Every company in the car business fights the same mental image. Say “a job with cars” to a nineteen year old and they picture a small local garage, oil, a wrench, something a bit dated. AUTO1’s reality is almost the opposite, a fast, international, tech-heavy operation running across more than 30 countries with thousands of roles to fill. The gap between that reality and the stereotype is the recruitment problem, and it’s a hard one, because the people they want form their opinion long before they ever reach a job posting. So I sketched a Roblox concept built to close it, and the design goal was specific, make the game recruit the same way the company does.

A playable job preview, not an arcade loop

The easy version of an AUTO1 game is a fast branded arcade thing, tap to process a car, beat your score, logo everywhere. Fun, but it tells a candidate nothing about the actual work. So this concept is a role preview instead. You spawn in an AUTO1 hub and choose one of the real hiring paths, mechanic or sales. On the mechanic track you’re in a production center, inspecting cars as they arrive, identifying issues, processing them. On the sales track you’re at a drop-off branch, dealing with customers, assessing a car’s condition, making fast and fair pricing decisions. Simple to learn, hard to master, and it accelerates over time until it takes real focus. The player isn’t watching a video about the job, they’re doing a compressed version of it.

Attitude over experience, as a mechanic

Here’s the part I care about most. AUTO1 genuinely recruits on “attitude over experience,” it’s a real principle for them, not a slogan on a wall. So I built the game so that’s literally how you win. You don’t succeed because you know cars, the game requires no automotive knowledge at all. You succeed through quick reflexes, problem solving, and the persistence to keep going when the pace gets intense. That’s the trait AUTO1 says it hires for, and the game rewards it by design. A candidate doesn’t read “we value attitude,” they experience a place where attitude is exactly what carries them through. The medium and the message line up, which is rare.

Showing the real scale

There’s a specific perception fix baked in. An entry-level candidate often pictures a small local garage, so the game visually connects a local drop-off branch to a massive European production center. You start to grasp that this local touchpoint is part of something continental, thousands of roles across dozens of countries, rather than one small workshop. The scale becomes something you see, not a number on a careers page.

Why this helps a stretched talent team

A recruiting team hiring at this scale, across this many countries, spends enormous time explaining the day-to-day reality of the job over and over. A well-built experience does some of that explaining on its own, around the clock, and it naturally resonates most with the people who enjoy a fast-paced environment. I’d frame that carefully though, the value is that the right people self-select toward it because they like how it feels, not that the game screens or scores anyone. It’s an immersive preview that attracts fit, not an assessment tool, and I’d be honest with any brand about keeping it on the right side of that line.

The honest part about connecting it to real hiring

I’ll be precise, because most concepts skip it. You can’t put a clickable link inside a Roblox experience that sends a player straight to the AUTO1 careers site, the platform doesn’t allow linking out from inside a game. So the real handoff happens around the experience, through the campaign, the experience page, the creator content and the follow up. The game builds the interest at scale, the real recruitment journey picks it up outside the game. One thing worth saying plainly, a Roblox experience runs on PC, mobile and VR, but its home is native on the platform where young people already are, that reach is the point, more than any booth or device at an event.

Where these things live or die

Building a slick AUTO1 hub is the easy part. The hard part, the one that quietly kills most brand games, is that they launch and nobody comes, because building was never the bottleneck, getting the right young audience to show up on day one is. Roblox is full of beautiful brand worlds nobody visited. Distribution is the whole game, it’s the part brands forget to budget for, and it’s the part I care about most, because it’s the genuinely hard one, and it’s what we’re built for.

Why I’m writing this

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept. But a company whose whole recruiting pitch is attitude over experience is sitting on the perfect gaming angle, because a game is the one place attitude beats experience by default. The ones that move first on this own it before anyone else can. I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one and push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it gets seen. We’ve also built a functional branded game already, Work at Ryanair, so this isn’t only theory. If employer brand on Roblox is on your radar, my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by AUTO1. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

This thumbnail is the less relevant I can use for a Bosch employer branding Roblox game.

I’ll be honest about how this one started. I asked a few younger people what they thought Bosch does, and the answers were “drills,” “power tools,” and one confident “fridges.” Not one person said artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, software, or data science, which is a problem, because that’s a huge part of what Bosch actually is, and it’s exactly the talent they’re fighting to hire.

So I spent a morning sketching what I’d build to fix that. Here’s the concept

The thirty-year-old mental image

Bosch has an image problem with young technical talent, and it’s a specific one. The brand reads as tools and appliances, solid and a bit old, when the reality is AI, software, digitalization, autonomous systems, the whole modern engineering stack. The company already has the story. What it doesn’t have is a way to get that story in front of an eighteen year old before that eighteen year old has already decided Bosch isn’t for them.

A job ad can’t do it, because the people Bosch wants aren’t scrolling job boards, they’re on Roblox. So the fix isn’t to describe the technology better, it’s to let someone stand inside it for ten minutes and feel the picture update on its own.

Not a factory sim, an innovation lab

The trap here would be a factory simulator, which would just confirm the boring image everyone already has. So the concept is a Bosch Innovation Lab, and the player moves through it as part of a near-future engineering team, solving short challenges that feel like real engineering rather than button-mashing.

The smart factory

You start in a highly automated Bosch factory and get one job, optimize the production line. You fix machines, read the production data, improve efficiency, and deploy AI-powered systems where they actually help. It’s hands-on and satisfying, and without a single line of corporate copy it tells the player that a Bosch factory is a piece of software as much as a piece of hardware.

The AI challenge

Then a problem lands. A machine is behaving abnormally, and you have to work out why. You inspect the data, find the anomaly, and choose the right technology to fix it. This is where a young player who’s into tech leans in, because it’s the actual shape of the job, not a description of it, and it quietly reframes Bosch from “manufacturer” to “the place that builds the intelligence inside the manufacturing.”

Smart mobility

Next you step into a Bosch-powered future city and work on mobility systems, optimizing traffic, repairing vehicle systems, configuring sensors, testing autonomous technology. Bosch is deep in automotive tech, and most young people have no idea, so letting them play with it is the fastest way to make that connection stick.

The future-tech lab

The last section is the most futuristic, a lab showcasing where Bosch wants to go, with progressively harder challenges the player unlocks as they get better. It’s the aspirational top of the funnel, the part that says this isn’t a company standing still, it’s one aiming at the next decade.

The part that does the recruiting

At the end of each challenge the game reads how the player actually performed and shows them what they’re good at, AI and data, engineering, problem solving, digital technology. Then it points them toward a matching Bosch path, software engineer, AI engineer, systems engineer, data scientist, electrical engineer, product manager, each with a small “day in the life” challenge instead of a job description.

The framing is the whole trick. The player demonstrates their problem-solving ability and discovers Bosch’s technology ecosystem at the same time, and the game hands them a read on their own strengths before it ever mentions a role. People share a thing that describes them. They ignore a thing that asks them to apply.

The honest part about connecting it to real hiring

I’ll be precise, because most concepts skip it. You can’t drop a clickable link inside a Roblox experience that sends a player straight to the Bosch careers site, the platform doesn’t allow linking out from inside a game. So the real handoff happens around the experience, through the campaign, the experience page, the creator content and the follow up. The game builds the interest at scale, the real recruitment journey picks it up outside the game. A partner who tells you that up front is worth more than one who promises an in game apply button that can’t exist.

Where these things live or die

Building a slick Bosch lab is the easy part, any strong studio can do it. The hard part, the one that quietly kills most brand games, is that they launch and nobody comes, because building was never the bottleneck, getting the right young audience, here the software and engineering-minded ones, to actually show up on day one is. Roblox is full of beautiful brand worlds nobody visited. Distribution is the whole game, it’s the part brands forget to budget for, and it’s the part I care about most, because it’s the genuinely hard one, and it’s what we’re built for.

Why I’m writing this

When I asked people around me (not my dad or my uncle of course, friends aroud my age), everyone said that Bosch is just testing drills. Nobody talked about the software engineers, AI engineers, systems engineers, data scientists, electrical enginees.. So, I came up with the idea to create a game for the employer branding of Bosch.

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept, I just think it’s where employer brand is heading, and the technical roles Bosch is chasing are the ones every industrial company is chasing at once. The ones that move first will own the association with young technical talent before anyone else can.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one and push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it gets seen. We’ve also built a functional branded game already, Work at Ryanair, so this isn’t only theory. If employer brand on Roblox is on your radar, my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Bosch. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

My brother work on a thermal company like Thermondo. We was in the car, when he said to me that he truly love his more, more than others desks jobs. And at this moment, I was like “oh, interresting. [3sec pause].. OH, I HAVE AN IDEA!“ and then I jumped on my laptop to write a concept for a company like Thermondo. And here, is one idea to use Roblox for an employer branding campaign in Germany.

Full disclosure before I start. I wrote this one with a specific person in mind, Tatjana Berstecher, who runs Employer Branding at Thermondo, because she has one of the hardest recruitment jobs in Germany right now. If that’s you reading, hi. If it’s not, stick around, because the problem underneath is one almost every industrial employer is about to face.

