Creator spotlight program is problematic in its current form

As a Roblox developer, I’ve often relied on various educational resources to improve my knowledge of programming when I was first starting out. Reading opensource code, books, videos and other forms of educational material were extremely helpful to me on my journey. The most valuable insights often came from talking with more experienced developers, and is still the case to this day. Talking to & getting insights from developers that have worked on live events, games with large playerbases, complex networking problems, and more greatly improved my programming knowledge.

About two years ago, Roblox had a “community spotlight” program. The purpose of this program was to provide educational content in the form of a given creator’s experience with that content. In theory, a developer experienced with liveops would be featured, another developer experienced with level / world design would be featured, so on and so forth. This aimed to give new & less experienced developers the same insight that would be given if they had spoken to a developer experienced with those fields / hard problems.
However, the program never really met this goal. A majority of past creator spotlight articles hardly have any educational material in them. The bulk of the articles simply talk about the creator’s work history, what experiences they made and other miscellaneous things like what their favorite videogame or favorite Roblox hat is. They were essentially glorified workhistory portfolios & free game advertising for the creator being featured. For that exact reason, the spotlight program was shut down / sunset by the level-up team. The program was then superseded by devhub articles, the level-up videos and Roblox’s creator event program.

With that context in mind, I was surprised to see the program revived yesterday on the 26th of March. After reading the first spotlight in about two years, nothing had really changed. The title of the recent spotlight refers to education, but there’s hardly any educational material at all. Once again, it simply advertises the featured creator’s games, talks about their work history and concludes. Why was this program brought back if it’s still not going to fulfill its original purpose? Why is Roblox still pretending it’s about education when it’s not meeting that goal?
Furthermore, the program in its current form is not an open or fair opportunity to creators. In order to be featured through the program, you either need to know / be friends with someone internally, or someone internally needs to know you, which leads to a sponsor. There is no application process or similar, which makes it very easy for Roblox to push certain agendas and makes the program vulnerable to things like nepotism and other forms of bias, which does not scale very well.
Internally, Roblox leadership has stated that they largely want to avoid processes that give individual creators an advantage. This is why programs such as the verified badge program are largely automated and not hand-picked by a small team of staff, to avoid the very issues I just mentioned. So why is spotlight being ran like this?

Because spotlight articles largely did not contain any educational substance & the fact that they advertise the featured creator’s games & merchandise, the spotlight program could be interpreted as being an advertising program. With that in mind, how is it fair that handpicked creators get what is essentially free advertising for their non-education related experiences and merchandise by Roblox? This doesn’t provide anything valuable to new & less experienced developers, and will only lead to the program’s eventual sunset again, as history has shown us already.

This is in a similar vein as the UGC program when it was first rolled out in 2019 / 2020. A small group of creators were hand-picked by staff internally to create the first UGC items. This, in turn, allowed said creators to have a monopoly over the catalog, which generated a lot of profit for them and allowed them to do things such as buying a house. This is obviously not fair or respectful to the many creators that could also have been included in the UGC rollout.
While the UGC program and the spotlight program are obviously two different programs, the similarity here is problematic.

What needs to change

With everything that was stated above being taken into account, how can the program improve?

Firstly, the program should be more about educational substance. If a creator is featured for their experience with liveops, liveops should be spoken about! Use examples from the larger industry, draw comparisons between that and their own liveops in their games, talk about the methodology behind it, talk about technical aspects to consider (flag migration in player data for the live event for example), etc. The article should NOT advertise the featured creator’s games & game merchandise. Things like “go play their games here” and “go follow them on Roblox!” and “buy their merch here!” should not be included. It disrespects new developers that clicked onto the article thinking it would be educational.

Secondly, the program’s selection process should be more open & democratic. Getting a slot because Joe the employee likes you is not a good system. By having a more scalable process that’s less prone to bias & nepotism, the developer community would benefit from a larger pool of topics from experienced developers.

Overall, I would argue that this program should have remained sunset. It never met (and still doesn’t) its educational goals, and there are better options for education available now.

