As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to visualize telemetric trends and feature usage from Roblox games in the Developer Stats menu. Right now, only generic user data that is not game-specific appears in the Developer Stats menu on the website.
IDEA: Wouldn’t it be cool to track custom events and have them populate graphs or charts within the Developer Stats menu on the website?
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my game / my development experience because I would be able to identify bottlenecks in gameplay, track feature popularity, and analyze statistics that I personally care about in my unique game. Right now, the Developer Stats menu only ingests and visualizes data that is not game-specific. For example, an RPG might be interested in how many health potions the average user purchases, while a shooter game might be interested what weapons of choice the average user selects. Insights into game-specific telemetry like this would vastly improve developer workflow and help developers identify which areas of a game need improvement or are the most profitable.
Although I am well aware I could code something up for handling this sort of situation independently, I think as a platform, Roblox should implement this feature to further empower developers and drive increased competition for the front page.
Since this is a big ask that would require API additions as well as web visualizations, I would like to point out other tools I have utilized in mobile app development that encompass this feature request:
- The first tool that I think of when talking about a Custom Event API is Segment. Segment is an API that collects consumer data in mobile/web applications. To track data, Segment API uses a track function call that includes a string name of that user event and a series of specified event properties are passed in tandem. Here is an example Segment API track call in JavaScript:
analytics.track("Registered", {
plan: "Pro Annual",
accountType: "Facebook"
});
- The second part of this feature request is actually visualizing this custom event data and allowing developers to filter the analytics/telemetry gathered from Custom Event API calls. I think of two different tools utilized in mobile development that I think Roblox Company developers should emulate in designing an affective analytics tool for game developers. First is Amplitude Analytics. Amplitude is an analytics tool that visualizes telemetry and user data. Another tool is Microsoft Azure’s Application Insights. Both of these tools offer various features (App Insights being more for performance management and Amplitude for business insights). The pictures below show you some of the visualization that the aforementioned tools can generate:
(Amplitude ^)
(App Insights ^)
In conclusion, I know this would be a huge undertaking for Roblox that could even be a multi-quarter project, but I think it is worth it. I know implementing an API like this also means limiting the amount of tracked telemetry for performance reasons and read/write costs, but they could also limit access to the API and analytics features to Roblox Premium members only or make us pay subscription/throughput scaling charges.
TL;DR - Analytics are really powerful in mobile app development and Roblox should offer us some more capabilities to track Roblox game-specific telemetry via Custom Event API & graphic visualizations.
