Review: H&M's Roblox Loooptopia Struggles to Connect With Users

In attempt to get their foot in the metaverse, H&M built a Roblox branded experience that promotes recycling, neon colors and loud fashion: all things that sound nothing like H&M.

With 58.8 million daily users, Roblox presents brands with thousands of invaluable opportunities to interact with consumers. Recently, the platform has seen a surge of branded experiences where companies can create games to take user interaction to the next level. In early January, H&M released a branded game titled Loooptopia, (with three o’s!) advertised as a world for “collecting elements to create thousands of unique clothing items”. While that sounds captivating, is the experience truly engaging from a player's perspective? As a teen who grew up on Minecraft and Roblox, I played through to find out.

When you first spawn in, you are guided to talk to a Non-Player Character (NPC) who guides you through the logistics of this land: open mystery boxes to gather materials, collect pink coins called Looops, make clothes, and level up. After you’ve filled your inventory with materials, you can create your first item of clothing, put together outfits, trade or recycle (the recycling bit is ironic considering H&M’s history with unsustainable practices, but at least they are trying). You will gain experience to level up, and at higher levels you can access the other three worlds. Although, my biggest critique is that the leveling up process is incredibly slow: after playing for an hour, I was only level five, and the next world isn’t accessible until level ten (ain’t nobody got time for that).

Loooptopia City, the first world you enter, is a futuristic playscape filled with neon colors and rainbows. Despite the loud visuals, soft elevator music plays repeatedly throughout the whole experience, which just feels weird. When I think of a typical H&M store, I think of trendy (fast) fashion, and sleek displays: both which are not found in this game. While you might argue that the bright and neon visuals are implemented to keep the player engaged, a classy brand like Gucci was able to stay true to their brand while also engaging thirty-nine million users in their Roblox experience.

Recently, the session length or the time that a user spends in the game is only eight minutes (romonitorstats.com), and I can understand why. The boxes tend to give you the same materials over and over again, which limits how many different clothing items you can create. Although, the addition of obby courses (Robloxian slang for obstacle courses that involve jumping from platform to platform) interspersed in Loooptopia City do make the gameplay more fun, especially since you can usually get rare items once you complete a course.

Overall, this game could’ve been much more successful if H&M stuck to their brand and offered trendy items instead of gaudy neon items that are likely to never get worn. They also could’ve benefitted from making the game progress faster for the player.

If you intend to build a branded experience within Roblox, here’s what you should take away from H&M’s Loooptopia: At its core, a branded experience is just another Roblox game, so it needs to be engaging to play. If you get bored after playing for five minutes, the average Roblox user will get bored after one. Unlike H&M, you should aim to replicate current successful games, stay true to your brand, and create incentives to continually keep players coming back. With all that, you’ll be able to create a successful branded experience, which could reach millions of new customers for your brand.