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.