Brazilian game developer Afterverse’s social game PK XD is ripe for partnerships, giving brands an opportunity to connect with roughly 50 million kids in the gaming market on a less saturated platform.

Aimed at the nine and up crowd, PK XD (short for PlayKids Xtreme Digital) is a five-year-old open-world multiplayer game that’s available on PCs and smartphones. It encompasses a neighborhood, shops, a playground (complete with a stage and rides) and portals to mini-games. Players can explore these areas, build and decorate houses for others to visit and rate, and play social mini-games including a car racing experience and an obstacle course.

The game is monetized through advertising (kids educational brands Homer and Kiddopia are two current clients) and the sale of in-game accessories and real-world products including home goods.

Child’s play
The PK XD universe has been growing steadily, with more than a billion installs and 150 billion minutes of play time to date, says Afterverse CEO Charles Barros. It’s currently available in 14 countries, including the US, Canada, France, Brazil and Mexico.

This kind of reach has already lured several major kids brands into the PK XD virtual world—such as Sanrio, which has created a range of Hello Kitty decor for players’ homes, as well as ringing in the brand’s 50th anniversary in November 2024 with a giant Hello Kitty-branded ferris wheel for players to ride and a branded character kids can talk to in the game.

Afterverse has also forged partnerships with MGA Entertainment (L.O.L. Surprise! outfits and home decor), Cloudco (Care Bears pets and outfits) and Miraculous Corp (a maze mini-game based on Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir). These early collabs have proven to be quite successful—players spent more than 350 million minutes in PK XD‘s Miraculous mini-game during its eight-week run, and the Hello Kitty campaign (pictured) racked up 150 million views in its first two weeks.

Usually running for three weeks, integrations tend to generate more than 200 million minutes of engagement, notes Barros.

A Miraculous experience
For Miraculous Corp, planting a mini-game in PK XD was a way to build awareness for the series in multiple regions, on a fun and safe platform where kids can only communicate using phrases provided in the game. There was high demand from PK XD users, who had been clamoring to see the Miraculous brand appear in the game, says Elinor Schops, VP of gaming experience at Miraculous Corp. “It offers Miraculous fans a unique opportunity to connect with a global community, engage in cultural exchanges, and enjoy immersive role-playing experiences using the platform’s versatile tools.”

Miraculous has done a total of four content drops since it started working with Afterverse in 2023. These include character interactions, mini-games and a Parisian simulation in the game world. So far, all of these activations have been successful, with key performance indicators showing strong results.

During the first six weeks of the initial integration, Miraculous’s mini-games racked up 73 million plays and more than 250 million minutes of playtime. And the follow-up effort did even better, with 120 million plays and 350 million minutes over eight weeks.

Part of PK XD‘s appeal to brand owners is the prospect of less in-game competition than on Roblox, which is home to an estimated 40 million games (both licensed and uno cial fan-made titles).

Creating games in more cluttered spaces like Roblox can be a challenging, time-consuming and expensive way to attract and retain users, adds Barros. And the chances of being discovered with so much content competing for attention are a lot slimmer.

But PK XD integrates brand activations directly into its world, where its entire player base resides. “This approach provides our partners with immediate and substantial exposure to all of our users, enabling them to achieve higher KPIs than on other platforms— delivering results from day one with less effort and cost,” says Barros.

And another point of difference is that Afterverse offers partners more e ective engagement measurement data, compared to the limited information they are able to glean from TV and streaming launches.

Miraculous Corps’ Schops sees PK XD as an emerging market that o ers a “blue ocean” opportunity (as opposed to a “red ocean” space that’s oversaturated with brands fighting for the same eyeballs). She adds that the game was especially attractive to Miraculous because of its popularity across North America and Latin America—two markets where the brand performs particularly well.

Open for business
Originally developed by PlayKids, PK XD was designed to provide kids aging out of the PlayKids app with a safe social world. The game’s growth was accelerated by the pandemic, when kids fl ocked to online spaces where they could relax and hang out—and that motivated PlayKids to set up PK XD operations under a new company called Afterverse. (When Sandbox bought PlayKids in 2022, Afterverse became a separate company under the umbrella of Brazilian techco Movile Group.)

The game has since expanded to include a creator program for YouTubers with more than 5,000 subscribers. Any PK XD-focused videos they make are featured in the game and on its social channels, plus these influencers get in-game currency and can access an ad-free version of the game. Brazilian YouTubers Peter Toys (2.2 million subscribers) and Sophie (736,000 subscribers) have both joined this program recently, drawing more attention to the game and using it to build out their fanbases.

But PK XD’s digital bread-and-butter is partnerships with kids brands, consumer product brands and TV shows. And the platform is looking to cut more integration deals in order to improve its user experience and attract new players, says Barros.

This story originally appeared in Kidscreen‘s Q1 2025 magazine issue.