Penn State’s Roar+ was supposed to be a place where Penn State fans could connect with athletes and teams in a way like never before – all while supporting NIL efforts.
Yet in just 15 months after its initial launch, the subscription-based platform is a ghost town. Penn State has posted just three videos since June and not once since the start of the 2026 school year after posting at least 48 videos in that time span last year.
Despite being heralded as Penn State’s first in-house media arm that would provide a “deeper connection” to fans by athletic director Pat Kraft, the platform has been virtually abandoned of new content and its paywall has been completely dropped – even though Penn State is still charging fans who subscribed on a monthly basis.
It is unclear if Penn State has plans to revitalize the platform but it is far from anything that was promised just last year.
In June of 2025, Penn State announced that it was launching a “student-athlete-driven” platform as a part of NIL efforts between the athletic department, Playfly Max and Lockerverse. Playfly Max operates as the NIL arm to Penn State’s multimedia rights holder, while Lockerverse would serve as the web hosting platform for the product.
Within the product, Penn State would leverage content creation from student-athletes as well as several key Penn State media figures to provide content not publicly available on other sources like YouTube or even GoPSUSports.com.
But in what felt intentionally different, Penn State would have content driven heavily by more meaningful conversations with Penn State head coaches, including at the time, Penn State football coach James Franklin. The conversations with Franklin – as well as other interviews – were hosted by Lavar Arrington, another selling point to the product.
Penn State also promised additional insights from Brian Tripp, the Penn State football radio sideline reporter and men’s hockey play-by-play man, in other interviews, message board-style chats and written articles. Penn State also offered vault-style videos of Penn State football games dating back to the mid-1960s.
The pricing for the product started at $15 and was a direct competitor for fan dollars to Happy Valley United, the athletic department’s NIL coalition that offered a subscription opportunity with little reward to fans.
The platform launched in July of 2025 and heavily featured content from Arrington, including several extended sit-down interviews with Franklin. Penn State consistently posted on the platform several times a week into the 2025 football season, including articles from student contributors and behind-the-scenes videos, like locker room celebrations. During its two and a half months, Penn State posted at least 48 videos that still remain on the platform.
The platform was conceived by Kraft and Arrington in part as a new method to connect with fans in a press-release sense and a new way for Penn State student-athletes to generate NIL money in a practical sense. It also marked a deeper dive into media for Penn State, rivaling that of many subscription sites like Lions247 or Blue-White Illustrated, but with controlled access.
In both an interview with Arrington that aired on the platform and in press releases, Kraft was bullish on the platform.
“You laid out a vision that four years later we are actually embarking on,” Kraft said to Arrington about launching the platform in the interview. “[Roar+] will absolutely disrupt the space to create our own media channel, be able to showcase our all of athletes in such an incredible way.”
That video is also the public genesis where Kraft set the expectation that he wanted Penn State to win four national titles in one school year.
But things took a bit of a turn when Franklin was fired following three straight losses in the 2025 football season – which seemingly also marked the downturn of the platform. While it is understandable that Penn State was not prepared for a key piece of the product to go away just two months into the school year, Penn State struggled to quickly adapt.
Arrington interviewed interim head coach Terry Smith on a weekly basis – but they weren’t particularly insightful interviews. Meanwhile, the behind-the-scenes and breaking news access that fans were promised were virtually nowhere to be found. Penn State often was posting press releases publicly before news was exclusively posted on Roar+. Alternatively, regular media outlets were sharing news that Roar+ would not touch.
Penn State seemed to stop pushing subscriptions to the platform by the midpoint of the 2025 season, though it kept posting content throughout the majority of the season. Paired with Penn State’s poor athletic performance last school year, Penn State seemed unprepared to handle adversity on the platform.
By the end of the school year, the content firehose eventually turned into a trickle. According to the site’s metadata, Penn State last published an article on the platform on April 23, a draft profile of Dani Dennis-Sutton.
Since then, Penn State has posted just four videos on the primarily video-first platform. One featuring an interview with Penn State men’s soccer coach Rob Dow on May 24, a Penn State football player podcast on June 3 and a video about Penn State baseball player Michael Anderson on June 13.
Its most recent post came on Aug. 4, according to the site’s metadata, which is part one of a 55-minute golf video featuring Penn State football players Rocco Becht, Nathan Tiyce, Benjamin Brahmer and Gabe Burkle.
Meanwhile, much of the content, including all content about Franklin and some of the Smith content, has been removed. (Though the removal of Franklin content is not a surprise.) The chat functionality, which served as quasi-message boards and fan chat rooms, is gone. The back catalog of videos doesn’t initially appear on the platform — though still available — through some workarounds.
At some point within 2026, Penn State also dropped the paywall required to view the content on the site. However, fans who have a subscription to the platform (including myself until very recently) are still being charged for the access. Penn State has also removed many of the subscription options, though Penn State still offers the chance for fans to subscribe to the platform for $50 per month or $600 per year.
Penn State has not posted during the 2026 school year, including the part two of the golf video.
Stuff Somers Says made multiple attempts to reach Morgyn Seigfried, who is the general manager of NIL at Playfly Max and appeared on the SSSWS podcast to chat about Roar+ last year, as well as Penn State athletics’ strategic communications, with a list of questions regarding the platform, including whether Penn State plans to reactivate the platform at some point in 2026. Additionally, we asked why Penn State is still charging fans for the platform and if Arrington is still under contract with Roar+.
However, despite multiple attempts and opportunities, no answers were given.
Meanwhile, Penn State seems to have jumped back toward the Happy Valley United direction for fans who want to support NIL efforts. The platform offers a $9.99-a-month subscription called Insider+, which features content from Mike Villagrana about mostly the Penn State football team.
Arrington is still posting about NIL efforts on social media with DisruptUPSU.
What started out as a promising opportunity for Penn State to – as Kraft alluded to – “disrupt” the space has become a shell of what was promised, marking a disappointing, murky future for the NIL platform. It is also another chapter in Penn State’s NIL era that has not been smooth since its inception, in part because, as initially feared, Penn State could not get out of its own way.
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