Why the US Open is building a tennis metaverse inside Roblox
As the US Open comes to a conclusion, the tennis tournament is teaming up with other major tennis events to keep the excitement rolling inside Roblox. It’s a demonstration of the power of gaming — and the metaverse — to build bridges across intellectual properties and their fandom.
At this year’s US Open, the United States Tennis Association opened the first-ever dedicated gaming space inside New York City’s Billie Jean King Tennis Center, giving visitors the chance to play a smorgasbord of tennis video games including the official US Open Fortnite and Roblox experiences. During the official “fan week” prior to the start of the tournament, over 1,200 people passed through the space on a daily basis, according to USTA senior director of digital strategy Brian Ryerson.
“We realize, when it comes to Gen Z and even younger folks, sports fandom is changing,” Ryerson said. “They engage with sports in a very different way, and they want to be a little bit more hands-on in that engagement, and video games just translates that so well.”
So far, the USTA’s investment in gaming appears to be paying off, at least in terms of traffic. In the month since the US Open launched on Fortnite, the game has been played over 5 million times, per Ryerson. Another 5.5 million players have visited the US Open’s virtual Roblox world, which launched last year.
But the potential impact of the US Open’s growing metaverse presence extends beyond the pure numbers. The US Open’s Roblox world was designed and built by the Roblox studio The Gang, which also developed the Roblox presences of Wimbledon and the Australian Open. This has made it possible for the three tournaments to cross-collaborate on the platform. Players can now use in-game portals to travel between the three tournaments’ Roblox experiences, using a shared experience point system to level up across all three games.
“It opens up the possibility to have excitement for the tournaments when there’s nothing going on,” said The Gang CEO Marcus Holmström. “The tournaments are huge during the time when they are live, and then it kind of goes down. Now, they can build excitement all year round, and they can also assist each other to push traffic.”
This strategy appears to be working, at least anecdotally. After the 8-year-old son of Stephen Dypiangco, a Roblox brand consultant, started playing WimbleWorld on the platform last month, he fell in love with tennis and soon requested to take lessons in the physical world.
“It’s anecdotal — it’s not like they’re driving 5 million a day,” Dypiangco said. “But being on this platform, putting yourself in this opportunity to show up and invite your brand into people’s lives, I think that can work, and it’s probably more of a long play.”
Expanding into Roblox has also given the US Open a chance to sweeten the pot for its own brand sponsors, such as Polo Ralph Lauren and Emirates Airlines, which both maintain dedicated spaces inside the broader US Open Roblox world. For now, these virtual spaces do not represent an additional investment on the part of these advertisers, but Ryerson told Digiday that the USTA is looking into ways to make its Roblox presence into more attractive inventory for both pre-existing and potential sponsors.
Fortnite and Roblox are not the only gaming platforms that have made their presence known at the US Open this week. The tournament’s gaming experience also featured two consoles loaded up with “Top Spin 2K25,” the premium console tennis game that launched earlier this year. As tennis makes its cultural mark through films such as “Challengers” and television series like Netflix’s “Break Point,” the sport’s presence across gaming is continuing to grow as well.
Digiday
