New deals are revealed almost every day to bring licensed IP into the metaverse, with the partners creating branded virtual goods, storefronts, events, or other implementations, especially in popular gaming worlds such as Roblox. Conversely, several games that originated in Roblox have lately started to break out as licensed properties in their own right. They typically start their outbound licensing journey either by retaining an agent or signing a master toy licensee:
- In a deal announced last week, Uplift Games named Jazwares the master toy licensee for Adopt Me!, a game in which players can adopt more than 200 pets, build and decorate houses, and create activities to play with friends. Adopt Me! has accrued more than 28 billion visits and has recorded as many as 1.9 million concurrent users at its peak. The toy line includes pets, figures, playsets, and accessories, among other toy categories.
- In April, Sonar, developer of Roblox games including Dragon Adventures and Creatures of Sonaria, hired Striker Entertainment as the licensing rep for all of its current and future Roblox titles. The two flagship games mentioned have together generated 600 million unique game sessions and 2.2 million favorites, and assembled a 1.5-million member community. Plans include toys, collectibles, publishing, lifestyle products, and entertainment productions. A month earlier, Striker had paired with The Gang Sweden, developer of the Roblox game Strongman Simulator, to represent its properties for licensing.
- In October of last year, GameFan named WowWee as its master toy licensee for Twilight Daycare. It created a line of dolls that can not only be played in the virtual world but also scan back into the game as exclusive virtual characters. The role-play game allows fans to experience an immersive world, taking on the role of babies, toddlers, or caretakers and performing tasks such as playing with toys or changing diapers. WowWee and GameFan plan to expand into other products in the future.
- In an early example, MiniToon licensed Piggy, its multiplayer survival-horror game franchise, to Phatmojo for a line of toys, including plush, figures, and playsets, and other merchandise, such as t-shirts and stickers, in 2020. As of late 2021, the game had attracted nearly 10 billion visits, while fan-made videos about the property on YouTube had garnered more than 3 billion views by 2020.
These are some of the most-played games on the platform and are among the first to reach a level of popularity that allows them to oversee their own individual licensing programs.
Fans have already been exposed to a variety of licensed products based on these and other games through Roblox Corporation’s licensing program, which gathers together a number of the user-created gaming properties that are playable in the Roblox universe and markets them under the Roblox brand umbrella. The company paired with long-time partner Jazwares to make figures and other products based on a range of games, for example, while it has worked Hasbro to market a line of seven Nerf blaster sets based on the games Adopt Me!, Badimo’s Jailbreak, ROLVe’s Arsenal, and Nikilis’ MM2.
It is almost certain that more properties established as games in the world of Roblox and other virtual worlds will become available for consumer products licensing in the near future, especially as game creators take note of their colleagues signing deals such as those mentioned here.
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