Pretty much as we all know there needs to be some sort of improvement with the current api on Roblox cause its very limited to its functionality. I’d like to see an api specifically that directly targets developer products as i’m trying to produce a useful tool for other developers. Having this data hidden only inside game makes it so new web features can never work with them like gamepasses.
The tool i’m making is meant to compare developer stats to show them what changes effect their developer product sales and more, to allow them to improve based on other developers.
I wouldn’t want people to know my developer product sales. The fact that gamepass sales are still publicly visible through APIs is a bad feature in the first place, IMO.
There is already an API for developer products, but the sales is only accessible by the game’s creator. There are also Lua APIs that allow you to get all of the developer products.
I’ve never understood why people are so against people knowing the sales of their items.
I see no point in hiding it, personally I like transparency and not hiding what I make/how much of an item I sell. I’ll never really understand people wanting to hide their sales and give slack to roblox for showing them.
The point for me is that it’s a privacy issue and not wanting to have that kind of information available to potential competitors. I’ve heard similar opinions from (near-)front page developers on this forum.
If sales are hidden, you can still choose for yourself to publish your own sales to whoever you want (just tell them, or post it on social media, I don’t really care how). That way, both parties can get what they want. Right now, everyone is forced to share their game pass sales because they’re publicly available, and I don’t want the same to happen to developer product sales.
Logically, you’d do this anyways, just by the popularity of the game.
Also, this is completely anti-consumer imo. Sales for almost everything is public to consumers.
GTA V, you can see the sales it’s had on steam. Minecraft shows their sales, and many servers have their sales for their memberships public.
I wouldn’t be against a feature to turn it off or on, but that doesn’t really give people the right to bash roblox for having the feature in the first place.
I personally like having sales, and being able to see others sales, reason I use @AlreadyPro’s plugin, and bought the premium stuff for it. I like statistics.
Seeing other developers sales also helps you factor what passes are more popular, then you can figure out which ones to have, or not to have, in your own game.
But, either way, most developers are going to price competitively, regardless if they know the sales or not of a rival developer. Which may, or may not hurt sales of the other.
This is speculation. For example, I wouldn’t think that nikilis’s shadow item pack had made 400,000 USD on its own. It doesn’t look like it could. But roblox says it has, therefore I would have weapon packs in a murder game when I otherwise wouldn’t.
I also wouldn’t have a radio if it didn’t make a ton of money. It’s a rather anti-player feature, allowing someone to run around blasting nonsense. But it makes a ton of money so we added one to RHS. Developers shouldn’t have product strategies handed to them. It makes it less rewarding for innovators and more rewarding for copycats.
But, in the real world, you can easily get stats of games DLCs. Steam is a huge platform with AAA titles, and anything those games have on there, the sales are shown.
So i mean, In real life, strats are essentially handed to them as well. It’s not much different than normal development.
Lol. And innovators will find ways to innovate something mainstream and popular among dev-products and game-passes. When theres a will theres a way, and I’m sure you’ll still profit with a unique game pass, or a new spin on an old one.
You really just need to evaluate your player base, and go from there.
Alright… It is no ones business on how much money I get from gamepasses / developer products… Period. If I wish to share that information then that is my choice, and not the choice of some web developer that thinks he is allowed to tell the world what I make a month…
You are looking at this the wrong way, no matter how much you make a developer is still going to go into your game, and still has every opportunity to take your ideas. This is not one of those things where you are protected by law. As long as its created by him, he can make whatever he wants. Google even lets their users know that there are in app purchases inside of games and many games even display their sales. If you dont wanna disclose your sales thats one thing but i believe we should at the very least be able to know all developer products of a game from an api, including the price, this part shouldn’t be debatable users should be allowed to know that there are dev products inside a game and each and every one that is included inside of the game its a safety thing but also a useful tool. We really need to see improvements with the current api to allow great web application tools for developers and the roblox community.
That’s not the point. The point is that roblox is telling them which ideas to take, and roblox is telling them how well their copies are performing relative to the original.
Obviously the players need to know what products a game is selling. The discussion is about whether it’s roblox’s place to tell everyone how much every game pass is earning.
Currently we don’t know ether though from an api standard, and actually based on my statistics people who share gamepass sales are more likely to get more sales on their game. This is mostly because more sales means more trust generally for a use, and more sales influences opinion on worth of gamepass/dev product its one of those things that if Roblox did implement something like this into an api they’d most likely end up making more money from it and so will you as a developer. Not only that but it will influence better game design since people will be able to learn how a developer product is meant to be used by other experienced developers. I find no harm in allowing new developers to rise up.
To show that there are some cool things you can do with such feature i’ll present one of the apps i’ve made for roblox yeah its not 100% done and may not be looking the best but its a great start to show u how great a tool like this can be for developers. From this I know that Elite is Murder Mystery 2’s best performing Gamepass I know that murder mystery averages 464k visits per day and earned about 605 Robux per 1000 visits.
Hes made about $1,321,046 being a Roblox developer, show this to 10 people and i’ll bet 9/10 times they’ll want to become a developer too! This will only make more developers appear, which will create better games and generate more people.
How can you view DLC and game sale statistics on steam? I know there are data crawlers that try to estimate based on population samples but I don’t think that function exists natively.
As much as I hate to say it, I agree with @Sharksie here. I really want to see how other users are preforming to gauge the success of the platform and for my own research but I can’t make a good argument about why that information should be freely available to me. It would be nice to see more anonymous information, such as earnings of top games and users, but I can understand the desire for hiding specific sale statistics.
We understand all sides of the current discussion. We are closing down this thread because we prefer if developer financial information is never disclosed unless the developer themselves gives out this information. The points here are valid and we do have plans in the future to keep this information private. We want to respect our developer community financial information. If you have any comments or concerns please feel free to reach out to me directly through the Developer Forum.
