I agree with your initial point but as I said, we should get this feature of posting Investment Requests back because again at some point when you would like to Address a Larger Audience then surely you need Sponsorships/Ads at least at some point. Social Media is just a good start.
They are a big name already. I would bet that when they started off, the put forward a BIG investment.
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To Clear off one more thing to everyone, Investments not only can be put into Ads but as well as Buying Assets from other Devs and or Hiring other Developers to Assist you in your Projects.
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This is true. Investors can also play a role in hiring a team. Investors can play a big role in a groups uprise.
This discussion isnât going to go anywhere with this back and forth, so letâs switch it up a bit for just a moment.
Regardless of where or what the funds go towards, I have serious doubt that game investments will ever make a return to the developer forums in its current form. Thereâs no way that Roblox can enforce investments, and that can lead to a lot of foul play.
The Main Thing for which I created this topic is should Investement Requests be allowed, how is it bad for the Community with a proper format? And how it could really help out our Dev Community Members who have Ideas but do not have support of others or Team Members to make the largest project on Roblox with Investments.
If you disagree, I hope to get a Valid Reason for why these Requests shouldnât be allowed because at some point or the other, to make your game very popular with concurrent players and one of the best games out there, you need some sort of Investment.
Agreeing with the post above, I will be creating poll and we shall see. However, it would be a great if we could get real and valid reasons of why Investment Requests Shouldnât be allowed? And we might see some Ways to Tackle those issues.
The rule was implemented after several incidents related to investments. As said, you do not need money to make gamesâ thatâs one of the Robloxâs core values (âcutting the blot from the gaming industry ⌠you donât need a 100 person team or a million dollar budgetâ). This is likely the same reason âHidden Developersâ, which you cited, banned investments.
Investing in Roblox games is a questionable business. There are many cases of fraud and shady behaviour out there from both sides of the bar; this especially happens with investment more than everything else in development.
A lot of people think that you need investors to grow your game. Most of the time, people want investors mainly for advertising. But as others have said, it is very much so up to you to spread the word if youâre an unknown developer. Investors will often end up being more trouble than theyâre worth because they take a usually pretty large percentage of revenue, but thatâs if your game does even start making a profit. Chances are that your game will flop especially if youâre unknown, which I presume is why people need investors in the first place.
Itâs a better idea to just stay away from investors. Roblox is a time and work commitment, not a money commitment. I turned ~18K Robux that I got from doing small freelance jobs, selling my limiteds, and one $20 purchase of Robux into almost 400 thousand Robux. Now Iâm trying using that to contract other developers for an upcoming game, and for advertising. Investors would have absolutely ruined me.
Here is the thing with investing in games, one, you can put yourself in debt a lot making it dangerous to do such things, probably why the dev forums doesnât allow this anymore, to make things safer for the community financial wise. Two, investments are not necessary at all when making ROBLOX games, you can simply have your game become popular as long as you put in a little money into it and follow the popularity tasks from the link I provided above. Finally three, a lot of new developers who come in here sure it might be helpful to boost their game, but they might not quite understand investing and could get themselves into a lot of trouble.
These are things you really have to put first when thinking of investing because they can be very risky.
You donât need an investor for your project. Iâm living proof.
Before summer last year, I had no player base and no funds. I had started work on my current project, Blox, towards the end of May. All I did was work on Blox every day and posted development updates to the WAYWOC thread as I added new features or fixed bugs. I didnât go looking for âinvestor moneyâ at all. The project got noticed naturally and ended up being covered by some of the top Roblox YouTubers, including Flamingo and KonekoKitten, completely organically.
I didnât do any social media promotion. I didnât spend a single penny on advertisements (in fact, to this day, I have yet to run any promotional campaign or advertising for Blox).
Roblox development is free. Paying back an investor with money you donât have isnât.
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The reason why new devs fail is because theyâre over ambitious. They have no experience at all and always attempt making some triple A game.
You donât need an investor⌠my earliest game horse valley; my brother posted on reddit asking for a people to try it out. I personally had contacts with someone that owned a group with 5k members. We slowly grew our audience and within a week, it had 700 concurrent players (big deal for 2015).
Even now, you donât always need any money to fund a game despite having experience and funds. Action! Is a living testament of that; with no ads it grew a very consistent player base of 1k, rn 2-3k. Never put an ad for it in two years.
Point is that, asking for investors as an indie game developer is pretty ludicrous; Iâd like to see an experienced developer say that you need an investor to make a successful game.
