Gregg Young

Gregg Young's central argument, repeated almost word for word across both episodes of Virtual, is that public broadcasters face the same reckoning with gaming platforms that they faced with social media a decade ago. His formulation is blunt: "als wij relevant willen blijven voor die jeugd, zullen wij daar ook op die platformen actief moeten zijn" ², and elsewhere he puts it even more starkly about the audience VRT risks losing: "wij zijn niet meer relevant als we bepaalde mensen willen bereiken" ¹. For Young this isn't a marketing experiment but an existential positioning question for a public broadcaster: if Flemish youth are spending their media hours inside Roblox, VRT either shows up there or cedes the ground entirely.

A recurring theme is that presence on these platforms cannot be a one-off stunt. Young describes Roblox worlds as fundamentally perishable: median playtime collapses quickly after launch, so a world only works with sustained investment, events and campaigns to keep it alive. He points to VRT's own JBC world as the proof, noting it drew 130,000 visitors before quickly emptying out again ². This is one of his most concrete, evolved takeaways across the two conversations: the platform logic of Roblox punishes broadcasters who treat it like a traditional launch-and-forget campaign, and rewards those who treat it like an ongoing service.

Young is equally interested in what Roblox does to brand discovery, and this is where his thinking sharpens between the two episodes. In December he frames it as an inversion of the usual media funnel: "heel veel kinderen kennen squid game als merk, niet omdat ze ooit één aflevering gezien hebben, maar gewoon omdat er in Roblox squid games zijn" ². By February the point has been compressed into a tighter, almost aphoristic line: "kinderen kennen squid game, maar omdat ze dat in Roblox gespeeld hebben" ¹. The consistency of the example across both appearances shows this is a fixed reference point in his thinking, not a passing anecdote, he uses it to argue that games now do the brand-building work that television commercials and billboards used to do, and that communities inside gaming platforms build brand awareness backwards, from play to recognition, rather than forwards from broadcast to audience.

On strategy specifically for VRT's own IP, Young describes a deliberate willingness to reinterpret dormant properties rather than simply port them over. FC De Kampioenen, off the air with new episodes since 2011, was rebuilt around Carmen's dog Nero in a destruction game called Terror Nero, aimed squarely at kids who barely know the original series ². This reflects a broader position he holds: that reaching young audiences on Roblox requires genuinely edgy, native-to-platform content, not a straight transposition of existing broadcast material, since the platform's own users are the ones who decide what stays alive there.

Young also frames a very concrete institutional payoff from VRT's platform bet: the closed Eurovision Roblox pilot run with Nordic broadcasters, involving 2,000 students from Danish and Norwegian schools and built alongside NRK, DR, France Télévisions and YLE, became the leverage that persuaded the EBU to commit to an open Eurovision Roblox world, with portals planned between different national broadcasters' worlds ¹². This is presented consistently across both episodes as evidence that a small-scale, closed experiment can generate enough proof of concept to shift an entire international broadcasting union's platform strategy, a bottom-up model Young clearly sees as replicable.

Finally, Young's tone toward the audience-side implications of Roblox game development is notably encouraging rather than alarmed. His remark that parents who discover their kids making Roblox games should be congratulated, "want dat betekent dat je een potentiële game developer in huis hebt" ¹², recurs verbatim in both appearances, suggesting it's a settled talking point rather than an offhand comment. It signals his broader stance that VRT's role on these platforms isn't only to broadcast to children but to help make the platform "a safer, more informative place" ², treating literacy in game-building itself as a value worth encouraging alongside the broadcaster's more immediate goal of staying visible to a generation that no longer discovers brands through television.