Battleground Roblox
If YouTube and podcasts took center stage during our 2024 election, look out for Roblox in 2028.
Strategies around political campaigning are relatively simple, no matter what the PhD from Georgetown tells you: find out where you can command the most eyeballs, and inundate them with messaging they respond to in formats they understand. This is why we’re anxiously tweeting about being ready to be done with the number of text messages from Democratic or Republican parties that we’ve registered for; it’s why hyped about returning to NFL Sundays without having to see a commercial for Trump or Harris again; it’s the relief in knowing we won’t get the five-second jump scare ad before every YouTube video now.
And it’s why the next battleground for your attention when it comes to political ads isn’t Instagram or YouTube or X or TikTok or your text messages. It’s Roblox. And it’s already started.
Roblox’s “Virtual Vote” launched on October 7th and ran right through Election Day (Nov. 5th), allowing players to access pop-ups that included mini-games and content that helped inform younger people about the voting process. Virtual Vote was a collaboration between 30 Roblox creators and developers, according to Digiday, and included “financial backing from the non-profit organization HeadCount,” with opportunities for players to win “prizes such as in-game items and celebrity meet-ups” for those “who filled out their name, address and contact information in order to check their voter registration status.”
It’s a low-stakes but interesting move. Roblox, unlike its other big living game competitors such as Minecraft and Fortnite, appeals to a much younger, unable to vote player base. Roblox’s largest audiences are between 13 and 16 (30%) and 17 and 24 (34%) compared to Fortnite, where more than 60% of the game’s base is between 18 and 24 years old. But Roblox poses an interesting opportunity for political camps. Consider this point from researchers Matthew Kanterman and Yon Raz-Friedman:
“From 2020 through 2023, the percentage of DAU over the age of 17 increased to 41% of DAU from 31%. And for those that think that Roblox is still just a platform for kids, it’s important to note that in 2023, the 17+ cohort of DAU was just about the same size as the DAU of those 12 and under.”
So Roblox is growing older and, most importantly, more people are playing Roblox than ever before. Gaming, similar to other entertainment industries, is trying to navigate an eventful past few years that skewed data and impacted decision making. The pandemic saw a strong effect on at-home activities that surged gaming activity overall. That engagement, however, has started to slow down across the industry.
On the one hand, this is a natural effect of having other activity opportunities open up. But the data tells a particularly interesting story about consumer activity. While engagement is down overall, time spent with certain games is continuing to see increases. Mobile games released more than a decade ago see higher playtimes on average than newer games suggesting that unlike traditional content, players are more hesitant to switch from their preferred mobile gaming experiences than try new ones. This is different from film and television where rewatches may happen (I am currently watching Law and Order: SVU for the hundredth time), but people seek out new content.
Anecdotally, this data proves true in my own household. My partner plays the same three games over and over and over. While his console activity changes — he comes back to Madden but will play the new Final Fantasy, Star Wars, or Zelda game when they come out — his mobile games hardly ever do. They’re not built for the same purpose. He uses them as a distraction on the go, as a way to calm his anxiety and, for the most part, turn off his brain. We’re now starting to see similar data in the living game space, or those games that people approach like malls instead of deep dive experiences.
Consider this point from Matthew Ball, a friend of mine and a brilliant analyst who spends much of his time studying these behaviors: “Compared to its most similar competitors—the social virtual world platforms, Minecraft and Fortnite — Roblox has about 5x and 2.25x as many monthly players. For non-gamers, Roblox has about two thirds as many monthly users as Spotify and half as many as Snap (though it probably has a lower share of daily-to-monthly active users) and is roughly as popular as Instagram circa Q4 2015, and Facebook in Q3 2009.”
These are the fundamental data points for political organizations, both those directly associated with parties or candidates and those focused on getting more people out to vote. Roblox is garnering more attention than any other direct-to-consumer interactive offering on the market. Attention is increasingly fleeting and harder to capture. The average person spends about 13 hours of a 32-hour day (calculated based on multitasking compared to the typical 24 hour measurement) with media, according to data by data firm Activate and reported by analyst Doug Shapiro. Of those 13 hours — more than half of the time we dedicate to sleep — the vast majority (5:21) is still spent with video, with audio in second (2:48) and gaming in third (1:37). This, as Shapiro points out, means there’s little room to grow the time spent with media. But I will argue there is more opportunity to grow within certain titles based on those segments.
Again, let’s go back to Roblox. Its growth, unlike Fortnite or Minecraft, is consistent. It’s also reaching new audiences (those over 13), increasing time across both genders (women make up nearly 40% of Roblox’s audience as of December 2023, according to Statista), and is picking up in global territories. Roblox’s total monthly users who access the platform daily have also seen a nearly 20% growth since the pandemic, according to Ball. All of which to say: if you’re trying to figure out the most impactful next place to launch political ads.
History Repeats
Roblox is hardly the first next generation platform to gain recognition from politicians looking to take advantage of concentrated attention amongst young people. Back in 2009, YouTube was one of the first major social platforms to work with politicians, political groups, and other organizations to make YouTube a full fledged destination for election coverage, election viewing, and videos to reach the public. The company partnered with CNN on presidential debates in 2008, putting YouTube, a website two years prior best known for cat videos, at the forefront of democracy.
