Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel

[Rainbo1239 (Rainbo)]

Hey! I have a few questions about the future of public UGC!

There are features which are presumably going to be released to all UGC Creators (for instance, shoes), but we haven’t gotten a release yet, and they aren’t on the roadmap. Are these features going to be rolled out before everyone has access?

When “everyone” has access, does that mean every account has access off the bat? If so, I feel as though the 24-hour cooldowns on limiteds are going to be pointless if some creators choose to make alts to upload their limiteds to when the marketplace becomes accessible publicly.

What’s going to happen with the 750 robux upload fee when UGC goes public? This feels as though it may be a barrier for many who want to start uploading. Will this be shifting at all, and will it vary based on item type (as has been the case with the on-sale fee for limiteds)?

Similarly, will the price floors/ceilings be adjusted at all? Different item tiers have different limits (i.e. face items have a floor of 15, while head items have a floor of 50), and this can incentivize intentional improper categorization of items. This has been mentioned a few times before among creators, such as:

@younite

I brought this up in a separate DevForum bug report a month ago (which I unfortunately have yet to hear back from). This inconsistency has restricted developers from allowing them to set a hat accessory to 15 robux, while they can do the same with a face accessory. This has resulted in some cases of creators miscategorising their items in order to reflect a better value for their items. Introducing a unified price floor/ceiling will allow creators much more control over their pricing and will stop misclassification completely - something that Roblox spent many months trying to fix before.

Thanks!

[TheRealANDRO (ANDRO)]

Adding on to my question:

How will a developer be able to prevent an exploiter from changing their avatar’s position illegally?
Will the server now have authority over the character and now we will be able to finally prevent hacks such as no-clipping, speed hacking, etc without doing hacky things or will you guys just offer a basic public module for a simple anti-cheat?

And, how will you guys solve the alt account problem where an exploiter can quickly create an alt account and return to continue cheating? Will it affect a normal user creating an alt account for an innocent purpose or will they get punished as well?
(For example, a youtuber creating an alt account to be anonymous)
How will this system work? When I get a punishment for another reason(maybe false) other than exploitation will I still be able to create a new account and play Roblox or am I not allowed on Roblox anymore?

[Elttob (dphfox)]

The largest issues facing creators today are economical in nature. Currently they way Roblox’s economy is set up is rather opaque and hard to work with, because systems like DevEx (respectably) attempt to simplify the costs of Roblox’s services into one universal ‘tax’.

Can we expect to see more relevant information about what costs our games and products are incurring, so that we can work to optimise our systems and allow them to run more cheaply, perhaps in anticipation of future savings being passed to developers?

[aStarZomkied]

Hola Dan and Manuel!.

Names aStarZomkied, a developer that’s going to make upcoming games.

So, since you are able to transfer experience ownership to someone else then would you also get the crowns based on the visits on the other account too? since if you are transferring ownership then that means you gain everything related to the game like visits, likes and favourites.

Also, will there be a another roadmap? Will there be improvements to promoting roblox games and making smaller developers have a much better chance to getting their games popular depending on if the game is really good?. Because, people want to get their awesome games out already where at least 100 people can play it. Also, the games discovery page needs a slight change as if you were to type in your/someone’s game then it wouldn’t show up. If you type the game name, it will show up the game but it should also be based of how high the likes, favourites and visits it has so once you type it in then you will see the real one.

[AC_Starmarine]

Would roblox ever be getting an official FPS unlocker that is built in? Will there ever be any optimizations done to the engine to increase performance? I get better fps in triple A games than roblox sometimes.

[idealxy]

Totally in agreement with this statement.
Feels weird that we, UGC creators are the one spending hours to make a good accessory for the Catalog and getting underpaid by only receiving 30% of revenue.

Meanwhile, the developers gets 40% by just being a middleman. It doesn’t make sense for our hard work.

[KaranBlox (Karan)]

Will you continue to impose rhtro on users by force?

Why is the block theme being tried to be destroyed?

Why roblox need kill history? Okay innovation innovation innovation but you do this by removing everything that people have fun with.

Community events like egg hunt are gone and roblox won’t be releasing, the official limited anymore. Bloxy awards has been degraded and the new name is ‘innovation awards’. Users don’t want this to happen, and you’re doing it by force, why are roblox doing it?

