Events platform [Full release]

[beastoftheeast0 (ashvin)]

[Update] March 29, 2023

We received some helpful feedback regarding who can create events for group-owned experiences. I’m happy to announce that we’ve launched a fix that allows anyone with the Create and edit group experiences permission enabled to create, update, and delete events.

No action is required on your end to enable this change! We appreciate your ongoing feedback — please continue to share below!

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Hey Developers,

We are excited to launch the Events Platform to our global developer community!

We know it’s been frustrating to not be able to promote your own events, and we’ve been hard at work on the Events Platform to make events as valuable and accessible as possible.

This feature is currently in experimentation, and will be rolling out to a portion of users on certain device types. Stay tuned for more details on full rollout!

Overview

In January, the Events Platform beta was released to the developer community. Now, it’s available to all developers. The Events Platform tool empowers you to create and schedule time-based events within your experiences. You can leverage this tool for special events, challenges, experience updates, offers, and more.

We’re rolling these features out to users gradually, but everyone will be able to see and interact with events in the coming weeks.

Discovery

Creating an event generates an Event Details Page that displays a title, description, and media about the event, as well as a countdown to when the event will start. This is similar to the Experience Detail Page. The page can be easily shared as a link. When the event begins, users can click the “Join Event” button to join your experience.

After creating an event, upcoming and live events will be displayed on the experience details page, which displays the event title, time, and a preview of the description. This will allow users to easily find and learn about upcoming events for your experience.

Notifications

Users can click “Notify Me” on both of the above discovery surfaces in order to opt into event-specific notifications.

When the event starts, these users will receive “stream notifications” in their notification inbox. Just click, and you’re in. Stream notifications will be accessible in the users’ inbox for the duration of the event, making it easy for them to hop back in at any time.

Users can also opt-in to receive push notifications for an event. When the event starts, opted-in users will receive a notification on their device that will take them into your experience.

Creation

To create an event, simply go to the Creator Dashboard in Creator Hub. Events will appear as a tab under the “Creations” page on Creator Dashboard, allowing you to create events and manage existing ones.

We want to empower you to bring your creativity to life, and we hope the Events Platform will help you spotlight your creations.

Check out the documentation for more information on how to get started!

What’s Next

Your feedback is crucial to our process! We have some exciting things being worked on which we can share at a later date - but let us know in the comments what you think and if there’s anything you want to see in the future.

FAQs

Can I create an event without an attached experience or in another developer’s experience?

• No, an event must be tied to an experience that you own, or to a group that you own

Who can create events for a group?

• Only the group owner may create events for a developer group

How many events can I create?

• There is a limit of 10 published events at any one time, but you can create as many drafts as you like!

How can I share events with users off-platform?

• After creating an event, a link to the event details page will be generated that you can share with users on or off platform

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Thank you!

[Krystaltinan (Krypt)]

Love this feature! Hopefully this allows us to expand our events to younger audiences who may not have social media. This also allows for more broad promotions! Great work!

[prooheckcp (pro)]

This is honestly so awesome! Would be cool to have an API so we could listen in our code for the start of an event so we can maybe toggle some stuff on when the event starts!

[CheOsana]

I feel that if you have to scroll to reach them then their usefulness and visibility is going to be poor. Maybe the option to promote it further up the page could be introduced.

[kinglalu]

This is great! Will there ever be plans to allow developers to award UGC items within these events as well in the future?

[Fm_Trick (Trick)]

This is great! I want to use this to advertise the upcoming updates for our game.

Q: Is there a maximum duration for event From/To dates? It fails to create the event if I put a time range of over a few days it seems. My solution is to just set the event range to just a few hours, since I mostly just want to alert when the game update drops, anyways!

Q: Is it safe to assume the selected From/To times are in our system’s local time? I imagine so but just want to double check that it’s not UTC or something!

Much appreciate this feature!

[Absumption (michael)]

Absolutely love this,

one major question though about future plans…
Are there any plans for some sort of API to interact with these events from in-game & from the web, possibly an ExperienceEventsService and an associated Web API?

[IAmPinleon (Pinleon)]

I’ve been waiting for this release ever since I’ve seen pictures of it in beta. This will definitely be helpful in the future when I release updates to my games. Almost all my information goes to the discord server, so other people might not know. With this, now people will!

I just tested out this feature and I think the time UI is pretty cool and all, but I would like the option to just type the time out here:

[beastoftheeast0 (ashvin)]

Thanks for the feedback!

1. You should be able to create events up to 3 months long, but the event must start at least 15 minutes from when you created it. Perhaps that’s why you weren’t able to create the event? Let us know if you’re unable to make an event longer than a few days!
2. Yes, From/To times are localized!

[beastoftheeast0 (ashvin)]

This is definitely something we’re going to incorporate into our thinking going forward!

[Ralphie0511]

This is an amazing update! I really liked the idea of this feature, and I really believe it can be used to make the platform better overall!

[Real]

Good update - but Group Owners should be able to grant permissions in groups for other people to publish events. Games have Community Managers/Events folks that are responsible for this. It isn’t intrusive enough to require game owner permissions exclusively.

[xyrafrost]

Pretty neat feature. It’d be cool if there was a way to have automatically repeating events, for example, an annual event that should repeat every year. Seems like the only way to accomplish this at the moment is to manually re-create the event after it ends.

Also, why can’t I delete past events? I made a quick test event to play around with this feature and I can’t delete it now that it’s ended.

[kingerman88]

Is there api which we could use to per say allow a discord bot to make an event for us?

I think that could be very cool if we could link our events from discord to Roblox

[metatablecatmaid (metatablecat)]

It would be nice to have in-experience integration as well, like for example, prompting the user if they’d like to register for an event on that place, or giving a “completion” award on the event page itself.

Overall, this is a great step for bringing back developer events, but letting the community organise it instead. It would also be nice to have the ability for a group of developers to host an event as a group, and opt-in their own experiences for a bigger event

[AbstractAlex]

This is so coo-

@beastoftheeast0

Only the group owner may create events for a developer group

Edit: This issue has been resolved!

[Ralphie0511]

I am pretty sure Discord blocked API calls from Roblox because of spam and abuse

[MartimDev]

Is there no new scripting API to go along with this? Would be really cool if there was an API to create live events with ease.
I would like to be able to get the events that are programmed, get if there is any event currently and maybe a few events like EventStarted, changed, deleted, etc.

[SoCalifornian (Cali)]

What’s the purpose other than out-reach/community-gatherings?

There’s no Engine API at all and not one that is mentioned either.

Given the concept of this you would ideally want to have things occur in game according to when events occur/are active.

A few ideas that come to mind:

• Allow for reoccuring events which occur every X (could be days, weekdays, hours, etc.)
• If an Engine API is introduced; Allow for attributes to be attached to events so that you can easily customize and change certain parameters to be read in-game

Currently on many games that I develop I’ve had to make a shared custom event system to satisfy the need of live game events without having to push out a new update. I would love to be able to replace my own custom system with this new system - and given that this system already seems to lay the ground work - I can see it being possible.