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Roblox often calls its developer community its “life blood”, but it consistently and systematically fails to communicate anything with its developers on larger policy issues. Any statements made are contradicted by Roblox’s later actions a decent amount of the time, huge feedback posts on the forums here with hundreds of likes and dozens, even hundreds of replies often get no response and are either ignored, or never responded to despite being discussed / on the radar internally.
Some examples of this issue include:
- Game discovery is fundamentally broken and only getting worse, it needs to be fixed, this only got a response because of someone poking a product manager internally on slack, and nothing changed despite assurances their would be positive change. Since this post, sponsored ads have gotten objectively worse by being hidden further down in sorts, being limited to 13+, etc.
- Developer Stars program should be updated & brought back, lack of program is problematic & disrespectful to the community, this has over 230 likes and various responses from top creators and small creators alike, yet it has gotten no response and was largely ignored by Roblox.
- Developer Awards program should be brought back, silent halt of program disrespects the community, this did get a response, but it’s been 2 months now without any updates despite the responding employee stating we would be getting a followup response.
- Roblox takes 90% of UGC & plugin developer’s incomes. On-paper it’s 30%, but when you go through devex and other fees, Roblox ends up pocketing 90% of our income. @elttob has made videos covering this issue, I made a forum post (UGC : Creator cut is too small & needs to be increased. 70+% taken by Roblox is problematic & disrespectful to the community) with over 120+ likes and has gotten replies from top UGC creators, yet Roblox has not responded to or acknowledged it in any way.
- Roblox announced at RDC that they would be preventing a “race to the bottom” in the UGC marketplace and has also stated that there would be systems in place to prevent IP theft. The recording in which they stated this was removed from Roblox’s RDC playlist on youtube for some reason, a 3rd party had to re-upload it : Archive.org link, yet the UGC program has not solved any of these issues. IP theft is a daily occurance in large numbers, creators are forced to price their items low because it’s a constant “race to the bottom” with item pricing, and a myraid of other issues. Creators have been trying to get communication on these issues for over a year now, yet no communication is ever given.
- Roblox’s “featured” program states that applicants will hear back within 2 weeks if there’s been an acceptance or denial. It has been 2 months and no one that I know of has heard anything from the program. No acceptance, no denials, just radio silence (Get featured on Roblox!).
- I cannot provide a link for this as it’s a private thread, but very recently there was a large exploit discovered with Roblox’s chat system. This exploit was reported, as it could be used to crash servers. Instead of fixing this issue, an engineer replied stating “the fix is to just use our new chat system”. This was not an option for many developers. When this was brought to the engineer’s attention, the problem was simply ignored. This issue was not fixed until someone else was poked internally. I shouldn’t have to resort to doing that. Internal politics like this actively hurts developer businesses and causes strife between Roblox and its developer community.
I could list off so many examples like this. Creators across the platform have been trying to get communication & feedback dialogue on issues like these and so many more, yet there’s been a consistent trend of radio silence on Roblox’s end. What is Roblox doing to address these? I don’t want the typical “we love developers and we can always improve comms!” slogan, I want to hear what Roblox is actually doing, in the here and now to improve these issues. We’ve heard the words before. The words have been stated many times over the past 2 years yet nothing has really improved, and in quite a few areas has gotten worse. Developers want genuine communication on these, and a bridge to give feedback about them.
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Will the roadmap become more granular? It’s a good start, but it’s missing a lot of info. E.g. if I want to know what the status of facial animation rollout is (“when will existing avatar bundles get dynamic heads”), or I want to know what’s going on with volumetric sounds like announced at RDC (“when will walls muffle sounds”), and many other things, the roadmap does not cover these. Some of these are giving active info updates in private NDA beta groups, but this does not help the creators without connections or program slots. Will the roadmap eventually support being dynamically updated based on what developers are asking? E.g. if a high amount of developers want to know what the future of shaders & PBR materials is (“when can we get pbr.color3”), would the roadmap reflect that?
Furthermore, will the roadmap expand its scope to include programs, not just engine features? E.g. if I want to know what the status of gamefund is, or what the status of the verified-badge scope increase is, can I see this on the roadmap? Currently creators have no way of getting any info about these, and also have no way of giving feedback on these. Trying to give feedback on a lot of programs is borderline impossible because of the complete breakdown in communication.
UPDATE : This post has gotten a response! However due to the thread being locked, I was not able to give a follow-up with the response. As such, I am putting it here for visibility purposes.
Hey @Aelarix, thank you for responding! 
Respectfully, a lot of these don’t actually answer our questions. It tells us that you’ve heard our feedback in a general sense which is great and very much appreciated, but a lot of our questions or concerns have not been directly answered. As mentioned in my post, having more two-way communication mediums for these would alleviate this issue. For example, I mentioned the developer awards program; having two-way communication on that issue would solve a lot of developer tension around its current problems.
Yes! A real-world example of this taking place was the playfab program being shut down. Under normal circumstances there would have been a large amount of pushback from the community because a valuable resource was being taken away for “seemingly no reason”. However, the folks handling that program directly explained the true reason for why that program was being shut down. It had to do with microsoft licensing & low adoption rate of the tools. While unfortunate, removing the program made rational sense with that honest explanation being given to developers. After that, we began getting two way communication with the creator analytics team to make a tool to replace it. This led to developers largely not taking a large amount of issue with the program’s removal. The process was constructive and overall positive!
And, as previously mentioned:
This is great and I am happy to hear this! Myself and many others are holding out for the actions & changes, we’ve heard the words before. Not trying to be rude, just being honest and straightforward.
This is great! Can we get public responses to them? Roblox discussing these problems & figuring out a way forward isn’t a big win if developers don’t know about it. It’s impossible to determine what Roblox is fixing or not fixing because there’s typically no meaningful public response and/or dialogue to them (see : playfab shutdown example I gave above for an example of a GOOD response). E.g. the stars post, nearly a full year later still has no response nor has it ever been directly acknowledged.
This is great news! I hope this improves things.
This is just a personal annecdote, but I’ve noticed a lot more of my bug reports getting resolved & replied to. A small step, but an important one! You folks are doing a great job with improving bug report handling so far from what I can see, and I hope to see that trend continue.
