ROBLOX has always been about empowering developers to use their imagination and ingenuity to make games, models, clothing, etc that the community can enjoy. This makes it thoroughly disappointing that the clothing market, for the largest part of the community (NBC players), is going to be privatized. Exclusivising the largest chunk of the ROBLOX community and preventing non-approved developers from sharing their creations with them seems to go against everything ROBLOX stands for. We shouldn’t be limiting both developers’ and NBC players creativity by restricting who they can buy from/sell to – we should be encouraging people to make and buy even more clothing than they ever have. ROBLOX’s currently-planned approach is not how we should be tackling NBC customization.
So how should we solve the problem? A long time ago, clothing could be sold for 1 ticket (essentially free), but the price floor was introduced so people couldn’t profit off of stolen clothing anymore. The UGC doesn’t suffer from this vulnerability – its contents are community-curated, meaning we won’t have to worry about an influx of stolen clothing and can safely allow free assets. If we are able to upload clothing for free in the UGC, all clothing developers will be able to share their creations with the community, ROBLOX won’t have to micromanage the catalog, and NBC players will have plenty of customization options, resulting in a much better experience and higher new-user retention. Clothing developers will still be out to make a profit, so there will still be paid clothing and by extension BC incentives.
ROBLOX, please continue to empower your developers and players to express their creativity to their fullest, as you have always done!
I have to respectfully disagree. Roblox is a company that earns money.
If you look at what it offers it’s player already, unlimited un-interrupted gametime, FULL 100% access to their game development software, etc… (I could go on for a while) you’ll see that roblox gives players a ton of room to be creative and express themselves. I did some rough math a few days ago with the assumption that 6 million NBC collected their 10 tix every day.
(60000000/18)*365/400 = 3 million USD of ‘free’ money being given out in terms of DevEx. Obviously not all of this does go towards DevEx, but you have to realize that even a fraction of that is quite a lot, even for roblox (which actually isn’t that large economicaly speaking, Buszucki posted some stats during an interview somewhere).
I think it’s survival of the fittest. They trimmed their fat and didn’t harm gameplay in any way. I don’t think we could fill a room with players who no longer play roblox because they can’t buy any more ‘free’ clothing.
Kind of went off on a rant haha. Basically I tried explaining why ‘free’ removing currency that could be used to DevEx was a good idea. I should have made it more clear that players have a handful ways to express themselves with NBC. Their place slot obviously being #1.
They also have the forums, models, and in-game things. I think they get enough.
ROBLOX isn’t a game. It’s a community of games. Just because you didn’t hurt the games doesn’t mean you didn’t hurt the community. Not everyone is a developer, and developer perks are irrelevant to the greater portion of ROBLOX’s community. You mentioned forums, but part of forums and every other place on the site where players interact on the site is their avatar. Their avatar gives them an identity. Profits/etc aside, without a doubt being able to express yourself with an avatar is a good thing. Revoking that ability results in a poorer user experience. If it comes down to a battle of priority of which is more important: profits or customization, and profits win, then yeah it’d make sense to stick with the current setup, but…
ROBLOX repeatedly mentioned the removal of tickets was not for an increase in revenue. Revenue has nothing to do with the update. Your argument that players shouldn’t have more customization because ROBLOX needs more revenue is wrong.
As for DevEx, free clothing does not affect it. I posted this chart on another one of your threads, but I’ll post it here for a reminder:
This illustrates the universally accepted law of supply and demand. As the price gets lower and lower, supply gets lower and lower. ROBLOX doesn’t have physical supply, but it has a supply on the number of clothing articles (there aren’t an infinite amount of shirts). Clothing developers will not start releasing every single one of their assets for free, resulting in everyone else not seeing any profits because no one wants to buy their stuff since they can get substitute goods for free. A lot of effort goes into designing clothing, and there’s not enough incentive for people to start releasing every single thing they’ve worked so hard on for free.
If anything, it’ll improve the market. Big time clothing devs won’t have any reason to release free clothing aside from being nice since their notoriety gives them plenty of business, while startups will be able to release their first clothing articles for free to increase their presence in the market which will ultimately allow them to start selling paid clothing for the same reason big time clothing devs are able to sell paid clothing. It will smooth the entry process to clothing development, and naturally saturate the free market with lower-quality items (because they’re created by newbies), still providing the incentive to buy higher-quality paid clothing.
Any company with that methodology would be out of business.
Employees are fired and production is moved for the sake of the customer so the company can provide lower-priced items. Companies treat customers entirely differently from employees. Either way, if I were to delve into that, we’d be going off-topic from the OP. Instead, I’ll settle at “to each their own” in response to our views on how companies work.
Getting back to the topic at hand, do you have any thoughts on the post prior to the “survival of the fittest” bit?
Not sure why you’d want to take the time to participate in a thread you’re not interested in reading. Either way, tl;dr: ROBLOX repeatedly stated that the update wasn’t for profit, so your argument that we need clothing to be limited because ROBLOX needs more revenue is wrong. Also that the law of supply/demand clarifies that free clothing will have no impact on DevEx.
Free clothing are really cool, but the moderation necessary to protect original clothing that are not free from being reuploaded for free taking is pretty much impossible. No, Roblox is not an empire and does not have an army of moderators.
This is why Roblox is talking about releasing free clothing themselves in limited quantities which is the next best thing they can do.
I think you missed the part about UGC being community-curated in the OP. The army of moderators curating the assets isn’t going to be ROBLOX. They’re already planning on crowd-curating clothing, and this feature request isn’t asking for anything that would require more moderation than would already be available.
That’s initially their vision - to not interfere with anything and just provide the engine and website functionality while content is fully managed by users. We can just wait and see how close they can get to that in the future.