Here’s the setup. A player spawns into a house with a dying old boiler, cold rooms, an unhappy family (then can be happy also haha), and one job to do, replace it with a Thermondo heat pump. That’s the whole game. And by the end of this you’ll see why that simple loop does more for recruitment than any careers page Thermondo could build.

The problem no job ad can fix

Germany needs thousands of heating technicians for the heat pump transition, and it needs them now. The catch is brutal, almost no young person grows up wanting to be one. It’s not that they dislike the trade, they never picture it at all. It sits in a blind spot, filled somewhere between “manual work” and “not for me,” by people who have never once seen what the job actually involves.

You cannot advertise your way out of that. A job posting speaks to people already looking for that job, and the whole problem is that nobody’s looking. What Thermondo actually needs is to make a generation want to enter the trade in the first place, which is a completely different task, and a much better fit for a game than an ad.

The install is the game

The loop follows one real job from start to finish. First the player inspects the house and uses different tools to find the heating problem. Then they plan the installation, choosing where the heat pump goes, checking the dimensions, preparing the work. Then the main event, they install it, hauling the equipment in, connecting the pipes, fitting the components, configuring the system. Then something goes wrong mid-install, wrong pressure, a bad connection, an awkward spot, and they have to understand what’s off and fix it properly. And finally they power it on, and the house goes from cold to warm right in front of them. (and family become finally happy!!)

That last beat matters more than it looks. A seventeen year old just made a home warm with their own hands and watched it happen, and the thought that follows is the entire point of the project, I could actually do this.

Why this fits Thermondo specifically

The game is a preview of the real job, and it happens to showcase exactly what Thermondo already has. The Akademie, because the progression in the game mirrors learning the trade step by step. The technology, through the digital tools and diagnostics the player uses. The field work, real and hands-on, nothing like a desk. The climate mission, built right into the core loop of moving a house off an old boiler. And the growth path, starting as a trainee and unlocking skills. None of that is told to the player through a slide. They live it.

The progression that mirrors a real career

The player starts as a trainee, then climbs, junior technician, heating technician, heat pump specialist, and eventually Thermondo expert. Each level unlocks new installations and new tools, so the sense of getting better at a real craft is baked into the game. It’s the same arc a real Thermondo technician lives, compressed into something a young player feels in an afternoon, and it quietly says the thing recruitment struggles to say, that this is a career with a ladder, not a dead-end job.

The line most recruitment forgets

At the end of an installation, the game shows the result, heating restored, energy efficiency 94 percent, CO2 impact reduced, installation quality excellent. Then a question, could you do this in real life. And then the line I’d fight to keep, the one that actually addresses Thermondo’s real problem, no experience? Start with the Thermondo Akademie.

That sentence is the whole strategy. It tells a kid who assumed they were unqualified that the door is open, that they don’t need to already know how to do this, they need to want to learn. For a company whose real challenge is widening the funnel, not filtering it, that’s worth more than any list of open roles.

The honest part about connecting it to real hiring

I’ll be precise here, because most concepts skate over it. You cannot drop a clickable link inside a Roblox experience that sends a player straight to the Thermondo careers site, the platform doesn’t allow linking out from inside a game, so the real handoff happens around the experience, through the campaign, the experience page, the creator content and the follow up. The game builds the interest and the intent at scale, and Thermondo’s real recruitment journey, Akademie included, picks it up outside the game. A partner who tells you that up front is worth more than one who promises an in game apply button that can’t exist.

Where these projects live or die

Building a clean Thermondo world is the easy part, any decent studio can model a house and a heat pump. The hard part, the one that quietly kills most brand games, is that they launch and nobody comes, because building was never the bottleneck, getting the right young audience to actually show up on day one is. Roblox is full of beautiful brand worlds nobody ever visited. Distribution is the whole game, it’s the piece brands forget to budget for, and it’s honestly the part I care about most, because it’s the genuinely hard one. It’s also the part we’re built for, we push these experiences through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the thing doesn’t just exist, it trends.

Why I’m writing this

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept. But the heat pump transition is real, the technician shortage is real, and the companies that make the trade feel worth entering will win the next decade of talent. Thermondo is unusually well placed to be first.

So, Tatjana, if this made it in front of you, that was the plan ;) . I’d genuinely love twenty minutes to walk you through it. Worst case, you spent a few minutes reading a stranger who clearly did his homework. Best case, Thermondo becomes one of the first in its sector to do this properly.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one and push them through our creator network so they actually get seen. We’ve also built a functional branded game already, Work at Ryanair, so this isn’t only theory. If employer brand on Roblox is on your radar, my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Thermondo. Yet. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

An order clock starts ticking, and a bin of used work garments lands in front of you. Your job is to get them through the whole cycle before the deadline, pick them up from the client, scan and sort them by condition and size, run the industrial wash, inspect them, repair the ones worth saving, prepare the delivery. Simple to describe, and the moment two more orders land while you’re still on the first one, not simple to do.

That pressure, in the first few minutes, is the reason this works as more than a virtual tour. Because the hardest thing about recruiting into a company like MEWA isn’t convincing people the work matters. It’s that they never picture the work at all.

Let me walk through the concept, and why a company most people would call boring is actually a strong fit for this.

The invisible-career problem

Say MEWA to a nineteen year old and, if they place it at all, they picture work uniforms and laundry. What they never picture is what actually runs the business, the automation on the sorting lines, the logistics moving garments across a region, the IT and digital systems tracking every item, the quality engineering, the sustainability work that’s genuinely central to a textile-cycle company. Those careers exist in large numbers, and they’re completely invisible to the people who’d be good at them.

That’s a pure perception gap, and it’s the kind a game closes better than any careers page, because you can’t argue someone into seeing a job differently, but you can let them do a version of it for ten minutes and watch the picture change on its own.

The cycle is the game

The core loop follows one garment through six stages, and each stage is a small piece of a real job. Collect, where you pick up used workwear from client sites. Sort, where you scan and route textiles by condition, size and destination. Clean, where you run and optimize the industrial washing machines. Inspect, where you find the garments that need repair or replacement. Repair, where you fix textiles and put them back into circulation. Deliver, where you prepare orders and organize the runs back out to client companies. The goal is to keep the whole facility flowing without a bottleneck while orders keep arriving, which is exactly the real challenge of the actual operation.

The decisions that make it real

A tour would be boring. What makes this a game is that the facility throws real problems at you and asks you to choose. An urgent order, 2,400 garments to deliver in 18 minutes. A machine issue, production efficiency down 23 percent. A quality check, 17 garments failed inspection. Each one is a small decision with consequences you can see in the flow of the plant, and each one quietly teaches the same lesson, that working here is about technology, logistics, people and solving problems under pressure, not about fabric.

What could you do here

As the player moves through the cycle, the game lets them start as an operator and gradually unlock the roles they never knew existed, industrial engineering, logistics, automation, IT and digital, quality management, operations, maintenance, sustainability, customer service. Each one is a real MEWA career family, surfaced through play rather than a list. The quiet question the game keeps asking, what could you do at MEWA, gets answered by what the player naturally reaches for.

The screen that does the work

At the end, the game reads how they actually played and hands them a profile, operations, problem solving, logistics, technology, sustainability, scored on their real choices, with a best match at the top, maybe operations and engineering, you like solving problems and keeping complex systems running. Under it, a way to explore the matching MEWA careers.

The framing is the whole point. Instead of showing a young person a wall of openings, it shows them something about themselves first, and only then points to where that fits at MEWA. People carry a description of themselves out the door. They forget a job ad by the time they’ve closed the tab.

The honest part about connecting it to real hiring

I’ll be precise here, because most concepts skip it. You cannot drop a clickable link inside a Roblox experience that sends a player straight to the MEWA careers site, the platform doesn’t allow linking out from inside a game, so the real handoff happens around the experience, through the campaign, the experience page, the creator content and the follow up. The game builds the curiosity and the intent at scale, and MEWA’s real recruitment journey picks it up outside the game. A partner who tells you that up front is worth more than one who promises an in game apply button that can’t exist.

Built for creators, not silence

A brand game that launches quietly is a brand game nobody plays, so this has to be designed for creators from the start, with content angles that actually work, can I run an entire textile facility without a single late delivery, that kind of challenge, creators competing on speed, efficiency and quality. That turns a recruitment message into entertainment, and it’s the part I care about most, honestly, because building the experience was never the hard part, getting the right young audience to show up on day one is.

The part I’d be straight about with MEWA

One honest note specific to this one. Unlike some brands, I don’t have a signal that MEWA has done immersive or gaming work before, so I wouldn’t pretend this extends an existing strategy. It’s a fresh idea for a sector that hasn’t moved here yet, and that’s actually the opportunity, being first in industrial textile care means owning the association with young technical talent before any competitor thinks of it. The companies that move first in their sector get that position cheaply. Everyone after pays more for less.