Do you think it’s a good idea to leave everything to the users? (limiteds, marketplace and events)

Come assest,game remove feature?

And this bugs not fixed for months:

1. Rthro shouldn't be the default avatar idle pose

2. If you use the profile picture change feature, the r6 posture position will deteriorate.

And lot of bugs is roblox deliberately not fixing these things? If yes why?

[coolguyweir]

Let’s just keep it simple, and I’m sure most if not all developers on Roblox are extremely interested about this:

Will DevEx rate increase?

I love all these features and stuff but there’s only so much that these features will do for the community compared to DevEx raise.
100k → $350 is kinda absurd. Yes, unarguably roblox provides on of the best connections from devs to audiences. But a ratio of 0.0035 use per robux is crazy, especially considering that this 0.0035 was raised from 0.0025 was around half a decade ago. Since then, Roblox has gone public, has had tremendous growth through quarantine, and has become a multi-billion dollar company.

So Roblox, I’m not mad at you, but a response to this would be nice.

It seems as if this issue is purposefully being ignored by Roblox and it’s not even a shock to me if it is being ignored.

EDIT: Indeed, as mentioned in the above bold: Roblox has proven to us they’d love to ignore this issue.

EDIT 7/1: I’m assuming roblox is being quite unjust as usual - reading from the bottom up. I’m hoping that’s the reasoning for why this important issue isn’'t addressed. Otherwise it’d mean they just don’t care about this, not surprising at all.
-coolguyweir

[Brian1KB]

Hey,

Appreciate y’all taking the time to do this. My perspective on the key issue with Roblox for developers right now is the lack of transparency surrounding the algorithm, and what is required to grow your game. Today, with the analytics currently available to us, two games can have matching analytics but entirely different numbers of new visitors provided by the algorithm. Additionally, sweeping algorithm changes are made without announcement, which can lead to huge, unpredictable shifts in revenue for developers on the platform. Platforms like YouTube have a clearer correlation between their available analytics, and algorithmic success. This leads to my question:

What is Roblox doing to help creators focus on the correct aspects of their game (e.g. monetisation, session length, etc.) in order to drive algorithmic growth?

[TheKingsHappyFool (Dan)]

With a goal of empowering creators to build rich, lifelike worlds, our immediate focus with lighting is to improve Future Lighting’s performance so that more users have access to it. Afterwards, we’re focusing on unifying our lighting models so that they look better, more consistent, and scale more smoothly across devices.

Then, we’ll work on bringing state of the art lighting technology – like volumetric lighting and global illumination – to Roblox in a way that all users benefit, not just people with high-end devices.

[orangewarrior78]

Hello Dan and Manuel!

I’m definitely grateful that you’ve given us this opportunity to answer some questions and hope that we’ll see at least a few more of these sessions going forward.

So first question, are there any plans to improve the R6 style going forward? Because there’s defiantly been a lack of support for it in terms of newer features on the platform like scaling or layered clothing.

I’ve heard of some rumors that the old version might be scrapped in favor of a newer one with updated code that would allow more possibilities.

It would be amazing if we all had the ability to make avatars like the one below in the future with the help of UGC, so I do think the potential of the R6 style could be improved on.

Second question, will we see player-made events that have the ability to hand out actual UGC items?

There’s been almost nothing from the events category so far and we haven’t really seen anything live up to the much older events like the Winter Games 2014, Egg Hunts or the Siege of Quebec.

Because while we do have the ability to make special event-like games, I personally haven’t heard much about how we can grant players the ability to earn UGC accessories from badges alone.

It would be great if we had more events that somewhat match the quality the originals, so seeing more of these would be amazing.

Third question, could we maybe see more starter places like the Modern City in the future?

These places alone have really helped me with my projects so far and they were very visually pleasing from just a simple glance alone.

The open-source assets in them have also been very useful, so I’m wondering if we’ll see much more of these in the future since they really do help developers with limited experience and budget.

That’s basically all the questions I have, so I’m hoping to at least see one question answered for the time being.

Thanks again for letting us do this!

-Orange

[BackspaceRGB]

Hello Dan and Manuel! This is a really cool idea by the way, would love to see more AMAs like this one in the future.