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The “requirement” of this said program was never meant to be 100% ‘educational’. It was brought back to highlight creators for their amazing work.

This glorification is to empower these selected creators. Knowing such fun things often brings up a nice atmosphere in the community :person_shrugging:

The ‘education’ part of it was never completely emphasized as Roblox’s goals. The goal is (assumed by the majority) to simply promote the work of the creators and put them (you guessed it) in the spotlight.

I believe this is the article you are looking for :-

https://corp.roblox.com/submit-for-featuring/

As said in the attached screenshot from the ‘application’ above, the point of this program is nowhere near being an education oriented sort. We already have other things for that, especially the Creator Events Program you mentioned.

This was the original reply from a Roblox admin confirming the program’s agenda.

Early creators get inspiration from such stories, learning about the creators’ interest, work and future plans. Not everything has to be all strict and knowledge oriented but also to create an aura of interest and happiness within the community.

This program has a LOT of scope and the amount of creators this can inspire is worth way more than educational posts and it was one of the great decisions taken by Roblox to reinstate this program for the good.

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This is not what I was told when I spoke to the levelup team. They stated it was meant to be educational.

I addressed this in my post:

It isn’t useful or “fun” that a handpicked group of selected creators can have their experiences advertised.

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You are confusing the purpose of the program which has now been brought back. It’s not the same motive shared by the LevelUp team earlier.

t’s not really ‘handpicked’ when there’s a selection process involved, here’s the recently updated documentation :-

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And I would argue that’s a problem. The articles as they are don’t really provide anything, it’s just advertising.

I’ve been told by more than one developer that the following have happened:

  • They spoke to someone internally (without going through the form you linked), and was given a slot
  • Someone internally “nominated” them, bypassing the form you linked
  • The team has reached out to people they personally know that fit certain criteria (gender, country, age, etc), despite the form you linked not being used

Doesn’t exactly look like the process you’re describing!

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From what I can tell this form has not lead to anything tangible and the requirements for being featured are incredibly opaque and open to biases. I think it’s fair to say that this form also wasn’t used for this

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Yeaaah that sounds nothing like the legitimate process :skull:

As far as I am aware, that form seems to be the only way to get featured. @Dev0mar is a respectable friend I have known from certain programs and I don’t think a biased process would be promoted from his side or DevRel’s inputs regarding it.

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Why is the assumption that the “Creator spotlight program” was for educational purposes? Seems pretty clear that it’s about highlighting people from the community first and foremost. This “feature request” seems like it would be more effective as a separate request for more educational content.

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It’s not an assumption:

This “feature request” was put here because there is no “program feedback” category, despite my numerous attempts to get such a category / comms pipelined created.

And this isn’t a request for more educational content, this post outlines the problems with the program as it is.

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I had a post in this category in the earlier days, and completely forgot I did until yesterday. It’s linked below if you want to look at it:

Granted, this is an older me, but let’s see, what do you get out of this?

  • What I work on? A bit.
  • How I got going? No. LEGO Universe would have appeared there if it did.
  • How I kept going? Not enough to be useful.
  • Any of my educational resources? Nope.
  • Any of my open-source work? Nope, and that was a huge waste.
  • Does it have errors? Yes! I didn’t make Roblox Battle, I made a remake called Roblox Battle (Remastered)!

Reading it now with a lot more experience, it feels like an advertisement for me or a marketing thing for Roblox to get people to try the platform. It makes me want to write my own as a retrospective because I had little or no (honestly don’t remember) editorial control. The latest post that revived this seems better in this regard, but doesn’t give me a lot to go on besides trying external editors, but I get a lot of brands and other games presented.

With that being said, I don’t see Roblox advertising the program as an educational resource, nor does the name imply this as much. To me, this is only a problem of usefulness instead of deception. Looking at you, now defunct “Roblox Champions” program name".

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Another piece of feedback was given on the main thread about this issue, reposting here for visibility:

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