Welcome, folks.
In Episode 18 of The Speakeasy, Sanjay Shivaram of Formula E joins Joe Condon & Jay Stuart to unpack how a motorsport series builds a gaming strategy without building its own game, and how a brand can 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 get discovered on a platform like Roblox.
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Snippets from The Speakeasy
Why Formula E has resisted building its own game, despite fan demand
Scroll through Formula E's Instagram comments, and you'll find fans regularly asking for the same thing: where's the Formula E game? Sanjay says that the desire exists internally too, but the evidence has consistently pointed the other way. A blockchain strategy game built with Animoca in Season 7 struggled to find an audience, and a handful of owned, gamified experiences on Formula E's own web and app underperformed relative to licensed partnerships.
From this, Formula E started to get really granular on the type of games they should be entering into, how their IP could best contribute to the story of the game and experience of players, and passing on opportunities that didn’t match their audience profile.
By doing this, they will now have a portfolio of nine games with their IP in them by the end of this season, with Sanjay walking Joe & Jay through the next genre’s and platforms they’re targeting next.
Internet culture, Brainrot and meeting an audience on its own terms
Formula E's Roblox project was always built with room to be playful with the IP, rather than as just a literal recreation of cars and tracks, and so they have experimented with internet native IP like Italian Brainrot, which saw absurd characters morphed into Formula E racing suits, cars and helmets for a four-week limited-time unlock.
Sanjay’s feedback was that it landed well in-platform, but the trailer drew some backlash when it was promoted on Instagram, where the audience skewed older and less receptive to AI-generated content.
The lesson isn’t necessarily about the creative itself, but about matching the content to channel and audience. Essentially, not every piece of platform-native content needs to travel onto every social feed your brand has, and testing that boundary is part of the ongoing process with Roblox specifically.
How Formula E measures value
Player counts are the headline number, but Sanjay's team leans just as heavily on cumulative unique players reached and aggregate engagement time, treated much like average audience metrics in broadcast. The number that gets less attention externally is media value: the exposure teams and sponsors generate through liveries, trackside branding and content generated off the back of a game, calculated as a CPM against seconds of exposure multiplied by audience size.
Trackmania is a good example of this in practice. Despite having a smaller player base than Roblox or Real Racing 3, its media value has been high, driven by owned tracks, team liveries, and a broadcast esports competition streamed on YouTube and Twitch. That's pushed the team to think about CPM refinement too, given how differently a Roblox audience should be valued compared to other platforms.
Where could the Formula E IP go next?
Asked about the biggest untapped opportunity, Sanjay points to the intangible strength of the Formula E brand - the same quality that's brought in long-running deals with Lego and Hot Wheels - translating into bigger, more physical experiences.
Formula E’s Gaming Arena is one, and it’s their most popular fan village activation, with queues that sometimes go on for two to three hours. It was so popular, the team implemented QR codes and virtual queues to make the experience more fan-friendly.
Formula E is also launching a branded electric karting centre in Saudi Arabia this summer, and Sanjay sees room to roll that out further as karting operators shift from combustion to electric.
The common thread across all: the opportunity to build mass-market products and experiences that carry the IP's intangible appeal into the physical world.
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