YouTube was one of the sole video-focused platforms on the internet that political candidates had access to but it wasn’t the only social platform seeing an increase in time spent and attention given. Facebook and Twitter were equal alternatives. Facebook also made it possible to buy a new product, Facebook Ads, in November 2007 that became a critical tool in the 2008 election — the first election that social media played a key role in. Not only could politicians upload their own videos to reach voters, but they could appear in videos that voters weren’t seeking out. That was the fundamental promise of reach through digital networks. This, in my opinion, made YouTube similar to television, but would eventually become much more targeted.
Much like how television supplanted radio and the internet has come to compete with television, new platforms like gaming are becoming intrinsically important, especially as social media platforms become more tainted for politicians. The 2008 election — Obama’s “hope” campaign — encapsulated the feeling of social media at the time. Everything changed in the Trump era. Social media and social video started to come under direct attacks from bad actors and foreign agencies and emerged as breeding grounds for data tracking services. This passage from the Journal of Economic Perspectives published in 2017 by researchers Matthew Gentzkow and Hunt Allcott sum it up nicely enough:
“Following the 2016 election, a specific concern has been the effect of false stories—“fake news,” as it has been dubbed—circulated on social media. Recent evidence shows that: 1) 62 percent of US adults get news on social media; 2) the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories; 3) many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them; and 4) the most discussed fake news stories tended to favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Putting these facts together, a number of commentators have suggested that Donald Trump would not have been elected president were it not for the influence of fake news.”
Whether propagated by political strategists, bored trolls, or nefarious international groups, the fact remains that more people started getting their news from social media. More people were spending their leisure time on social media. More people were hearing directly from candidates on social media — Twitter was to Trump what Facebook was to Obama — and anyone with half a brain cell could see how important an easily manipulatable, poorly regulated and even more poorly managed fragmented information ecosystem would become to integrally important events like elections. And yet, it’s where the people are. And thus, so shall political parties.
Why Roblox?
But this isn’t a history lesson on how social media in 2016 changed how we approach elections today. This is an essay on how people move, and political campaigns will follow. The next battleground, therefore, isn’t social media. It’s gaming. As gaming becomes more concentrated amongst titles that players want to hang out in, the more limited options there are for political parties to build in.
That basically leaves Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft and, theoretically, I guess, like, Candy Crush. So why am I so hellbent that Roblox is set to become a new battleground for political campaigning compared to Fortnite, where there are certainly much more lavish in-game events that attract celebrities like Travis Scott and Dua Lipa? Perhaps not a fulfilling answer, but the reality is that Roblox is the future mall of America. It’s a highway. It’s an amusement park and a social center. Behaviorally, this makes political campaigning feel like less of an anomaly that sticks out from the normal atmosphere in the game. It becomes integrated into an already established daily ritual. Is that the operative goal for political parties? Isn’t campaigning supposed to be in your face? Maybe. I’d argue, however, that from early grassroots online campaigning to the million-dollar industry it is today, political campaigning through digital platforms and on social media is designed to blend in, not stick out. Consider this point from a previous piece on Roblox about expectations for players once they boot up the game compared to Fortnite.
Minecraft has steadily lost players interest, with more than 13 million players lost in the month of January 2024 alone. Fortnite consistently maintains around 230 million active players as of February 2024, down from its height in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic, but not facing the same concerns as Minecraft. Does this mean that the true competition is between Roblox and Fortnite? It depends on how leisure is defined. Similar to how YouTube’s time spent on TV sets (now sitting with a TV viewership share of more than 10% in the US) is not necessarily comparable to time spent with Max because the demand for those types of content are not 1:1 even if the distribution format (TV sets) is, Roblox and Fortnite present two different options for different occasions. Fortnite is more competitive, glossier, and operates in a more action-oriented space. It is growing into more than just a game, but it still feels like a place to game rather than exist. Roblox, on the other hand, is built around cooperative building and socialization. It’s a place to lean back and hang out, something that Fortnite is trying to build but where Roblox has the advantage.
The biggest digital tools this election cycle were podcast appearances, YouTube sit-downs and lengthy Twitch streams. Joe Rogan. Alex Cooper. Adin Ross. Theo Von. Intimate spaces that listeners and viewers already incorporate into their daily lives. Some may point out that this is the natural extension of the late night stop by sessions that politicians have used for years, including on Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Johnny Carson.
I would argue again, however, that the critical difference is in expectation and relationship. We know that a politician stepping on a late night show with an audience being instructed to clap when the signs blink, situated deep in the heart of New York City or Los Angeles, comes off as corny. We know it feels like a stunt. That’s what late night talk shows have taught us to expect. Podcasts and livestreams, however, still feel authentic even if they’re not. Even if they’re just promotional space now. But the relationship to Theo Von or Joe Rogan is so strong — hours upon hours of listening and watch time dedicated to getting to know these people who we hear while we’re in the shower or we watch while lying in bed — that someone like Trump stepping by carries a weight late night talk shows don’t anymore.
As the New York Times pointed out following Trump’s re-election, the president is a master of new media. He doesn’t just use popular platforms, but he approaches characters that mainstream institutions and critics decry as jesters with the utmost seriousness. We can scoff, but it worked. What’s to stop candidates in 2028 or 2032 from using Roblox in the same way? Future presidents will go to where people are hanging out, and operate in formats that people are already using. That was TikTok and YouTube podcasts for this election. Next election, I have a feeling that it may be Roblox.