Roblox’s ad expansion sparks backlash from creator studios

For years, Roblox’s creator studios — in-game agencies that employ individual creators to build custom-branded worlds or integrate clients’ brands into their pre-existing experiences — have been among the metaverse platform’s most staunch supporters. Many of them have official partnerships with Roblox through the Roblox Partner Program, and have charged brands such as Vans and Nascar hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to design and build bespoke experiences and items. 

Traditionally, studios have gained much of their brand business thanks to introductions from Roblox, which routed brands’ advertising queries directly to them. Studios’ fees for custom brand integrations typically sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the bulk of those revenues going directly into studios’ bank accounts.

Now, Roblox appears to be eyeing a bigger slice of that revenue pie.

In 2025, its relationships with creator studios have soured, according to studio creator representatives, four of whom told Digiday that they feel their relationship with Roblox has shifted from partner to competitor. They all requested anonymity to preserve their business relationships with Roblox.

“As we continue growing our in-house partnerships team and advertising business, our focus is on building tools and solutions that benefit and delight our community of creators, users, and brands,” a Roblox spokesperson told Digiday. “We are also expanding our partner ecosystem and connecting creators aligned with this mission with brands for impactful collaborations. We look to creator studios as primarily our strategic creative partners that we bring into the vast majority of brand conversations.” 

Roblox started offering programmatic ads across its in-game experiences last May, and since then, the brand introductions that once formed the lifeblood of Roblox creator studios’ business have slowed or stopped entirely. Instead, studios are finding themselves in direct competition with Roblox for the same share of brands’ marketing dollars. 

“There are limited introductions to studios, unless it’s in Roblox’s best interest,” said one anonymous studio representative. “I can tell you that we certainly see a dramatically lower volume of brand introductions than what we were used to in the past.” 

Although creator studios also generate revenue by building popular non-branded experiences and selling in-game items — much like individual creators on Roblox — they prefer the consistent revenue of brand deals over the uncertainty of chasing viral success among Roblox’s users. At the same time, Roblox is clearly incentivized to sell its own ads directly to brands because doing so allows it to receive a larger cut.

The Roblox spokesperson noted that Roblox recently expanded its Partner Program in January 2025, clarifying its application process and introducing a badging system that delineates which partners are experts at the creative design of brand experiences and which are experts in managing large media campaigns on Roblox.

“The program’s goal is to empower more studios to directly support the brand ecosystem and collaborate with brands,” the spokesperson said.

One example of a brand introduction that worked in Roblox’s interest is H&R Block’s Roblox campaign, which kicked off last week. Instead of working with a Roblox-partnered creator studio, the tax preparation software firm worked directly with Roblox to launch an in-game campaign that includes both video ads and integrations into the popular Roblox role-playing experiences “Club Roblox” and “Mega Mansion Tycoon.” Roblox introduced H&R Block to the creators of these experiences, who helped place brand assets such as H&R Block’s mascot inside them.

“We work with Roblox directly to build and work with creators,” said H&R Block senior marketing manager of media and strategy Andrew Martinson. “So our actual partnerships are with the developers of the two games that we are integrated with.”

H&R Block’s Roblox campaign resulted from an upfront presentation given by Roblox representatives to H&R Block last year, which prompted a “three hour conversation about what can be done for brands in this space” between Roblox staff and Martinson.

“I had a chance to sit with some of the Roblox developers and the head leads for creative — some of their marketing folks, as well as some of their sales and partnership folks,” Martinson said. 

Roblox’s creator studios are starting to view the platform’s sales team as direct rivals. The purpose of the team, which Roblox built out by poaching key hires from other platforms last year, is to sell Roblox’s ad products, which include video ads and “Portals” that teleport users directly into Roblox experiences, and transform advertising into a major revenue stream for the company. A Roblox representative declined to share the current size of Roblox’s sales team.

Although Roblox’s bookings — total sales including advertising sales and in-game purchases — continue to grow year-over-year, reaching a total of $1.362 billion per its most recent earnings call on Feb. 6, the company’s investors have high expectations for its performance, and a drop in Roblox’s stock price in the day following the call reflected that the company’s reported numbers fell short of observer’s predictions.

“I don’t think it’s personal — it’s just incentives,” said a second anonymous studio rep about Roblox’s ad-selling push, referring to Roblox’s internal need to demonstrate continued growth to its investors. “And the incentives are: ‘we’ve got to sell and generate a certain amount of revenue.’”

Roblox’s growing competition with creator studios is also fueled by stagnant brand budgets. Despite the platform’s massive user base of 380 million monthly active users and last year’s introduction of programmatic ads, most brands still treat Roblox marketing as experimental. According to three studio representatives who spoke to Digiday anonymously, individual brands’ annual spending in Roblox typically remains in the hundreds of thousands — rather than the millions.

Despite the large amount of user activity and engagement occurring inside Roblox, it’s still difficult for marketers to quantify the returns on their Roblox advertising investment. Martinson, for example, highlighted figures such as unique player count and average session time — 1.25 million and 16 minutes, respectively — to show the success of the H&R Block campaign, but said that the brand is largely tracking metrics such as brand lift and brand sentiment rather than tracing a direct line between Roblox activity and purchases of H&R Block products.

To help convince brands to spend more of their marketing dollars inside Roblox, creator studio representatives believe the platform needs to implement more tools to show the direct ROI of brands’ Roblox ad spend. 

“In our view, the biggest opportunity for any platform is to build out their tools for developers and agencies who can in turn use those tools to grow the platform and thus attract more marketing budgets that go back to the platform,” said a third anonymous studio representative. “Creating that flywheel will make it a win-win situation for everyone.”

Although tension is mounting between Roblox and its network of creator studios, individual creators on the platform have been relatively unscathed by the conflict. Ultimately, individual creators who are hired to build branded experiences get paid either way, regardless of whether Roblox or a studio is the entity directing the work. And branded content represents only a small share of individual Roblox creators’ income, with creators making hundreds of millions of dollars selling in-game items directly to users during the past financial quarter. 

“The top YouTube creators all do brand deals, on top of their bread-and-butter AdSense revenue. By contrast, few of the top Roblox creators do, many because of previous deals going awry or just simply not scaling against their core DTC [direct to consumer] business,” said Ben Sarraille, the co-founder of the agency Makeshift, which manages Roblox creators. “Whether Roblox or agencies are the bridge between brands and creators, it’s important as the space grows to figure out how deals can be additive even to the largest experiences.”