Why I’m writing this

This time, we change the industry. It’s a little bit different, and we can’t just do the same type of game than for the others of the season.

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept. But it’s where employer brand is heading, and a company that most people underestimate has more to gain from it than almost anyone.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one, and just as important, we push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it actually gets seen. If you lead employer brand or early careers and you’ve wondered what this could look like for your company, this is it, and my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by MEWA. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

You climb into the cab of a Caterpillar excavator and the objective is simple, clear the site. Position the machine, dig, avoid the obstacles, load the haul truck, do it cleanly. When you finish, the game scores you, safety 94, precision 89, efficiency 91. And whatever you expected walking in, the first feeling you actually get is I could be good at this.

That feeling, in the first three minutes, is the entire reason this concept works. Because the hardest thing about recruiting into heavy industry isn’t convincing people the work matters. It’s the picture in their head before they ever look.

Let me walk through the whole thing, and why Caterpillar specifically is one of the strongest fits in this space.

The picture problem

Ask a seventeen year old to imagine a career at Caterpillar and most of them land on the same image, a factory, repetitive work, old machinery, a guy in 1985 with a wrench. That mental model is quietly costing the whole industry, because the reality moved on decades ago and the image didn’t.

A modern Caterpillar technician is closer to a mechanic, an electrician, a software user and a data analyst rolled into one, making decisions on machines worth millions. Caterpillar itself has spent years using immersive 3D and VR to visualize machines before they’re built, and pushing AR, AI and data across training and fleet operations. The innovation is real and already there. What’s missing is that a young person never connects any of it to a career they could have, so the job is to replace the outdated picture with the real one, and the fastest way to change a picture is to let someone stand inside it.

Start easy, then go deep

The first mission is deliberately accessible, operate the excavator, clear the site, get scored on precision, efficiency, safety, time. Anyone can feel competent quickly, which is what pulls them in.

Then the concept turns. The machine stops performing normally, and instead of replacing it you have to work out why. A simplified service interface offers the suspects, hydraulic pressure, engine temperature, an electrical fault, a sensor issue, the fuel system, operator error, and you have to read the signals and find the real cause. The game shifts from drive a big machine to understand a complex one, which is the actual shift in perception Caterpillar needs a young candidate to make.

The machine is smart

Next a digital overlay appears over the excavator, live telemetry, fuel consumption, engine load, hydraulic pressure, productivity, maintenance status. You get a target, reduce fuel consumption by twelve percent without losing productivity, and you experiment with operating strategies until it works. Without a single piece of jargon, the player lives Caterpillar’s digital transformation as a loop, data, decision, performance. Somewhere in there they think, these things are basically computers on tracks, which is exactly right.

The technician challenge

Then you step into the service workshop, a machine rolls in with a fault, and you get a diagnostic tablet. Scan it, identify the fault, locate the component, replace it, run a system test, return it to service, all as a timed technical challenge. The point isn’t to make anyone feel like a mechanic from forty years ago. It’s to show that the modern technician is a mechanic and an electrician and a software user and a problem solver at once, which happens to be exactly the role Caterpillar most needs young people to find aspirational.

From one machine to the whole site

The scope keeps widening. You become the operations planner, and a site has to move a set amount of material by a deadline. You choose which machines to deploy, how many, where they work, the truck routes, how it’s all coordinated, and every choice moves productivity, fuel, safety and cost. The player stops seeing individual machines and starts seeing a connected system, which is a much truer picture of what the company actually is.

Then the final mission pulls it all together, thirty minutes to save a project that’s behind schedule, diagnose why productivity dropped, operate the right machines, repair a critical one, cut wasted fuel, keep the whole fleet moving. The site visibly transforms as they fix it, and it closes on a line that sets up progression rather than a dead end, you’re ready for the next machine.

Find your fit

After a few missions the game hands the player a skills profile drawn from how they actually played, mechanical thinking, problem solving, systems thinking, precision, leadership, and maps it to real Caterpillar career areas. Strong mechanical thinking points toward technician, systems thinking toward engineering, data and optimization toward digital and technology, operations toward manufacturing, leadership toward site and project management. The player isn’t handed four hundred openings, they’re shown where they might fit based on what they naturally did, and that difference is the whole thing.

The skills-gap answer

Caterpillar’s real investment in workforce development gives this a credible destination, and I’d build a Cat Academy area around it, a virtual training facility showing the progression, learn, train, certify, work, grow. The message a young player walks away with is the one the manufacturing skills gap most needs, you don’t need to know how to fix this machine today, you need to be willing to learn how, and there’s a path. For apprenticeships, technician routes and STEM outreach, that lands far harder than a job ad ever could.

Great machines need great teams

Caterpillar’s “power of everyone” idea works better as a mechanic than a slogan, so some missions need more than one player. One operates the excavator, one runs diagnostics, one handles logistics, one watches safety, and the mission can’t be done efficiently alone. Players get rewarded for coordinating, and the culture message lands on its own without a corporate slide, great machines need great teams.

Built for creators, not silence

A brand game that launches quietly is a brand game nobody plays, so this is designed for creators from the start. The content writes itself, I have ten minutes to fix a Cat excavator, can I run a ten million dollar construction site, Roblox just turned me into a heavy equipment technician, with creators competing on safety, efficiency, productivity and time. That turns a recruitment message into entertainment, and it’s the part I care about most, because building the experience was never the hard part, getting the right young audience to show up on day one is.

The honest part about connecting it to real hiring

I’ll be precise here, because most concepts skip it. You cannot drop a clickable link inside a Roblox experience that sends a player to the Caterpillar careers site, the platform doesn’t allow linking out from inside a game, so the real handoff happens around the experience, through the campaign, the experience page, the creator content and the follow up. The game builds the curiosity and the intent at scale, and Caterpillar’s real recruitment journey picks it up outside the game. A partner who tells you that up front is worth more than one who promises an in game apply button that can’t exist.

What the talent team actually gets

Beyond player numbers, Caterpillar can see experience starts, completion, session time, which career categories people click, career-page visits, application starts. And in aggregate the gameplay becomes talent intelligence, a read on which career areas actually attract young technical talent, technician versus engineering versus digital. For an employer brand team, that answers a better question than “how many people saw us,” it answers “what actually made them want to work here.”

Why I’m writing this

Whene I was 15, I was trainee in a construction company. It required physicals aptitudes, pragmatism and skills to use a jackhammer, right. But it was more about cohesion. And that’s what I wanted to explore with this game, I think that it can be truly relevant to build this game.

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept. But it’s the natural next step for a company that already made immersive tech part of how it works, and the ones that move first in their sector will own the association with the next generation of technical talent before anyone else can.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one, and just as important, we push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it actually gets seen. If you lead employer brand or early careers and you’ve wondered what this could look like for your company, this is it, and my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Caterpillar. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

You step into a Volvo truck cabin, except you’re not here to drive it, you’re here to design it. The dashboard, the screen positions, the seat, the sightlines, the controls, all of it is yours to lay out. Then you climb into the driver’s seat and test your own decisions, and a simple readout tells you how you did, visibility, comfort, safety, usability. The point isn’t to make the cabin look nice, it’s to make the right call for the person who actually has to sit in it for ten hours a day.

That’s the first three minutes, and it already tells a young player something most industrial employers can never quite get across, that engineering at Volvo is about people, not just parts.

Let me walk through the whole concept, and why Volvo Group specifically is the strongest fit I’ve come across for this kind of thing.

Volvo already did the hard part

Most brands that come to an idea like this have to manufacture a connection to gaming out of nothing. Volvo doesn’t. They ran an activation at DreamHack built on the premise that gaming skills can translate into engineering ability, and they already use XR to test virtual truck cabins with real drivers before those cabins ever get built. The link between gaming, engineering and the future of transport is something Volvo has already put real money behind.

So the job here is not to convince anyone that Volvo is innovative. It’s to take a belief the company already holds and let a candidate feel it instead of reading it on a careers page. A nineteen year old who’s genuinely good at games has no idea Volvo Group is a place where that ability maps onto a real career, and still thinks of the company as trucks and nothing else. The game closes that specific gap.

You design it, then you test it

After the cabin design, you become the test engineer. A virtual driver climbs in, and you start getting real scenarios, the driver needs to find a control without taking their eyes off the road, the driver has been going six hours and needs better comfort, visibility is limited so find the safest configuration. You adjust the cabin in real time and get immediate feedback, and a small interface quietly introduces the actual Volvo XR story, test, measure, improve. Without a single lecture, the player absorbs the real lesson of engineering, that you don’t build something once, you keep making it better.

The digital twin

Then the experience opens up into a futuristic development lab where a complete truck appears as a digital twin. You walk around it, inspect it, and step into different systems, cabin, safety, powertrain, software, aerodynamics, each with its own small challenge. In software, a warning tells you the driver is getting too much information, and you have to reorganize the interface. In aerodynamics, you change the truck’s shape and watch the efficiency shift in real time. In safety, you spot the hazards around the vehicle. Hard engineering ideas turn into things you do with your hands, which is exactly how a game should teach.