Smaller games have plenty of ways to grow; ads and sponsors are not everything.
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In your case, you had a Contact but just in case if the Dev doesnât have a contact and say for example he wants to make a good simple obby game. He has a regular Twitter Account, a regular Instagram account. Now I am sure here he wonât be receiving any Concurrent Players or many Visits. Nowadays People have become too picky about games, they first see how many Visits or how many people are playing the game and then only do they join the game. Even if you get 500K Visits but 0 Players Playing at the afternoon or evening time as well, would that really, I mean think of it as a Hypothetical Situation yourself. Would you really join that game to play yourself alone with no other Player, I really donât think anybody would go for that.
I think Investments at some Point are Necessary if you want to make a Successful Game, maybe you started off with spreading the word, that gained you some Visits Etc. but then, what then? Wonât those Friends of your also be bored of playing your game again and again? Wouldnât you want to reach out to the larger general Public?
Yeah, I donât think so. Itâs a rule for a reason. Like Thomas said, you really donât need an investor to make a game which outputs a profit. You have loads of options anyway:
- You get a job/start doing commissions in your strongest field,
- You make a game by yourself and use itâs profit to fund a bigger game with more people.
I also imagine lots of people got scammed, not necessarily the forum members. âOutsidersâ because the forum is public.
Build yourself a name on this platform is all you really need to make a big game. Oh yeah and PROMOTE EVERYTHING well that was dramatic.
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@Cinema_Sin The main question still arises that how will you earn lots of profits without any ads or sponsorships, Social Media or Any Discord Server alone wonât help you, plus Profits on a small game is a very old Talk now that Marketplace Fees is Literally 90% for which I have made a Feature Request too.
Also, to clear off one more thing.
Investment Requests Can Also be used for:
⢠Partnerships between two people who are going to create a Studios, if One Founder Doesnât alone want to bear the loss if the game fails.
As for fraud and Requests on the Forums,
Creating a Proper Format and having Community Post Approvals for the very following Investment Requests, a seperate Category where only New Members+ could post that too with approval. I think there shall be no frauds.
I think one of your main arguments here is that some people canât get a game out there without ads or sponsors because no one knows them.
Adding back investments wouldnât help with that, though. I donât see why anyone would invest big in some new developer.
There are lots of people here talking about organic growth and social media, yet we must remember it is easy to talk about that after we have found a degree of success on the platform.
Imagine being a 12 year old developer who by some chance has created some amazing game, he does not have a job so cant use owners capital and due to age restrictions should not be using social media.
Sometimes due to the roblox search algorithm this sort of growth is simply not possible, and you need at least some sort of advertisements to kick start your community and get your name out there, since no one talks about a game they have never played.
Since its practically impossible in my opinion for an investee to get scammed, lets talk about investors being scammed. People need to keep in mind investors are hardly broke 99 times out of 100, not to mention successful investors tend to have fair sized following on social media which can hold their backs in the event of something unfortunate happening, people take out investments at their own risk, if they donât make a return then they should have expected that risk at the beginning. As an investor I have never been âscammedâ by clearly defining the terms of the agreement and keeping in mind to only invest in people who have reputation to lose, since these are the people more likely to think rationally.
On my first investment on this forum I made an over 2,000,000R$ return, completely invalidating @NINJAMASTR999 point about people not getting returns here, sure the quality may not be up to scratch and work may be needed, but it is our duty as investors to ensure that work happens and the project is lead to a success, especially since some of the ideas people have executed here are truly mind-blowing.
To conclude, I think investments should be bought back HOWEVER the terms and risk of investment should be more clearly outlined, in addition to something I feel would help a lot which I have not head suggested yet.
Let people offer investments.
Do not let people ask for investments.
Thank you for reading, and I hope my proposal is of some interest.
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Indeed, this interesting statistic can be used to support what you are saying; it is not just the amount of Robux which leads to success but the game itself at the end of the day.
âIn fact, 21 of the top 100 games achieved 100% viral growth and more than 50 of these games spent less than 100,000 Robux on advertising.â (Earning on Roblox | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub)
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20% is the minority, not the majority which is worth keeping in mind here
Also note
100,000 R$ is not cheap to the average user, and hence encourages the need to get investment for a much better chance to reach the front page.
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You donât need to be with the top 100 games to make good profit.
I am certain that this 100,000 R$ is referring to the total amount of Robux spent in the lifetime of the game. Therefore it is not needed to have an investment of 100,000 R$ at the start of the gameâs life-cycle.
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