I’ll keep it simple. Is R6 still planned to be deprecated/removed? Many games including my own are pretty much impossible to migrate to R15, in my case because of limb sizes, offsets, etc. My game has morphs, which follow the R6 body type, so it would be really difficult to make it work for R15 seamlessly.

[BuildIntoGames (Preston)]

Appreciate the communication and opportunity.

I run BIG Games. We have several popular games that have their own respective teams & developers. One of the biggest pain points has been paying out these developers percentages of revenue on a per game basis. Currently, we cannot automate this and there’s concern that there is no accurate way to do this at all. When can we have the ability to send out recurring group payouts per game instead of the entire group?

Also, any plans to raise the Highlight limit? haha

[OneEDM (EDM)]

Why does Roblox ignore extremely essential years-old bug reports and feature requests? (I would list some but there is simply too many to name)

Additionally, serious issues get completely ignored such as the large issues with VC moderation: Voice chat moderation : Moderation reason needs to be given when banned from voice chat

It is seriously impossible to get Roblox to even acknowledge large issues, let alone actually deal with them. It give off the sense that Roblox just does not care and are only there for the money.

[ramdoys (Ram)]

Hey Dan and Manuel,

I’m curious about what could be the future of UI Design using the Roblox Engine. I feel that we don’t have much options, especially for UI built directly on Studio to really be created into something we want, apart from the cool things we can use (like UIGradients and Strokes which are both amazing in their own regard.) Do you think UI will be more customizable at some point?

Second, do you think support of third-party code editors could become easier to connect and optimal. The current Roblox script editor is great, and the recent updates such as multi-cursor have been phenomenal, but what do you think we can do for developers who prefer to use other code editors where they feel they’re workflow can be improved.

Thanks, Ramdoys.

[Guestdere]

Hi Manuel and Dan,

First of all, Thank you for taking the time to do this AMA, and I hope to see many more in the future!

As Roblox continues to invest in AI in the coming years, how can artists on the platform be sure our creations won’t be used in training these tools without our permission and compensation?

and if, in the future, you allow users to create their own trained datasets for various Roblox AI systems, how do you intend to regulate the same issue as above? For example, even if I say no to having my content used in AI, if another user were to steal it and then allow it to be used, what would happen?

Thank you

[MrChickenRocket]

Hello again!
What are your thoughts on things like toon shading?

[TheArayeus (Arayeus)]

With the advertising changes to under 13 accounts, are there any plans in the works that will help developers reach that target audience of under 13? Right now the only way under 13 will realistically see new games is on the front page.

[LowPolys]

Hey Dan and Manuel,

Will groups ever receive a long overdue update? Being unable to break down revenue by game, or even viewing all-time historical stats is impossible, we’re still limited to the past year. I could figure it out with a bit of manual effort, but it seems like data that Roblox definitely has and I don’t see why it can’t be provided. The exile user feature is also pretty useless as they can just rejoin, making the group wall very cluttered. Both of these have been developer complaints for a long while.

It seems Roblox gave up on groups when they bought Guilded, which is really unfortunate. There was some discussion years back about updates, but nothing seems to have come of them.

[dvdko (dvd)]

@Rainbo1239

Similarly, will the price floors/ceilings be adjusted at all?

I’d like to extend on this post, specifically regarding price floors/ceilings adjustments, to include information that was provided in the guidelines about UGC avatar bodies:

UGC Avatar Bodies [Guidelines]

Hello Creators, As we mentioned in last week’s Creator Roadmap post, we are building features to enable a community-led Marketplace where any creator can make an avatar that is more expressive, communicative, and personalized. Therefore, we wanted to take this opportunity to share more about our work here. In the coming months, we will be enabling members of the UGC Program to create and sell avatar bodies and, soon after, standalone heads. There are a few bodies already on the Marketplace tha…

It is mentioned in the guidelines that upon launch that UGC bodies will have a “minimum price of 0 and a maximum price of 10,000 Robux.”

Will there be any changes to this price floor of 0 robux when avatar bodies and animated faces launch in Mid 2023 or when UGC becomes public? Avatar bodies and animated faces are extremely tedious and complicated to create compared to normal accessories and layered clothing, so a price floor of 0 robux is extremely demotivating for those of us that want to make them. People would be able to undercut prices or release something similar for free which is already happening in the current market with face accessories.