As someone who has been fighting and advocating for change for a while now, this is a step in the right direction. Reliable two-way communication is paramount for Roblox and its developers, it is a part of the symbiotic relationship that has made the platform what it is today. I look forward to and hope that this announcement will become more than just words on a devforum post.
With that being said:
What about major issues brought up in the past by the developer community that were never addressed or responded to? To list off a few recent major ones:
- Revenue % problems in plugin marketplace and UGC marketplace, creators not earning fair income from their work. @Elttob has had many discussions with folks internally about this, and it’s never really gone anywhere meaningful. This post covers the issue with current UGC %s.
- Various discovery issues, surfaced across many devforum posts. E.g. this post only received a response from a PM due to internal pinging on slack. Not a lot of change has been seen or felt since that response, and in some cases things have actually gotten worse.
- Various developer-facing programs that positively serve the community, have been shut down. When they are shut down, there is often with no rational explanation why other than some pre-canned PR quote, that explicitly avoids answering real developer questions. Some examples include things like the developer awards program, which was silently halted about a year ago with no notice, or the developer stars program being shut down, which many developers protested against, the accelerator program being shut down, etc. While some shutdowns have been explained and are being handled promptly (e.g. playfab program), most of them are just seemingly ignored by Roblox, with no response or dialogue being given, developers being told what they would like to hear, etc without problems actually being fixed.
The list goes on here… how do you folks plan to handle these? How will major issues that have been brought up in the past that were ignored / remain unfixed, be addressed? The reason behind the developer community’s backlash is not because of one team create feature, it is much larger than that. It is a “death by a thousand cuts” scenario, which was caused by large issues being hot potato’d internally until things exploded.
I truly hope this is the beginning of positive change, but unless the above and more are actually addressed in good-faith, I do not see this leading anywhere long-term.