The mechanic that does the real work

This is the heart of it for employer brand. At the end of each challenge, the player gets a skills profile, systems thinking, problem solving, spatial reasoning, decision making, human-centred design, scored on how they actually played. The game never claims that Roblox proves someone is an engineer, that would be silly and a smart nineteen year old would see through it instantly. What it does is plant a single thought, the things I’m naturally good at in this game are actually connected to engineering. That thought is the entire bridge between Volvo’s DreamHack strategy and real recruitment.

Where could you fit

From there the player unlocks a simple screen that maps what they enjoyed to real Volvo career areas, not a generic job board. If they liked designing, it points them toward UX and human-centred design. If they liked solving systems, software engineering. If they liked testing, engineering and validation. If they liked vehicle performance, vehicle engineering. If they liked the data, data and digital technology. And then, only then, it offers to show them where that skill actually lives at Volvo Group.

The Axel moment

The strongest single beat I’d build is turning Volvo’s real XR work into a character. The player meets a fictionalized Volvo XR engineer who explains that he works on virtual truck cabins before they ever reach the road, and then the player performs a simplified version of exactly that process. The difference in impact is enormous. Telling a candidate “Volvo Group uses XR” is a fact they’ll forget. Letting them think “I just used the same kind of technology a Volvo engineer uses” is something they’ll carry around, and repeat.

Build what’s next

The experience ends with one final mission. A new Volvo truck concept needs improving, and the player has a hundred and eighty seconds to make calls across driver experience, safety, efficiency, digital interface and sustainability. The game scores the result, and closes on a line, you built what’s next, and underneath, could you build it for real. That framing matters. It doesn’t beg anyone to apply, it hands them a small sense of achievement and lets the invitation follow from it.

Built for creators, not silence

A brand game that launches quietly is a brand game nobody plays. This one is designed for distribution from the start, around a creator challenge, can you build the most efficient Volvo truck, with a leaderboard of top engineers and creators competing against each other. That gives Volvo a genuine reason to work with gaming creators, and it turns the whole campaign into gaming, then challenge, then engineering, then Volvo, then careers, instead of an ad pointing at a job page. This is also where I care most, honestly, because the build is never the hard part, getting the right young audience to actually show up is, and a creator-led launch is what makes or breaks that.

The honest part about connecting it to real hiring

I’ll be precise here, because most concepts skate over it. You cannot drop a clickable link inside a Roblox experience that sends a player straight to the Volvo careers site, the platform doesn’t allow linking out from inside a game, so the real handoff happens around the experience, through the campaign, the experience page, the creator content and the follow up. The game builds the curiosity and the intent at scale, and Volvo’s existing recruitment journey picks it up outside the game. A partner who tells you that up front is easier to trust than one who promises an in game apply button that can’t exist.

What the talent team actually gets

The value here isn’t only player numbers. Volvo can see experience starts, completion, time spent, which career areas people interact with, career-page clicks. And in aggregate, the gameplay itself becomes talent intelligence, a readout of which career areas pull the most interest from young technical talent, software versus human-centred design versus vehicle engineering. For an employer brand team, that’s a much sharper picture of what actually attracts the next generation than any survey would give them.

Why I’m writing this

It’s not the first time that I see Volvo being implemented in Roblox. I saw integrations in games, like Driving Empire or Greenville. Volvo know how to reach gen z, but they haven’t already used Roblox for the recruitment part, and make a big press coverage impact.

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept. But it’s the natural next step for a company that already brought engineering to a gaming crowd at DreamHack, and the companies that move first in their sector will own the association with the next generation of technical talent before anyone else can.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one, and just as important, we push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it actually gets seen. If you lead employer brand or early careers and you’ve wondered what this could look like for your company, this is it, and my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Volvo Group. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

A timer appears at the top of the screen. Storm incoming, 24:00:00, counting down. Out through the window there’s an offshore wind farm, forty eight turbines standing in open ocean, and the weather is turning. Your job for the next twenty four game-hours is simple to say and hard to do, keep the turbines safe and keep the energy flowing.

Except you can’t see the whole picture. You’re one of six people on this team, and each of you knows something the others don’t. The data scientist can see the weather closing in. The engineer knows which turbines are mechanically fragile. The technician knows which ones are already flagged for repair. The operations manager knows who’s actually available to send out. Nobody can solve the storm alone, so you talk, you argue, you decide, and the farm rides it out or it doesn’t.

That’s the pitch, and it’s deliberately not the obvious one.

The trap most agencies would fall into

Hand this brief to a typical shop and you get build a turbine, a pretty sim where you plant a windmill and watch it spin. It shows the product and sells nothing about Vestas as a place to work. Worse, it leans on the one message a young tech talent is completely numb to.

Because here’s the thing about “save the planet.” To a seventeen year old who’s good at code or systems, it’s the expected line, the thing every green company says, and it lands like a slogan rather than a challenge. Ask that same kid whether they can keep a 2.4 gigawatt offshore wind farm running through a storm, and now you’ve got their attention, because that reads as a game. The game is what pulls them in, and once they’re in, Vestas gets to show the engineering, the AI, the data and the careers that make it real.

You start on land, and it grows

The experience opens on a coastal region that’s mostly empty, a city, some factories, roads, a bit of offshore water, a few turbines. A bar at the top reads energy demand, 72 percent, the city is growing, we need more power. Your first job is small, build the next wind farm.

But placing turbines isn’t just plopping them down. You’re weighing wind speed against terrain, distance to the grid against construction cost, environmental impact against energy demand. Without ever opening a menu that says “engineering careers,” you’re already doing the actual reasoning an engineer does. That’s the whole design philosophy here, you learn the job by doing a small version of it, never by reading about it.

Then it surprises you

Once the farm is up, you tune it, blade configuration, electrical systems, grid connection, and you get small sharp puzzles like turbine seven is at 78 percent output in 31 kilometer winds, do you adjust the blade angle, increase rotation, or reduce load. Quick, satisfying, quietly teaching.

And then the concept does the thing I care about most, it breaks the stereotype. A huge monitoring interface appears, Vestas Digital Control, twelve thousand turbines online, energy output, performance, wind forecast, AI prediction. Your task is to spot the turbine that’s about to fail before it fails. Predictive maintenance. And somewhere out there a kid who’s into tech thinks, wait, I didn’t know Vestas did this. That sentence, in that kid’s head, is the entire point of the project.

Then you can literally leave the control room and go to the field, stand at the base of a giant turbine, inspect it, find the fault, secure the area, make the repair, bring it back online. The same player goes from a monitoring dashboard to a wrench at the base of a turbine, which is exactly the range of work Vestas needs people to picture.

One energy team

The real employer brand engine is the co-op. Everyone picks a role, and they’re all genuine Vestas career families, not labels. The engineer designs the solution. The wind technician keeps turbines running. Data and AI predicts what’s coming. Electrical connects the energy to the grid. Offshore operations keeps the whole thing moving. Environment builds without wrecking the ecosystem. Project management keeps it all on track.

Each role sees different information, which means the only way through a real crisis is to actually work together. That’s not a mechanic bolted on for fun, it’s the most honest possible picture of how the work really happens, and it quietly tells a young player that Vestas is a whole system of people who need each other, not a single job title.

What the game gives back

When the storm passes, the game doesn’t flash you won. It looks at how you played and hands you a profile, you naturally gravitate toward engineering, problem solving, sustainability, digital, with the bars filled in based on your actual choices. Then a line, you could be a Vestas engineer, and under it, based on the way you played, explore the careers that match your strengths.

The framing matters more than it looks. Instead of pointing at open roles and asking the player to apply, it points at the kind of problem they’re clearly wired to solve, and shows where that fits at Vestas. The experience gives the player something about themselves first, and people carry that out the door in a way they never carry a job ad.

The bridge to real hiring, done honestly

I’ll be precise here, because it’s the part most concepts fudge and it’s easy to get wrong on Roblox. You cannot drop a clickable link inside the experience that sends a player straight to the Vestas careers site, the platform doesn’t allow sending users out to external sites from inside a game, and anyone promising you an in game apply now button that links out doesn’t really know the platform. The bridge to real hiring happens around the experience, the campaign, the experience page, the press, the follow up. The game builds the intent at scale, the real funnel picks it up outside the game. That’s the kind of thing a serious partner tells you before launch instead of after.

Where these projects live or die

Building a gorgeous Vestas world is the easy part, any strong studio can model turbines in a moody ocean. The hard part, the one that quietly kills most brand games, is that they launch and then nobody comes, because building was never the bottleneck, getting the right young audience, and here the tech-minded ones Vestas actually wants, to show up on day one, is. Roblox is full of beautiful brand worlds that sat empty. Distribution is the whole game, it’s the piece brands forget to budget for, and it’s honestly the part I care about most, because it’s the genuinely hard one.

