• by Colin Kirkland , February 5, 2024

In an effort to capture the attention of younger fans and celebrate the 25th anniversary of popular childrens’ cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants, the National Football League (NFL) has partnered with Gamefam, a leading metaverse game developer, and Paramount to launch a SpongeBob-themed event on virtual gaming platform Roblox during the lead-up to Super Bowl LVIII.

For the first time, the big game will also be broadcast on Nickelodeon -- in addition to CBS -- where it will be hosted by SpongeBob characters.

From February 2-19, the cross-game metaverse quest will be live on Paramount and Gamefam's newly released SpongeBob Simulator for Roblox's 70 million daily active users.

In addition, Visitors will encounter NFL, Super Bowl and SpongeBob-themed minigames and items across previously established Gamefam-created Roblox worlds, including Super NFL Tycoon, TMNT Battle Tycoon, Twilight Daycare and Easy Obby.

The Roblox experience will also spotlight Nickelodeon's first-time Super Bowl broadcast. In the week leading up to the game, SpongeBob, Patrick, Sandy and other characters from the hit show will invite Roblox players to answer pre-game prediction questions and give them a list of tasks to complete to help ensure Bikini Bottom is ready for the February 11 faceoff between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs.

“We’re not looking at [Roblox] as just a marketing platform,” said NFL Vice President of video Gaming Ed Kiang. “We look at it as a next generation social experience, the way our fans are playing in that ecosystem and the way they’re communicating and the retention that they have. How do we create more of that persistent experience, where they can keep coming back, and then we can layer in our marketing tentpoles around that.”

The NFL was the first major sports league to develop a persistent experience on Roblox via its 2022 launch of NFL Tycoon. The league also partnered with Visa in 2022 to launch the NFL Zone in Roblox-competitor Fortnite, where fans could take part in virtual tailgates and Visa-sponsored stadium and mini games.

This new cross-game experience follows this year’s Christmas Day Roblox collaboration between Gamefam,the NFL and Paramount, which involved a sports and pop culture crossover event, as well as last year’s Super Bowl collaboration between Gamefam and the NFL in which rapper and singer Saweetie performed the highest-rated concert in Roblox’s history, receiving a 95.86% rating and 7.5 million visits in the first week.