Hi all, I’ll try to be as concise as possible.
I co-run (with a friend) a roleplay Ro-State group (TSO Belmont). We have a game which is fairly feature-complete and completely custom built over the course of the past 2 years. We have a small community of about 100-200 people, of which 20, max 30 are actually active (which I find adequate with the size of the group).
We really want to grow out. Roleplay games and Ro-States are still present on the platform*, and given that Roblox grows with more users each year, I don’t think it’s logical to assume that the genre is ‘dead’.
We’ve tried ads - both the old and new systems. The problem is that our game kind of requires other players to be fun, and with ads it’s quite difficult to get a server to exist with multiple people at once. We have a SSU** event system, but it requires attendees to be on Discord, and ~90% of our Discord members don’t come to SSUs (so about 2-5 attendees per SSU, 10 on good days).
Our goal is not profitability. The only income our group gets is through shirt sales on uniforms for police/fire/etc, and from premium payouts. We don’t have a way to purchase in-game currency, and we don’t sell gamepasses. Our game is not P2W in any way.
Would anyone have any tips on how to grow such a group, one that requires actual concurrent players? Thanks for taking your time to read this. Any feedback on the game itself is also greatly appreciated.
Footnotes
* - e.g. Mano County, British Columbia, etc. still do get players
** - Server Start-Up, essentially a scheduled Discord ping for people to join a server all at once so we all play the game together
PS. This is a repost since I originally posted in the wrong category 