Why I’m writing this

I see the potential for an indusry like the sustain energy to be on Roblox. Vestas needs to reach the young generation, and there future generation of technicians. It can be done with Roblox. We have the power to enhance the recruitment and the employer brand of Vestas, because we actually know where is this new generation. Spoiler : On Roblox.

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept. But it’s where employer brand is heading, and the companies that move first in their sector will own the association with the next generation of technical talent before anyone else can buy it back.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one, and just as important, we push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it actually gets seen. If you lead employer brand or early careers and you’ve wondered what this could look like for your company, this is it, and my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Vestas. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

A huge operations hub materializes around you, screens everywhere, and in the middle a single line lights up.

THE WORLD IS MOVING. Your job is to keep it moving.

Then a 3D map of the planet flickers on, and the routes start drawing themselves across it, Shanghai to Rotterdam, Rotterdam to Hamburg, Hamburg to New York, thousands of tiny containers flowing along the lines like blood through veins. For a second it’s almost hypnotic, you’re just watching the whole world trade in real time.

And then the map turns red in one spot. A disruption has just occurred.

And here’s the thing, you’re not reading about logistics, you’re not being shown a video of what Maersk does, the problem is already yours and the clock is already moving, and whatever you do next actually changes the map in front of you. That shift, from watching global trade to being responsible for it in the first ten seconds, is the whole idea, and it’s exactly why this would hold a seventeen year old who would have closed a corporate careers page in about four seconds.

Let me explain what I’d actually build, and why Maersk specifically is close to a perfect fit for it.

Not a boat sim, a living network you keep alive

Most agencies handed this brief would build a ship driving game, steer the vessel, dock it, done. And it would completely miss what Maersk actually needs to say. So the concept isn’t about driving a boat, it’s about running the chain, keeping the whole global network moving, which is a far bigger and far more interesting job.

Each session is a day inside the Maersk network. A container might hold car parts, medicine, electronics, or food, and your job is to get it where it needs to go, except the network never sits still, there’s bad weather, a congested port, a delayed vessel, a system outage, a customs problem, a sudden shift in demand, a security incident, a new route to open. You react, you prioritize, you adapt, and the map responds to every call you make. It’s a tycoon at heart, but the thing you’re growing isn’t a theme park, it’s the world’s trade.

The genuinely clever part, one problem, many careers

This is where the concept stops being a nice game and becomes a real employer brand engine.

Picture the event on screen, port of Rotterdam, four vessels delayed, twelve thousand containers affected, what do you do. Now here’s the trick, the answer depends entirely on who you are. The Data player can dig into the flows and find the pattern. The Operations player can reorganize the routes. The Technology player can fix the failing system underneath. The Maritime player can rework the vessel scheduling. The Design player can simplify the wall of information so everyone else can actually act on it.

Nobody solves it alone. And that single mechanic teaches, without one word of corporate copy, the exact thing Maersk struggles to communicate, that it isn’t one job, it’s thousands of careers working together. You don’t tell a young player that, you let them feel it when they realize they physically cannot fix the crisis without the person playing the role they’d never heard of.

The roles, and why each one matters

When you join, you choose what you bring, and each path is a real family of Maersk careers, not a label. Operations, where you keep the network moving across routes, ports and schedules. Technology, because a shipping company at this scale is really a tech company, and you build and defend the systems behind global trade. Data and AI, where you find the signal in the noise and predict disruptions before they hit. Digital design, where you make brutal complexity simple enough to pilot. Engineering, where you solve the physical and technical problems that keep everything running. And Maritime, where you discover what it actually takes to move the world by sea, with the real constraints of a vessel.

Six doors, and a young technologist who assumed Maersk meant boats suddenly sees data scientists, AI engineers, UX designers and cybersecurity specialists sitting at the center of the whole thing.

Built for co-op, because that’s the honest version of the work

I’d make this four to six players, each with a specialty, and I’d open on something that sets the tone, six players, one network, zero room for error. Then the event lands, and each player receives different information, Data knows a route is quietly turning inefficient, Operations knows a port is saturated, Tech sees a system anomaly, Maritime knows the vessel constraints. They have to actually talk to each other, and the whole server watches the network shift in real time as they do.

That measures something a CV never could, how a person thinks when the picture is incomplete and the ground is moving, whether they share what they know or sit on it, whether they coordinate or freeze. For a company hiring exactly those instincts, that’s a screening signal hiding inside a genuinely fun game.

The 72 hour challenge

The mission I’d build the marketing around is this. A fictional natural disaster hits a major trade route, and the player is handed a single line, seventy two hours to restore the network. Then it unfolds, identify what’s happening, prioritize what’s critical, reroute, collaborate, deliver, and the world map slowly reorganizes in front of them as they work.

And when they pull it off, the game doesn’t say congratulations, you completed the mission, it says something that lands far harder, the network is moving again, you kept the world moving. That’s the difference between a game ending and an employer brand landing, one is a score, the other is a feeling a seventeen year old carries out of the experience.

Turning their VR credibility into recruitment

Here’s the strategic hook I’d put in front of their talent team. Maersk already has real credibility in immersive training, they’ve used VR to teach faster and improve real behavior, so this isn’t asking them to believe in something new, it’s taking a technology they already trust and giving it a new job. You can even carry over the principles from their training work, hazard recognition in a port environment, a safety decision when a situation turns dangerous, a leadership moment when an incident needs coordinating.

The line that sells it is simple, you’ve already proven immersive learning works to develop your people, now use the same mechanism to attract the people you don’t have yet. VR training becomes VR recruitment, and Maersk doesn’t start from zero.

The Maersk Career Map

As the player moves through the roles, the experience quietly builds a map of them, and at the end it hands them something they’ll actually want to keep, bars filling across Maritime, Data and AI, Technology, Operations, Digital, Engineering, then a callout, your strongest area, Data and AI, you enjoy solving complex problems using information and systems, and under it a short list of real roles to explore.

And the framing is the whole point, it isn’t here are our five hundred openings, it’s based on what you enjoyed doing, here’s where you might belong. That reversal matters enormously to Gen Z, because the experience gives them something about themselves before it ever asks anything of them, and people share the thing that describes them, not the job ad.

Day in the life, the natural next step

Once a player finds their strongest area, say Data and AI, they can step into a day in the life, a small premium space with a desk, colleagues, the real tools, a genuine problem to look at, and a short video of an actual Maersk employee talking about the job. Same for a UX designer, a software engineer, a port operations manager, a marine engineer. The game quietly becomes a career discovery platform wearing the clothes of a game, which is exactly what you want, discovery that never feels like recruitment.

The perception problem this actually fixes

Here’s Maersk’s real challenge, and why this concept fits them better than almost any brand. Say the name Maersk and a young person thinks ships, containers, ports, full stop. Meanwhile Maersk needs AI engineers, data scientists, UX designers, software engineers, digital product managers, cybersecurity specialists, operations talent. The game tells the exact inverse of the assumption, the ships are only the visible part, and behind every one of them there are millions of decisions, thousands of people, data, AI, technology, engineering, the actual machinery of global trade. You don’t argue someone out of a stereotype, you let them play the truth for twenty minutes.

The honest part about connecting it to real hiring

Most concepts wave their hands here, so I’ll be precise, because getting it wrong on Roblox is easy. You cannot drop a clickable link inside the experience that sends a player straight to the Maersk careers site, Roblox does not allow sending users out to external sites from inside a game, and anyone who promises you an in game apply now button that links out doesn’t actually understand the platform. The real bridge happens around the experience, through the campaign, the experience page, the press, the follow up, the game creates the intent and the affinity at scale and the real recruitment funnel picks it up outside the game. Telling you that up front is exactly the kind of thing you want from a partner, rather than discovering it at launch.

## The part that actually decides whether it works

Building a beautiful Maersk world is the easy part, any strong studio can model a gleaming operations hub and a world map full of ships. The hard part, the one that quietly kills most brand games, is that they launch and sit empty, because building was never the bottleneck, getting the right young audience, and here specifically the tech-minded ones Maersk can’t hire fast enough, to actually show up on day one, that’s the bottleneck. Roblox is full of gorgeous brand worlds nobody ever visited. Distribution is the whole game, it’s the piece brands almost always forget to budget for, and honestly it’s the part I care about most, because it’s the genuinely hard one.

Why I’m writing this

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept, but it’s the natural next step for a company that already proved immersive learning works inside its own walls, and the ones that move first in their sector will own the association with the next generation of digital talent before anyone else can buy it back.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one, and just as importantly we push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it actually gets seen. If you lead employer brand or early careers and you’ve been wondering what this could look like for your company, this is what it looks like, and my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by A.P. Moller Maersk. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

A screen lights up in front of you, black background, white text, nothing else.

YOUR CLIENT HAS A PROBLEM.

Then it keeps going, one line at a time. AI is transforming the way they work. Their workforce is struggling to adapt. Their systems are outdated, their leadership needs a plan. You have thirty minutes.

And then a single button, enter the project.

