Is phone users really a big part of the roblox platform. Is it worth redoing the ui of a game so it can work on phone or keep the game just working on tablet and computer? Do you notice an increase a earnings from making your game work on phone? Also do you think it would be reasonable to make a separate place for phone users or just update the uis in the main game to work for phone users?
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There are plenty of phone users. I can’t give hard numbers on how many R$ are spent per platform, but I know mobile is not insignificant.
I’d start by making your game for a single platform (whichever you most enjoy) and if you find it can sustain an audience of 100+ people, invest some time in enabling the game on other platforms. Mobile won’t be a magic bullet to make a not-fun game fun, but it’ll improve your reach if you’ve already got a fun game.
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At RDC, a staff member mentioned mobile was roughly 50% of users on the platform. That said, if:
- Your game is unreleased and isn’t going to take the front page by storm
- Your game is unreleased and it’s scope is dauntingly large
- Your game is released and its playerbase is small
- Your game is released and you have pressing issues like bad ratings / bad retention
you have more important things to worry about than mobile support. Mobile support is definitely not be something you prioritize over other factors critical to your game’s success. You need a successful game for any increase in audience from mobile to be meaningful.
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Alright thank you.
This is really interesting. I’ve always suggested Devs to make their game for mobile, or at least keep mobile in mind while making it so that launch can reach the largest base - ie, don’t make a massive game with redundant content. Missing 50% of a userbase could make or break any launch for any project, on or off Roblox.
I’ve never disagreed with you (or a staff member - whoever told you), but I’m a little speculative about this. If you don’t mind, I’d like to discuss this further with you either in DMs or on a thread. I’d like to learn more for this perspective as it directly contrasts with my own 
Mobile is an important aspect of roblox but mobile can also destroy a game due to having to change controls or sizes to fit mobile.
You can make the game work for all platforms, changing those basic layouts and settings for whatever device you’re using. That isn’t the question here 
My question is the “is it worth investing time/money into mobile-compatibility” like if, as Echo (and/or the staff member) said:
- Your game is unreleased and isn’t going to take the front page by storm
- Your game is released and its playerbase is small
you have more important things to worry about than mobile support.
My pre-conceived notion is that both of those issues can be - or have the potential to be - reduced or negated enough by opening up your market to at most 50% more players.
In addition to the above question, is basically that I’m asking for more information about this. I know I don’t know the full picture and if Echo and a staff member think this way, then I want the information to think this way too. I’m just looking at new ideas in an observational way in an attempt to learn something 
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Well your games genre also impacts its release. IF you create another school then it will be a challenge to be better and unique then the other schools on the roblox platform. Also if your game is too custom you may have to spend a lot of time explaining how to play and the objectives of the game ultimately leading to players leaving due to confusion or not being engaged. Both of these impact your ability to use phone or tablet because if the market for your game is too saturated or your game is too unique people will still not play it even if it is on mobile.
Opinion in my previous post is my own. The reasoning behind it is that adding a supported platform can only increase your playerbase by a factor of ~2 – if 45% of your audience is desktop, it’s not physically possible for you to grow by 3x or more since you’ve already saturated half. There are some cases where this isn’t true (e.g. you make a game whose audience is 10% desktop and 90% mobile), so this assumes the main platform you’re supporting is also the main platform your target audience uses.
For growing games, 2x is a very small increase. You will have a much better result if you spend time on improving your gameplay loop or addressing retention concerns which could yield 10x, 50x, or 100x increases in concurrent players depending on the game and how popular it is currently. On the other hand, games like Jailbreak that have mostly saturated their market can’t make changes to their game which will see a 50x increases in players. Gains in players will be really small for these games, so expanding the target audience by 2x is a lot for them.
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That’s an interesting perspective, thank you for the clarification. I guess I’m looking at the total population percentage, not the potential gains from growth in the current playerbase.
If I’m understanding what you’re saying - and I’ll use a hypothetical situation even though I know it’s not realistic - is that if I have a game with 1000 concurrent players on PC. I should focus on expanding that 1000 PC players by x10 to 10 000, instead of releasing on mobile that would expand my concurrent players by x2 to 2000.
I see this as a short term model that works really well, basically controlling a larger percentage of a current market instead of the risk of breaking into new ones and falling flat. There’s also the opportunity cost of not gaining a larger percentage of your current market while you work on breaking into new markets.
I suppose the long term model would be “we will ship to mobile when we see PC growth ROI fall below x and rinse/repeat accordingly.”
Thanks for taking the time to explain this, I will keep your idea in my back pocket while making game design decisions going forward
In my opinion, the mobile community produces more income than all of the others combined. Due to the ease of buying robux (compared to puting there moms credit card in the screen) its just a few taps! A lot of mobile users “accidentally” purchase robux on the mobile app, and can easily become spending whales to your game! More than half my income is from them and by not including them your missing out big time. Not just that but you will see your ratings, player count, and spenders go up than ever before!
Just remeber to give mobile users an advantage so they dont dislike for having a disadvantage (platform wise)