number a media plan can inflate and the ranking stage ignores.
tl;dr
The instinct for media to support a campaign end-to-end is right for most channels except here. On Roblox the audience is on loan from the recommendation system, the payback is in retention by players Roblox chooses and media can only cover the first step.
Daniel O'Sullivan LFG Studio · [email protected]
FAQ
Can a game franchise be brought to Roblox?
Yes, and several have. Sonic Speed Simulator, an official Sega licence built by Gamefam, has 1.52 billion visits and was the first brand game on the platform past a billion. Garten of Banban and Ubisoft's Rabbids are also there. Most arrived through a studio already experienced on the platform rather than through the publisher's own team.
Why haven't more game publishers launched on Roblox?
Not reluctance. Owning a franchise means understanding progression, economy and retention natively, but the instincts that made the source game work don't translate. A Roblox player decides within seconds whether to stay, progression has to pay off in an afternoon, and depth has to be felt in the first few minutes. Some publishers are closing that gap by contracting the capability rather than retraining their own teams.
Who is the Roblox audience for a game franchise?
Two groups. The smaller one is existing fans who know the franchise and have nothing to play. The larger one has never encountered it at all, and Roblox is where that first encounter would happen. Roblox built its Select tier for 9 to 15 year olds, an age most of a franchise's existing channels don't reach.
What are Roblox age-based accounts?
Live since 16 June 2026: Kids accounts for 5 to 8, Select for 9 to 15, and Roblox for 16 and over. Kids accounts only reach experiences labelled Minimal or Mild. The under-16 audience monetises less than adults, and Roblox attributed part of its second-quarter shortfall to lower spending per hour among younger users.
How does the Roblox licensing platform work for IP owners?
Any IP holder can list a licence themselves, since November 2025. From 12 September 2026 a licence can cover specific game passes rather than a whole game. The catalogue held 26 IPs at 23 September 2026. It makes permission cheap. It doesn't supply the method.
What should an IP owner ask a studio before building on Roblox?
Comparable work on Roblox with dates. A named, dedicated team and their Roblox experience. A proposed list of what stays faithful and what has to flex, agreed before design starts. Itemised and tiered pricing with descope options that keep the core loop intact. And what the studio needs from the IP owner in approval turnaround, and what happens to scope if it slips.
Footnotes
Roblox Creator Hub, Discovery, read 6 October 2026. Retrieval and ranking stages, the sources that count in each and the explore-and-expand loop are all described there. 123 million average daily active users: Roblox Corporation, Q2 2026 Earnings Shareholder Letter, 30 July 2026.
John Ciancutti, Optimizing Discovery: How Great Games Reach Millions of Players on Roblox, Roblox newsroom, 15 June 2026. Signal list and windows: Developer Forum, same date.
LFG analysis of the top 229 branded Roblox games by lifetime visits, Romonitor Stats data, June 2026. Alive = average concurrent players over 14 days of 200 or more; the threshold sits in the natural gap in the distribution. Visits per day = concurrent players × 1,440 ÷ average session minutes. Survival rates for branded worlds: Edition 4.
Roblox Creator Hub analytics benchmarks, adventure genre, day-30 retention: 50th percentile 0.12%, 90th percentile 0.8%. Read 6 October 2026.
GEEIQ, 7 questions to ask your agency before you enter gaming, 15 September 2026. Paid-media figures from GEEIQ tracking of seven experiences, September 2024.
David Baszucki, RDC 2026: The World Needs More Play, Roblox newsroom, 11 September 2026.