Moonrock Labs brings brands and developers together for metaverse experiences

Moon Rock Labs brings together content marketing for brands and game developers to build branded experiences for the metaverse.

It is a young company, but it has hit the ground running in deals with many different brands and game companies. It’s partnered with brands like Lenovo, Kellogg, Coca-Cola/Fanta, Burger King, and a number of others looking to transition to metaverse experiences like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft.

“Moonrock Labs is all about helping brands get their branding into games like Roblox and Minecraft,” Moonrock Labs co-founder John Benyamine said in an interview with GamesBeat. “To really engage with audiences with custom Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite activations.”

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Gaming content veteran John Gaudiosi worked with Benyamine at Greenlit Content in their former company. They got out in 2019 and sold the company to Rekt Global, which sold itself to Infinite Reality in April 2022 for $470 million.

Gaudiosi left to begin Moonrock desk working on content marketing for brands in gaming. Benyamine later joined him. Then Benyamine met Krishna Singh at the GamesBeat Summit Next conference in November 2022. Singh told Benyamine he was looking for him.

Singh was CFO of EVNT, a development studio. He suggested they get together and start Moonrock Labs, which would focus on bringing brands together with games within metaverse experiences like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite.

The companies formed a joint venture called Moonrock Labs, which is part of Moonrock. Benyamine is a co-founder of Moonrock Labs and a strategic advisor to Moonrock. Gaudiosi serves as Moonrock’s president. Singh is CFO of Moonrock Labs. Noah Barskiy is CEO of Moonrock Labs and Jordan Baker is COO of Moonrock Labs. They all apply their expertise to creating branded experiences aimed at reaching the tens of millions of users who are growing up in metaverse experiences.

Sometimes they complete their projects in eight weeks. But others may take longer, Barskiy said.

“It depends on the project and how broad a backend we need to make,” Barskiy said. “Sometimes we can put a lot of engineers on it. For smaller projects, it’s just a few people. One project will probably have 50 or 60 people.”

All told, Moonrock has access to about 100 employees and contractors. Additional clients include Amazon Studios, Twitch Rivals, The Lord of the Rings, Microsoft, ESL, Xbox Game Pass, X Games, Lenovo, Dermalogica, and Bisect Hosting.

“We’re doing game activations on a few platforms,” ​​Barskiy said. “Those brands say here is the budget and the timeline. Can you get us in there? There is an enormous amount of work to be done.”

The company has completed activations such as Restaurant Tycoon 2 on Roblox, which has more than 900 million total visits. It also did TwitchCon San Diego 2022 “Minecraft MOBA”, Bird’s Eye View of TwitchCon San Diego’s Minecraft MOBA built in-game lobby, featuring Capital One, Dunkin, and Verizon billboards for all players to see.

And it worked on Burger King’s Fortnite Race Track, with billboards, logos, a large Whopper and restaurant buildings for players to whiz past in custom Burger King race cars. And it created Fanta’s Halloween Fortnite map with Halloween-themed Fanta bottles, branded billboards, and exploding soda volcanoes.

There’s so much to do that many companies in this space view each other as potential employees, not competitors, Barskiy said. Some companies want lobbies or town squares for their brands. But players often want something much more engaging in the form of a game. Figuring out what to do for a brand in a specific space is where the collaboration happens, Barskiy said. The team is scattered.

“A lot of us have been working together for a long time, so we can get things flowing much faster,” Barskiy said.

Moonrock Labs focuses on gamified experiences where the hope is to involve the community as much as possible. They build the game or app and get as many influencers as possible to collaborate on and promote it. That helps the games spread.

“Some of our products have gained several million unique players, with some reaching as many as 20,000 concurrent players,” he said. “A lot of people have realized that any game is customizable and you can have player-generated content and have infinite video games in a video game,” Barskiy said. “This is something we’ve been dreaming about for a long time.”

The idea is to create engaging, high-quality content that appeals to the people who want to meet brands. And the place where they meet is a metaverse gaming, using turnkey development and brand integration services. The key is to communicate exactly what the players want and the goals of the brand.