You tap it, and here’s the thing, you’re not watching a character explain what PwC does, you’re not walking through a virtual office shaking hands with NPCs (non sense), you’re already inside the problem, the clock is already running, and the first decision is already yours. That shift, from being told about the work to doing the work in the first ten seconds, is the entire idea, and it’s why this concept would keep a seventeen year old in the experience when a branded office tour would lose them in about forty seconds.

Let me back up and explain what I’d actually build, and why it fits PwC specifically better than almost any other brand I can think of.

Why PwC is different, and why that changes the whole design

Most brands that come to Roblox need convincing that immersive learning even works. PwC doesn’t. They already deployed VR to train soft skills across twelve US locations and found that VR learners trained four times faster than in a classroom, they’ve published their own research validating it, and they’ve been running gamified upskilling for years through programs like PowerUp. Immersive learning is already in their DNA.

So you don’t pitch them “Roblox is cool, let’s make a game.” You pitch them the obvious next step they haven’t taken yet. You already use immersive tech to develop your people. Use the same mechanism to attract the people you need next. That one sentence is the whole strategy, and it reframes the game from a marketing gimmick into an extension of something they already believe in.

And it points at their real pain, which isn’t awareness, it’s a shortage of AI and technology talent, hundreds of specialist roles that are genuinely hard to fill, at the exact moment PwC wants to be seen as the firm leading transformation. So the game shouldn’t try to make PwC look fun, it should let the rare candidates PwC actually needs feel what solving PwC’s problems is like.

You don’t play PwC, you do the work

Instead of a menu of careers to browse, you pick what you bring to the team, and the choice genuinely changes what you do.

Choose AI and Data, and your client is drowning in data they don’t know how to use, so you identify what actually matters, decide what can be automated, work out where AI creates real value versus where it just adds risk, and then present a recommendation, and right when you think you’re done, the client asks you a question you didn’t prepare for, and you have to improvise. Choose Technology, and you’re arbitrating the trade-offs that define real infrastructure work, speed against security, cost against performance, innovation against reliability, and the consequences of your call show up in the world around you. Choose Cyber, and an alert fires, unusual activity detected, and you have to understand what’s happening and prioritize under pressure.

And then there’s the one that ties straight back to PwC’s own research, People and Change. Your AI system is technically excellent, and the employees simply refuse to use it, and the game makes you sit with the lesson PwC talks about constantly, technology doesn’t transform a business, people do, so you build an adoption plan instead of a technical fix. That single mission does more employer brand work than any brochure, because it shows a young technologist that PwC understands the human side of transformation, not just the code.

The twist that makes it a team sport 🏀

Here’s where it stops being a solo puzzle and becomes something you can’t fake your way through.

You put four players on the same team, and each one holds different information, one has the AI and data picture, one has cybersecurity, one has people and change, one has business strategy. None of them can solve it alone, they have to actually communicate. And then, just as they’ve aligned on a plan, the system drops an event, the client has just changed its strategy, and everything they prepared has to be reassessed on the spot.

That moment measures something a CV never will, how a person thinks when the ground shifts, whether they hoard information or share it, whether they lead or freeze. For a firm that hires for exactly those qualities, that’s not a game mechanic, that’s a screening signal disguised as fun.

The PwC Skills Profile

After a few challenges, the experience hands the player something they’ll actually want to screenshot, a personal skills profile. Problem solving, adaptability, collaboration, digital thinking, communication, critical thinking, each with a score, and then a standout skill called out with a sentence that feels personal, something like, you tend to question assumptions and identify risks before deciding. Under it, a short list, careers to explore, mapped to how they actually played.

This is the quiet genius of the whole thing, because it flips the emotional direction of recruitment. Normally the candidate is the one being judged, here the experience gives them something about themselves, and it just happens to end on discover your career at PwC. People don’t share job ads, they share things that describe them.

Why this beats a job ad, and beats their own PowerUp

PowerUp answered an internal question, how do we upskill the workforce we already have. This answers the one keeping their talent team up at night, how do we attract the next generation of digital talent. Same philosophy, pointed outward instead of inward, which is exactly why it’s an easy yes for a firm that already believes in the method.

And it fixes a perception problem PwC genuinely has with young people. A seventeen to twenty-two year old still thinks PwC means audit and accounting, and they finish this experience thinking, wait, they have AI engineers, cybersecurity specialists, technology consultants, that’s the real employer brand win, not a logo on a billboard, an actual shift in what the brand means to someone who’d never have considered it.

The Future Lab, where the game hands off to real hiring

When the mission ends, the player arrives in a small, premium space, not a giant theme park, a clean hub called the PwC Future Lab, with a few doors, AI and Data, Cyber, Technology, People, and each one holds a short experience and a video of a real PwC person talking about what they actually do.

This is the bridge, and it’s where I have to be precise with you, because most concepts get this wrong. You cannot put a clickable link inside a Roblox experience that sends a player straight to the PwC careers site, Roblox does not allow sending users out to external sites from inside a game, and anyone promising you an in game apply now button that links out doesn’t understand the platform. The real handoff happens around the experience, the campaign, the experience page, the press, the follow up, and the Future Lab is what creates the intent that the real recruitment funnel then picks up outside the game. Telling you that honestly up front is exactly the kind of thing you want from a partner, rather than finding it out at launch.

The measurement that turns this into an employer brand tool, not just a campaign

You can obviously measure the usual, players, sessions, completion rate, average playtime, challenges finished, career paths explored, skills discovered, careers clicked. But the number that matters most to a Head of Employer Brand is career intent, and you can actually capture it, because you ask once before the experience, how interested are you in working at PwC, and once after. The shift between those two answers is the whole story. Being able to walk into a room and show plus whatever percent in consideration among players turns this from a nice activation into a measurable employer brand instrument, which is the language that gets budget approved.

The part that actually decides whether it works

Building a sharp, premium PwC experience is the easy part, any strong studio can do it. The hard part, the one that quietly kills most brand games, is that they launch and sit empty, because building was never the bottleneck, getting the right young audience, and here specifically the tech-minded ones PwC wants, to actually show up on day one, that’s the bottleneck. Roblox is full of beautiful brand worlds nobody visited. Distribution is the whole game, it’s the piece brands almost always forget to budget for, and honestly it’s the part I care about most, because it’s the genuinely hard one.

Why I’m writing this

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept, but it’s the natural next step for a firm that already proved immersive learning works inside its own walls, and the companies that move first in their sector will own the association with the next generation of digital talent before anyone else can buy it back.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one, and just as importantly we push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it actually gets seen. If you lead employer brand or early careers and you’ve been wondering what this could look like for your firm, this is what it looks like, and my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by PwC. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

Linkdin here, instagram here, email : quentin@empire-studio.com

A bank that size isn’t a room full of people shouting about stocks, it’s technologists, analysts, cybersecurity teams, risk specialists, advisors, engineers, thousands of careers most young people have never once pictured, and would never think to associate with a bank. So the game shouldn’t be about getting rich, it should be about discovering what actually happens inside a global financial institution, and finding the job in there that fits you.

Here’s what I’d actually build.

Not a trading floor, a financial world you move through

The concept is closer to a career campus than a market simulator, you join JPMorgan as a new recruit, you start in one division with a few missions, and you move across the whole institution discovering how the pieces connect, the tagline is simple, build your future inside the firm that helps build everything else.

The loop pulls you forward without ever pretending money is a game, you take on missions inside a division, you solve a real problem that division actually faces, you earn XP and level up your career, and you unlock the next part of the building, so the progression is about mastering skills and climbing, not about a portfolio balance going up.

Careers become the gameplay

Instead of a screen that says “explore careers in financial services”, which no teenager has ever clicked with joy, you let them play the jobs.

You spend time in technology and engineering, because a bank this size is really a tech company, and you fix or build a system that keeps money moving. You try cybersecurity, defending the firm from an incoming attack in a tense, genuinely fun mission. You step into data and analytics, spotting a pattern in a wall of information. You try risk, weighing a decision where the safe answer and the profitable answer aren’t the same. You sit with a client as an advisor and help them with a real goal, a first home, a business, a retirement. You explore operations, the invisible machine that makes millions of transactions actually work. Each one is a real JPMorgan career turned into a short mission, so the player isn’t reading about the job, they’re feeling what it’s like.

The Career Passport

This is the piece I’d protect at all costs, because it quietly turns a game into a discovery tool without ever feeling like a recruitment pitch.

Every player carries a Career Passport that fills as they play, a badge for each division they’ve tried, an XP bar, a tracker that reads something like five of seven careers discovered, it feeds the collection instinct that keeps young players exploring, and along the way it shows a player which parts of the firm they actually gravitated toward, so a kid who assumed a bank meant “trading” leaves knowing they were drawn to cybersecurity, or engineering, or advising people, and the passport closes on one honest line, you’ve discovered the world inside JPMorgan.

Why this framing matters more here than anywhere

With most brands the risk is a boring game, with a bank the risk is a game that sends the wrong message, so this one has to be handled with care.

