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 The program was then superseded by devhub articles, the level-up videos and Roblox’s creator event program.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.
