Group Improvements Tailored to Development Groups

Feature Requests Website Features
#1

This will be a post about the current use of group games, and potential improvements I think would help incentivize more developers to use them for their new projects. Eventually I see group games as the dominant method for publishing a game on Roblox.

Given Roblox’s current features, here’s what I like about group games currently compared to individual profile published.

  1. A group wall, this essentially replaces the comment section of a game, there is fewer spam, more feedback generated, more bug reports than what you could originally find in the comments. A group wall is especially important with the complete removal of the comments system, it provides a sense of community outside of the game (is this important, you can decide).
    If you don’t have a group game, there is no wall for players to post on publically on your profile. There would then be messages.

  2. Group payouts. When multiple people work on a game, group games are better and easier to use. Assuming 100% of revenue going to group fund, every robux in the group funds has already had the 30% fee applied, paying out to your developers is free, as opposed to having the robux be double fee’d if you then pay them with the robux in your own account.

  3. A visible list of all the games by that group. Profiles have this too, but it is hidden behind a profile page where if the player wants to find more games by the developer, they have to click profile, then creations, then the grid view of the creations. With a group game it is simply 1 click, the creator (group) then they see a list of games under the group shout.

Here are the improvements:

  1. Individual game funds. Instead of one group fund, there should be a different fund created for each game the group creates. What this allows for is easy payouts to different developers according to what games they created in the group. % payouts would work with these funds as well, allowing for the choice of % payouts automatically or 100% to game fund. (Going to game fund (currently group fund) makes it easier to account for advertising expenses for that particular game) ie) payout the developer who spent the R$ on ads right away. If you know basic accounting (revenue - expenses) you know what I’m talking about.

  2. Individual game editing permissions. This would allow certain people within the group (no matter what rank they are) to edit a particular game that the owner sets. Would give more control over what developers edit what group game.

  3. Using individual game funds to advertise/sponsor for that game
    Excuse me if I’m wrong with this one, but currently you can’t choose to spend group funds on advertising or game sponsors. Instead you have to spend the robux yourself, and pay back you/ who ever spent the robux on the ad. (What I was talking about at the end of bullet point 1)

  4. Display developers of the game (and hyperlink to their profile) right under “By (group name)”. It would display the developers that have permissions to edit the game (described in bullet point 2). (This one is just icing on the cake, but would be very professional, currently group games do this within the description -a very make-shift way to do it, as the description should be for what the game is about)

If I missed anything important that other group game developers currently do / want to see as a feature, please post about it.

28 Likes
TheAmazeman's Catalog of Feature Requests and Helpful dev forum posts
#2

I think percentage payout is not very useful because it is applied directly per item. That means part of the sales can get put into group funds still if it cannot be properly divided. If I set the division to 100% summed I also expect 100% of the funds to be divided fairly over the complete set of sales (not per item, since that obviously doesn’t work well for amounts that don’t exactly distribute among the shares). Possibly a time frame could be specified for when the funds should be shared among stakeholders, like once a day, once a week, once a month.

Balances for each game separately would be really interesting.

4 Likes
#4

The @player idea is so important! @Repotted

Also group owners should be able to create channels, so there’s not only one group wall, there could be multiple depending on how many owner wants to make. ie) “Bug reports”, or individual channels for each major game on the dev group.

5 Likes
#5

Sounds a bit like having sub-groups (for separate funds/wall/members) along with some other features. Seems similar to GitHub’s organisation structure with Teams/Projects where you can assign teams/people to repositories/projects and repositories to projects or the organisation in general. Would be a lot of work to implement on ROBLOX, but would be quite nice.

2 Likes
#6

One thing that I realized recently was that groups have group assets that any dev can access. I’d also like a feature where, as an owner, I can restrict people from accessing those assets so only the appropriate people have access to them. Probably they could be made per place so only people who have edit permission to a certain place can view the assets associated with that place.