Panda Express is turning gaming from a campaign into a standing part of its marketing. Marketing Dive reported on 5 October that the restaurant brand has relaunched a permanent Roblox game, The Panda Express Obby, with monthly updates, and has run three Fortnite map integrations tied to limited-time menu items. Its media agency of record, The Many, and the playable media company Super League run the programme, and Nielsen measured the results independently. For a quick-service brand that is a real commitment. Most food brands treat gaming as an event: a map, a skin, a week of attention. Panda Express is treating it as a place where the brand lives.
What the brand lift study shows
Per Marketing Dive’s account of the Nielsen study, awareness rose three percentage points among people exposed. Consideration went from 64% to 67%, recommendation from 61% to 64%, and purchase intent climbed five points over 30 days. Roblox saw a 16% engagement rate and the Fortnite activations drew 537,000 engagements. None of that is dramatic. It is the kind of result that justifies a standing budget, though. A three-point lift in consideration, repeated monthly across a large audience, adds up in a way one viral moment does not. Super League’s Rhiannon Apple, executive vice president of client strategy, said in the report: “Repeat investment only happens when the results are there.” The report puts the audience at more than 220 million monthly players, mostly aged 18 to 34, and notes that gaming still gets only a small share of advertising budgets. That gap is the opportunity brands keep pointing to and rarely act on at scale.
From stunt to standing platform
The earlier work shows how Panda got here. In July 2025, to mark the return of Hot Orange Chicken, it put custom cutscenes into four Fortnite Creative maps and added a non-playable character, Pei Pei the Panda, to Fortnite and Roblox. The cutscenes sat at natural breaks in play and players earned in-game rewards for watching. The brand reported more than 450,000 player engagements. That was a campaign with a start and an end. The new set-up changes the economics. A permanent Roblox game gives people somewhere to return to without a campaign reason, and monthly updates give them a reason to. The Fortnite integrations still carry menu tie-ins, so the game and the restaurant feed each other. Crystal Chou, group media director at The Many, called gaming “a core pillar of our marketing strategy” in the report. The useful distinction for brand teams is between attention and presence. A campaign buys attention for a few weeks. A standing platform builds presence, which is closer to what a food brand needs among younger customers choosing where to eat on a Tuesday rather than during a promotion.
Also readGame-changers: winning strategies for effective game branding
Why this suits a food brand
Food is a low-involvement category. People choose fast, often on habit, and the brand that comes to mind first wins the order. A gaming platform gives a food brand repeated, relaxed contact with a young audience at moments when nobody is trying to sell them anything. That is hard to buy elsewhere. It also suits this brand in particular. Panda Express has a mascot with a playful character and a menu hero in Orange Chicken, and both translate into a game with little explanation. Brands with a more complicated story or a less visual product would find it harder. Others in food and drink have tested similar ground, from Coca-Cola’s limited-edition flavour for gamers to Sour Patch Kids’ tycoon game on Roblox, and the platform itself has been courting brands, as when Roblox signed Shopify as its first commerce integration partner.
The limits of the evidence
Two cautions apply. First, the study measures lift among people who saw the activations, and the figures come via the brand and its partners. They show the programme works, not that it works better than the same money spent elsewhere. Second, a permanent game needs constant upkeep. Roblox audiences move on quickly, and a game that stops updating becomes a neglected shop front. The monthly update schedule is a cost, not just a feature.
What to Watch
Watch whether Panda Express reports lift data again after a full year of standing presence: if consideration keeps rising without a campaign behind it, other restaurant and retail brands have a clear case for moving gaming from the campaign budget to the base budget.