A concept that rewards players for “making money” trains a young audience to see finance as a slot machine, which is both irresponsible and, honestly, bad employer branding, the whole point is to show that a career here is about solving hard problems, protecting people’s money, and building the systems the economy runs on, so the game keeps score in skills and careers discovered, never in a fake fortune, that single choice is what separates a thoughtful employer brand activation from something a compliance team would kill on sight.

The honest part about connecting it to real hiring

Most concepts get vague here, so I’ll be precise, because getting this wrong on Roblox is easy.

You cannot place a clickable link inside the experience that sends a player straight to the JPMorgan careers site, Roblox does not allow sending users out to external sites from inside a game, and anyone promising you an in game “apply now” button that links out doesn’t actually understand the platform. The real bridge happens around the game, through the campaign, the experience page, the press coverage (most important feature of the product), and the follow up, the game builds the interest and the affinity at scale, and the real recruitment funnel picks it up outside the game, that distinction is exactly the kind of thing a serious partner tells you before launch, not after.

The part that actually decides whether it works

Building a sleek JPMorgan world is the easy part, any competent studio can model a gleaming HQ and a clean UI.

The hard part, the one that quietly kills most brand games, is that they launch and then sit empty, because building was never the bottleneck, getting the right young audience to show up on day one is, and Roblox is full of beautiful brand worlds nobody ever visited, so distribution is the whole game, and it’s the piece brands almost always forget to budget for, which, honestly, is the part I care about most, because it’s the genuinely hard one.

Why I’m writing this

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept, but it’s exactly the kind of employer brand activation that’s about to become normal, and the firms that move first in their sector will own the association with “the place young talent actually wants to be” before anyone else can buy it back.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one, and just as importantly we push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it actually gets seen. If you lead employer brand or early careers and you’ve been wondering what this could look like for your company, this is what it looks like, and my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by JPMorgan Chase & Co. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

DB doesn’t have a problem convincing people that trains are cool, it has a problem showing a whole generation that behind every train there are drivers, engineers, technicians, signal operators, planners, and digital teams, thousands of people doing jobs most seventeen year olds have never once pictured. So the game shouldn’t be about driving a train, it should be about keeping an entire network alive, and discovering, mission by mission, all the careers that make that possible.

Here’s what I’d actually build.

Not a simulator, a network you keep alive

The concept is a management game, closer to a tycoon than a driving sim. You join Deutsche Bahn, you start with one small station and a handful of missions, and you slowly grow into a national network. The pitch fits in one line, build the railway, keep Germany moving.

The loop is simple and it pulls you forward, you operate the trains and get them out on time, you maintain the tracks and the equipment when things break, you connect new cities and expand, you manage incidents and passenger flow, and you grow from a single platform into a huge network that spreads across the map. Every one of those pieces, and this is the whole point, maps onto a real job at DB.

Careers become the gameplay, not a menu

Instead of a screen that says “discover careers at Deutsche Bahn”, which no kid has ever clicked with any excitement, you let them feel the jobs by playing them.

You become a train driver and actually run a line with passengers depending on you. You switch to maintenance, and you inspect a stretch of track to find and fix a fault. You move to signaling and control, where you manage the signals and keep trains from conflicting, which is weirdly tense and genuinely fun. You try infrastructure, and you build a new section of track that connects two cities. You step into operations, optimizing timetables and clawing back delays, and into digital and technology, working on the systems that run a modern railway, and finally into management, coordinating several teams at once and making the calls.

Each of those is a real DB career turned into a short, satisfying mission, so the player isn’t reading a job description, they’re living a small version of it.

The Career Passport

This is the piece I’d fight to keep, because it’s what quietly turns a game into a recruitment tool without ever feeling like one.

Every player carries a DB Career Passport that fills up as they play, a badge for each job they’ve tried, an XP bar, a little tracker that reads something like six of eight careers discovered. It taps straight into the collection instinct that keeps young players exploring, and it does something clever along the way, it shows a player which roles they actually gravitated toward. A kid who never thought about the railway finishes the session knowing they liked signaling, or infrastructure, or the digital side, and at the end the passport closes on a simple line, you’ve discovered eight careers at DB.

The network everyone builds together

Here’s where it stops being a solo game and becomes a moment.

Every server shares one network, and the players grow it together. It starts tiny, Berlin connected to Frankfurt and not much else, then as people complete missions the map expands, Hannover comes online, then Hamburg, then Munich, and the lines start crossing the whole country. Nobody builds that alone, it’s the sum of everyone on the server doing their small part, which happens to be the most honest metaphor an employer brand could ask for, every journey starts with someone behind it.

That shared payoff is also what makes people come back and bring friends, because they want to see the network they helped build keep growing.

The honest part about connecting it to real hiring

Most concepts wave their hands here, so I’ll be precise, because getting this wrong on Roblox is easy.

You cannot drop a clickable link inside the experience that sends a player straight to the DB careers site, Roblox does not allow sending users out to external websites from inside a game, and anyone promising you an in game “apply now” button that links out doesn’t actually know the platform. The real bridge happens around the game, through the campaign, the experience page, the press coverage, and the follow up, the game creates the interest and the affinity at massive scale, and the real recruitment funnel picks it up outside the game. That distinction matters, and it’s the kind of thing you want your partner to tell you up front rather than discover at launch.

The part that actually decides whether it works

Building a beautiful DB world is the easy part, honestly any competent studio can model a clean red train and a nice station.

The hard part, the part that quietly kills most brand games, is that they launch and then sit empty, because building the experience was never the bottleneck, getting the right young audience to actually show up on day one is. Roblox is full of gorgeous brand worlds nobody ever visited. Distribution is the whole game, and it’s the piece brands almost always forget to budget for, which, honestly, is the part I care about most, because it’s the one that’s genuinely hard.

Why I’m writing this

Nobody asked me to design this, it’s a concept, but it’s exactly the kind of employer brand activation that’s about to become normal, and the companies that move first in their sector will own the association with “the brand that gets young people” before anyone else can buy it back.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one, and just as importantly we push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we’ve built, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it actually gets seen. If you lead employer brand or early careers and you’ve been quietly wondering what this could look like for your company, this is what it looks like, and my DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Deutsche Bahn. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

Airbus doesn’t need more people who want to fly planes. It needs people who want to build them. Engineers, technicians, designers, logisticians, programmers. A whole world of careers hiding behind one logo. So the game shouldn’t be about flying. It should be about building, and about discovering that all those jobs exist in the first place.

Here’s what I’d actually build.

The player walks into a factory, not a menu

The image at the top of this piece is a concept mockup of the opening scene. The player spawns inside a huge Airbus Assembly Campus. A real A320 sitting mid build in the center, gantries and cranes around it, work stations everywhere, yellow safety lines on the floor, and dozens of little avatars working across the hangar. A billboard reads Build the Future, Your Journey Starts Here.

No loading screen full of text. No “Work at Airbus” splash. You’re just standing in the factory, and it feels like something is being built around you. That feeling is the entire pitch.

Careers become the gameplay

Instead of telling a player what Airbus does, you let them pick a role and do it. A terminal asks one question, what do you want to build, and offers real specialties.

Aircraft assembly, where you fit sections of the fuselage together. Engineering, where you solve a technical problem. Quality control, where you inspect a section and hunt for defects. Supply chain, where you get the right part to the right place. Avionics, where you install and test the electronics. Paint and finishing. Flight testing. Project management, where you coordinate other players.

Every one of those is a real Airbus job turned into a two minute mission. That’s the trick. The job description becomes the level.

The loop that keeps them there

It’s simple and it’s sticky. You join the factory, you choose a career, you complete realistic missions, you earn XP, you climb from Trainee to Technician to Specialist to Senior to Expert.

A quality check mission might ask you to inspect an A320 section and find five anomalies before you sign it off. An assembly mission might make you use the right tools and install components in the correct order. Small, satisfying, and quietly educational, because the player is learning what the job actually involves without ever feeling lectured.

The aircraft everyone builds together

This is where it stops being a normal branded game.

The plane on the server evolves collectively. Fuselage, then wings, then engines, then cockpit, then paint, then interior. Every player’s missions feed the same aircraft. And at some point the whole server sees the same message. The aircraft is ready. Everyone who contributed sees their part in it.

That shared payoff is what makes people come back, screenshot it, and tell their friends to join. You didn’t build a game, you built a moment people were part of.

The Career Passport

Each player carries an Airbus Career Passport. A badge for every role they’ve tried, an XP bar, a simple tracker that says something like discovered four of six careers. It turns the whole experience into collection and completion, which is exactly what keeps a young audience exploring.

And quietly, it does something clever. It shows a player which roles they gravitated toward. A kid who never thought about aerospace finishes the session knowing they liked avionics, or quality, or project management.

Why this beats a job ad

You never ask a seventeen year old why they want to work at Airbus. You let them try Airbus for twenty minutes.

They discover that behind the logo there are engineers, designers, technicians, logisticians, programmers, mechanics, project leads. They discover the jobs without ever opening a careers page or reading a single listing. By the time they leave, Airbus isn’t a company their parents respect. It’s a place they’ve already been.

