So I did a lot of programming work while in school, and decided to learn LUA and make a game on the platform. I was blessed to find my first game did very well, being Paid Access for the majority of its life span (Getting consistent updates for about 1 year) and getting almost 2 million visits!! I am so proud and thankful my hard work was recognized. However, a few months ago a Roblox physics update made the game bugged for about a day, and I was working on a new project at the time. I decided to go and fix it up but ended up encountering a lot of issues that I didn’t like in scripting that could lead to data loss etc due to poor scripting. I decided to private the game.
Also like I said this game was Paid Access for a while and me and a few others decided it would be best to make the game free to play, which didn’t go how we intended and led to a lot of exploiting that I wasn’t good enough at scripting to catch.
I have decided to make a sequeul to said game and leave the previous one privated, I told my community about my decision and many people were frustrated because they spent money on the previous game that was taken down. Is this against TOS in any way? Do I need to put my game back up? What do I do? I want to oblige to roblox TOS to the best of my ability and also do not want to let my community down.
Nope. Would a game that’s run on Steam for a nice long 7 years suddenly be entitled to refund all players for their purchases after deciding to close their doors (drop support or close servers)? Same principle applies to Roblox, in addition to the issue of not having a proper refund system.
Digital purchases are the same as brick-and-mortar purchases. Unless there’s some compelling reason that consumers can’t use the product they purchased and fixing it isn’t an option, you don’t hand out refunds when they’ve gotten their use out of the product.
Roblox players are a little different - and wrong - in their mindset about when it’s appropriate to issue refunds or when to get angry about a purchase. Buying an early access experience and it closing down later after running its course is not one of those appropriate times.
ETA: I’ve strikedthrough the first sentence of the second paragraph. I can’t explain that one well enough in terms of why it’s relevant to the point I’m making, so feel free to ignore it.
TOS says nothing about it from what I can see by just doing ctrl + f, and people have done stuff like this for years and nothing ever happened to them. It’s a purely moral concern, no rules are broken by this.
Even if it’s not against the TOS, consider adding some rewards in your sequel for your current userbase.
It’s not necessary, but it’s a nice gesture for the players that have supported you in the past, and this way you can clean your image and incentive your current userbase to play the new game!
No you shouldn’t, but maybe make a message saying the game is closing soon before you actually close it. You’re allowed to take gamepasses offsale and that sorta stuff, so I dont see an issue with this
This is an awful strawman argument using an incredibly specific-yet-unrelated example both in terms of the physical good in question and licensing circumstances. We’re talking about games here, not other physical goods. Whether you have a physical disc or the game’s files on your computer digitally, the result of end-of-life for the game doesn’t change.
It’s my fault for trying to use physical and digital examples to further back my reasoning as to why a refund isn’t warranted when a game faces end-of-life. It’s not entirely relevant and I failed to better explain what I meant there. I’m specifically talking about refund cases.
ETA: Updated the original reply accordingly to cross it out.
I say you should keep it public, I too am frustrated that one of my favorite games (a different game) is no longer public and likely will stay that way, I don’t care if its broken and unplayable, I like to revisit stuff for nostalgia reasons
You could probably make some sort of notice in the older game that there exists a sequel or that its broken.
here’s your issue: worrying about whether you can do it rather than if you should do it
your community is clearly distraut about privating the game, so instead of checking to make sure you can get away with it, why not just not do it for them, or make a compromise
leaving the game open seems like the easiest. since all the servers are paid for by roblox, you lose nothing, much less than if you privated the game. it might be broken, but people like to reminisce. if you dont want people spending money on it, just take all the gamepasses offsale.
a bit under 2 million visits is impressive, but games that size generally dont have huge communities, so its best not to alienate them, especially if you want support for a sequel (which it seems isnt even in an alpha state yet)
So, heres what I would reccomend make the sequel free to play, award said players who owned the game a certain item in the game ex: Exclusive Title/Pet/Item, etc.
As others have said, it’s stated in the TOS. Furthermore, if you want to buy a product you agree to the fact that the game will have full control on that and can change it as they like, and therefore you are responsible for the purchase.
Did you try to reverse the game’s places back to an older version so with older datas and with a little dataloss it could be set to public and maybe approch the exploits from a different pov.
lol if you want to refund someone for a gamepass just mass report it and get it banned
also there was a cool game that got banned called “Oof tycoon” and they just made a new game and make the gamepasses count towards that game
2 million visits for a game with paid access is pretty good. Part of developing a game is maintaining it, or making sure nothing breaks. It might be the hardest part, but that’s why Roblox has opt-ins. This is likely the one that broke your physics:
You will have time to make it compatible before the timeframe is over.
To answer the original question, no. However, it will give you a bad reputation among your community (if you have related games).
