As a Roblox player and developer, communication in my games is very important and benefits player retention and gameplay value, however I cannot chat or enable chat on my games on Xbox. Communicating is very important in many games and this would benefit a lot of games and players.
I think it be cool if in the future ROBLOX has an Xbox chat built in so developers don’t have to make one just like for character movement and the like. It make it easier on the developers so it’s not mandatory to make one of your own but only if you want to customize it. Right now it’s impossible for Xbox users to communicate unless a game goes out of their way to make a chat for Xbox users.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would make playing on Xbox more social and more fun, and would improve how players experience my game as a developer.
From my understanding you are requesting for a chat system like we have on all the other devices. This sounds like a good idea but there is a major issue that could potentially stop this being a feature.
On any console with a controller of some kind it is really annoying to type messages. When you think about it, typing a message on any console will take at least 2-3 times longer to type it than on any other device. This is probably the reason why Roblox doesn’t allow chat in Xbox games because players will get annoyed because of how long a message takes to type. If players were able to view the chat they may feel left out because they may not think it is worth the time to type the message.
With all that said, this feature will give Xbox players a more social aspect just like you said in your post. However I do feel the negative aspects do out way the positives. For this to be a feature Roblox or Xbox will need to think of a way to speed up typing messages. Maybe a voice chat system that allows you to say a message then it goes into the chat as a text chat message.
I’d like to bump this thread, as I have been getting a lot of request from my xbox playerbase to add a custom chat. It’s important enough to warrant in some games, and I don’t see why the developers aren’t given a choice in the matter.
I don’t want to have to port all of my notifications, admin commands, etc. to a new custom chat system (not to mention building/finding one), when there is a perfectly good chat system for every other platform.
I think the issues with bad UX and to stop lazy developers adding it as an afterthough, this could simply be disabled by default? We could change it in the game settings, or even hide it behind some function of StarterGui, as a default-hidden coregui. This would dissuade beginners from using it, and would demonstrate that it’s not the intended experience on Roblox xbox. A warning could be given on the devhub article about it, or have a confirm box (if it’s implemented as a game setting) with a warning pop up before you can enable it.
I wanted to bump this one more time. I know that it’s a privacy concern of roblox to conform to young kids using microphones in online games. Honestly, I think this would be super annoying to hear little kids the whole time anyways. Perhaps a better alternative to realtime voice chat like in other games (this would not apply in cooperative games where realtime communication is necessary) would be voice recognition. If there were a way for roblox developers to analyze sounds and parse words out of the microphone, it could seriously improve gameplay for xbox users. I don’t think roblox is really “protecting” anyone in the first place though, considering every other console game to exist on xbox live uses realtime chatrooms for communication.
Bumping I come with new information. I’d like to share @goldzun’s response to the topic of chat on Xbox:
“We understand that chat is the most highly requested Xbox feature, and its something we wish to add soon. There is a fair amount of work to get chat to be compliant and feel native on Xbox, which is why it was removed.”
Additionally, Roblox now has age ratings/guidelines and Roblox is rated T for Teen on Xbox. (previously being E10+ and before that E for Everyone.)
My goal in this post is to link feature requests and info together so that when people find this feature request, they know info from elsewhere. I’m not sure the best action for this feature request specifically. There seems to be no other feature request for chat on Xbox that I could find. Maybe moving it to Xbox feature request.
Definitely would be awesome to have text chat readded to Roblox on Xbox. I have friends that use Xbox as their only reliable way to play Roblox and I would like to at least be able to have them see my messages in-game. Minecraft has a chat system that is able to be used on Xbox (it being a Microsoft title), so I don’t see why Roblox shouldn’t have a chat system be readded.
I wanna reply to some people’s posts and share my thoughts
Yes, the negative of having it be longer to type on Xbox than any other device, but the positive of being able to do it in the first place honestly outweighs that negative since at least they’ll even be able to in the first place. On top of that, Xbox has keyboard support and people can connect external keyboards through USB or through their Xbox port at the bottom using keyboard attachments.
Super happy they are at least considering adding it back in the future. This is a very needed change to allow all users to be able to communicate together without having to be restricted to only Xbox parties (which I argue creates more issues than fixed problems in some cases).