That is the whole difference between advertising a job and letting someone feel the work.

Connecting it to real hiring, the honest version

One thing most concepts get wrong here, so I’ll be precise. The bridge to real Airbus careers does not happen with a clickable link inside the game, because Roblox doesn’t allow sending players out to external sites from inside an experience. That’s a platform rule, not a detail to gloss over.

The real connection happens around the experience. The campaign, the experience page, the press coverage, the follow up. The game creates the interest and the affinity at scale, and the actual recruitment funnel picks it up outside the game. Anyone who promises you an in game button straight to the careers site doesn’t know the platform.

The part that actually decides if it works

Building this is the easy part. Any decent studio can build a beautiful Airbus hangar.

The graveyard of Roblox is full of gorgeous brand worlds that launched and sat empty, because nobody brought the players. The entire thing lives or dies on distribution, on getting the right young audience to actually show up on day one. That’s the piece most brands forget to budget for, and honestly it's the part I care about most, because it's the hard one.

Why I'm writing this

Nobody asked me to design this. It's a concept. But it's exactly the kind of employer brand activation that's about to become normal, and the brands that move first in their sector will own the association before anyone else can buy it back.

I'm Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We design native Roblox activations like this one and, just as importantly, we push them through one of the largest French speaking creator networks we've built, so the experience doesn't just exist, it gets seen. If you lead employer brand or early careers and you've been wondering what this could look like for your company, this is what it looks like. My DMs are open.

Independent concept created by Empire Studio. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Airbus. All trademarks belong to their respective owner and are shown here for illustrative, non commercial concept purposes only.

recruiting gen z is getting harder, and the old tools are quietly falling apart. career fairs cost more and reach fewer of the people you actually want, and nobody can really prove the return. your careers page gets read by people who are already looking, which is not the problem you need to solve. and underneath all of it there’s a harder truth. for a lot of respected, established companies, the employer brand is aging. the brand your parents admired is not the brand a nineteen year old is dreaming about. gen z isn’t rejecting you. they’re just not thinking about you at all.

you can’t fix that with another booth or a nicer photo of smiling interns on the careers page.

so where did the generation go. they went to roblox. and i don’t mean “kids playing games”, i mean roblox is now one of the biggest social platforms on earth, and gen z and gen alpha spend more time there than on most social apps. it’s where they hang out, where they figure out what’s current and what’s old. for a recruitment team that’s a channel hiding in plain sight, because the exact people you’ll be fighting to hire in three to five years are already there, every single day.

ikea is the example everyone points to now. in 2024 they built a co-worker game on roblox where players actually worked shifts, helped customers, got promoted, and then, this is the wild part, ikea hired a limited number of them for real, paid at the real hourly rate, with a cv and a digital interview. a furniture company ran a real recruitment campaign inside a video game and it worked, and it got covered everywhere. that press wave is the actual product, more than the hires.

but here’s where i want to be useful instead of just hyping it, because most brands are about to get this wrong.

you do not need to go as far as ikea did. actually hiring people through a game is the hardest, most expensive path, and it’s not where most of the value is. the value is the coverage and the buzz. a native roblox experience, built well and made to travel, does three things at once. it makes your brand feel current again, basically overnight, in front of the exact generation that had written you off. it plants you in a space your competitors haven’t claimed yet, and being early in your sector is a position nobody can buy back later. and it lets a young audience that never once considered working for you discover, while they’re playing, what a career with you actually looks like.

and here’s the trap. building the experience is the easy part. everyone can build a branded world. the graveyard of roblox is full of brand worlds that launched and sat empty, because nobody brought the players. distribution is the whole game, and almost nobody budgets for it.

that’s the part i care about, and honestly it’s why i think we’re built for this specifically.

i didn’t come from marketing. before any of this i was a creator, i built an audience of over a hundred thousand on youtube in the roblox space, which means i spent years learning the hard way what makes this generation stop and watch, and what makes them leave in three seconds. that’s not a media theory for me, i lived it. at empire studio we take that and we build the native experience, then we push it through one of the largest french speaking roblox creator networks we’ve built, so the thing doesn’t just exist, it trends. on a recent activation we drove over fifteen million organic views in forty eight hours with zero paid spend, which is the muscle most agencies selling roblox simply don’t have. and then we measure the whole thing in a format your teams already read, so it’s not some orphan dashboard nobody trusts.

so to be clear about what i’m actually saying. every employer brand serious about the next generation should be on roblox, not in two years, now, while the space in your sector is still open. you don’t need a giant budget or ten hires through a game. you need one experience that travels, real distribution behind it, and the coverage that resets how young people see you.

if you lead employer brand, recruitment, or early careers, and this has been quietly nagging at you, that instinct is right, and it’s the easy part to solve.

i’m quentin fassion, founder of empire studio. we connect brands to gen z and gen alpha through native roblox activations, and we make sure they actually get seen. if this is on your radar, i’d genuinely like to talk it through.

Career fairs cost more and deliver less every year. You book the booth, print the banners, send the team, and you reach a shrinking slice of the people you actually want. Measuring the return is almost impossible, and deep down everyone knows the numbers don’t quite add up.

Underneath that sits a harder problem, the one nobody wants to say in a leadership meeting: for a lot of established brands, the employer image is aging. The company your parents respected is not the company a 19-year-old dreams of joining. Gen Z isn’t rejecting you. They’re just not thinking about you at all.

You can’t solve that with another career fair or a fresh coat of paint on your careers page.

So where did the most forward-thinking brands go? They went to where this generation actually spends its time. They went to Roblox.

Why Roblox, and why now

Roblox is not a kids’ game anymore. It’s one of the largest social platforms on earth, and Gen Z and Gen Alpha spend more time there than on most traditional social networks. It’s not where they play. It’s where they hang out, socialize, and form their sense of what’s current and what’s not.

For a recruitment and employer brand team, that’s a channel hiding in plain sight. The talent you’ll be competing for in three to five years is already there, every single day.

The IKEA example: recruitment inside a game

In 2024, IKEA did something that made the entire HR world look twice. On Roblox, it launched “The Co-Worker Game,” a virtual store where players could work shifts, help customers, and get promoted across departments, mirroring IKEA’s real, non-linear approach to careers.

Then it went further. IKEA actually hired a limited number of players for real, paid at its genuine hourly co-worker rate, complete with an application, a CV, and a digital interview. A furniture company ran a real recruitment campaign inside a video game, and it worked, generating a wave of press coverage across retail, HR, and mainstream media.

IKEA wasn’t the first to explore this. Even earlier, game companies experimented with bringing hiring and recruiting directly onto their own platforms. But IKEA made it legible to every brand outside gaming: this is a recruitment channel now, not an experiment.

The key insight: the game is not the point

Here’s where most people misread the IKEA story. They assume the goal is to build an elaborate, fully-functional hiring simulator. It isn’t.

You don’t need to go as far as IKEA did to win. Actually hiring people through the game is impressive, but it’s the hardest, most expensive path, and it’s not where most of the value comes from.

The real prize is the press coverage and the cultural buzz. A native Roblox experience that’s well-built and made to go viral does three things at once:

It rejuvenates your brand image, almost overnight, in front of exactly the generation that had written you off.

It anchors you in a space your competitors haven’t claimed yet, and being early in your sector is a position nobody can buy back later.

It lets a young audience that has never once considered working for you discover, playfully, what a career with you actually looks like.

That’s the difference between advertising jobs and introducing yourself to future talent before anyone else does.

Why coverage-first changes the economics

A coverage-first approach flips the logic of a career fair. Instead of paying a fixed cost to reach a shrinking room of people on one day, you build one native Roblox experience designed to travel, and you push it viral.

That last part is where distribution matters more than the build. A great experience nobody plays is a very expensive brand world sitting empty, and that’s the single most common way these projects fail. The ones that win are the ones with real distribution behind them from day one.

This is exactly what a creator-led model solves. At Empire Studio, we build native Roblox activations and push them through one of the largest French-speaking Roblox creator networks, so the experience doesn’t just exist, it trends. The coverage, the reach, and the rejuvenated brand image come from the traction, not just the game itself.

What this means for employer brand and early careers leaders

Employer brand is about to be won or lost on platforms most talent teams haven’t touched yet. The first movers in each sector will own the association between their brand and “the company that gets young people.” Everyone else will spend 2028 explaining to their board why applications from young talent keep dropping.

You don’t need to hire ten people through a game to start. You need one native Roblox experience, built well, made to travel, and backed by real distribution. The coverage does the rest.

If you lead employer brand, recruitment, or early careers, and this is quietly nagging at you, that instinct is right.

I’m Quentin Fassion, founder of Empire Studio. We help brands reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha through native Roblox activations, powered by one of the largest French-speaking Roblox creator networks. If recruitment on Roblox is on your radar, I’d genuinely like to talk it through, no pitch, just a real conversation.

Let’s conect on Linkedin, See my Medium