Popular game creation platform Roblox has launched its new licensing platform, which has Kodansha as one of its four partners (the other three being Lionsgate, Netflix, and Sega).
In an announcement, Roblox said that this platform includes the recently announced Roblox License Manager and Licenses catalog, with the former providing IP holders with “new self-serve IP management tools, making it easy to provide licenses to their IP at scale for use on Roblox by Roblox creators.” The intention is to turn “a months-long process, often limited to a select few” into something that “allows eligible creators and rights holders to secure licensed use of an IP in just days or hours.”
With the new system, Kodansha and other IP holders will be able to automatically collect their share of revenue, among other functions. A separate press release says that they can “customize license terms, including IP usage, content maturity, and revenue share.”
Kodansha’s contributions to the Licenses catalog at this time will be Blue Lock and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, which are “coming soon.” In a prepared statement, Kodansha president and CEO Yoshinobu Noma said that the publisher was “thrilled to offer our popular manga, novels, and their anime adaptations to creators through a new form of licensing,” and that the partnership will allow Kodansha to “deepen our connection with fans and explore new storytelling avenues within immersive experiences, in line with our global purpose: Inspire Impossible Stories.”
As for the other partners of Roblox’s new licensing move, they’ll be offering IPs like Twilight (Lionsgate), Saw (Lionsgate), Like A Dragon (Sega), Stranger Things (Netflix), and Squid Game (Netflix), among others.
Kodansha’s collaboration with Roblox comes after an Attack on Titan game creation contest last year, which offered “up to $1.5 million (approx. 200 million JPY) in development funds from GeekOut, with support from Kodansha GCL throughout production and post-release operation” for selected game proposals. In December 2024, it was announced that three teams had been selected as the contest’s winners.
And on July 1 of this year, it was announced that Kodansha, Dentsu, and GeekOut will jointly establish the ROBMIX label “for the purpose of discovering and developing the next generation of creators on the immersive social platform Roblox, and developing new IP and contents and deploying new media mixes.”
Roblox games inspired by manga titles and/or their anime adaptations have previously existed, with fan creators looking to titles like Naruto, Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, and Blue Lock.
Official initiatives include My Hero Academia Battlegrounds, which was made by Gamefam with Crunchyroll and Toho as partners, and One Piece Grand Arena.
Toei Animation also tried to harness the ecosystem offered by platforms like Roblox. Last August, it was announced that Toei Animation was teaming up with IP licensing company Spaceport to license the CG film HYPERGALACTIC to “multiple game developers and content creators simultaneously and at scale” and introduce it “into the most popular content platforms for gamers of all ages, including Roblox and Fortnite.”
Roblox says that it averaged 97.8 million daily active users as of Q1 2025.
Source: Roblox newsroom (via press release)
