trying to monetize free games has always been an illogical practice born out of mobile market shenanigans
That is a very odd take - why do you think developers are expected to make games for free? I’m not surprised when even passion projects have some sort of monetization, because in the majority of cases the developer can’t afford to focus their time on a project that returns nothing.
blaming players or calling them entitled when they don’t want to waste time on an experience that should be enjoyable (even if it’s “free”) makes no sense, there are droves of free games that don’t need to sacrifice player QOL to keep themselves afloat
I don’t understand your point about player entitlement, they can’t “waste time” when they are the ones choosing to play the game in the first place. Many games have created enjoyable gameplay loops while having a heavily monetized pay-to-progress-faster system.
Yeah, ideally there would be a better monetization strategy but @NoobFragged explained this pretty well, you need to create some incentive for players to spend money. If you want to avoid pay-to-win, then pay-to-progress-faster or cosmetics are usually your only choice.
Roblox takes an egregious cut of dev revenue and only makes certain practices viable in their economy. I don’t understand why devs who are looking for money are OK working with a platform that consistently screws them (which trickles down to players and their games) when they’d be better off going indie or seeking teams on the myriad of other developer storefronts out there after accruing a modest starting fund (especially Steam, which handles a lot of the back-end for you).
Because Roblox has cultivated a very powerful player ecosystem, there is no chance a game like “Skibidi Toilet Tower Defense” would be successful on Steam. I always see posts about people moving to other game engines - I wish them the best of the luck, but gamedev isn’t magically going to be easier on other platforms, infact I’d say its far worse. Roblox has a lot of tradeoffs that developers like myself consider to be worth it.
Personally, it doesn’t seem like you know much about the gaming industry, and whatever your imagination tells you is the point of “free games”, I’m pretty sure it’s wrong.
There’s no such thing as a free game, and with all due respect to your POV on what you think developing on Roblox should be, it’s not a sentiment a single developer shares, no one should work for free.
“Free Games” as you like to call them only exist as the result of the 90-9-1 business model. That model when introduced as “the end of western gaming” during a developer conference operated under the premise that for online gaming, if you made your game free and used micro-transactions to monetize the game, that 90% of your customers would never pay, that 9% of your customers would pay, but roughly about the same amount as you’d get from a subscription, and that 1% of your players would end up paying enough to offset the game’s costs and pay for the 90% that didn’t. The entire business model, which Roblox uses, is predicated NOT on games being free, but on a different strategy of making money off those games that allows people who can’t afford game subscriptions or especially multiple game subscriptions to continue to experience a variety of games and keep them alive.
This was specifically introduced as the world transitioned from a few MMO games that everyone pretty much knew the name of every game that was active to a world where there were more of these games than people could keep track of.
Anyone who tells other people they should work for free, is by nature not only by the very definition of the word entitled, but very problematic. That is completely unsustainable and unrealistic. The higher quality games being made today could never exist under such a premise and Roblox isn’t some “springboard” platform into Indie development, pick up an earnings call sometime, Roblox is a multi-billion dollar corporation with a valuation on par with Nintendo, this isn’t some little company where kids get their start practicing developing. Many games on this platform take six months to a year or longer to develop and are the work product of entire teams collaborating or people spending money investing. Take a look at the hiring sometime, no one is working for free, and they shouldn’t be asked to.
Roblox IS indie game development, and Roblox wouldn’t exist without developers monetizing their games, that is the entire business model of Roblox. It’s not a charity. That business model is built on the premise of people paying, and while you may not like that idea, don’t participate in it, but if you have the expectation developers shouldn’t, be prepared for a life of disappointment.
It’s not a “free game”, it’s a “differently monetized game”, basically, welcome to the equity world of gaming. It’s not about free and never has been, it’s about making money differently based on the player’s ability to pay.
The moment the conversation becomes that developers shouldn’t earn anything and basically the entire platform should be exploited labor, I’m done. Roblox didn’t become a multi-billion dollar corporation off “free” anything. The entire premise of Robux IS for games to have microtransactions, and frankly, players are lucky when they can have options like watching ads to earn what other people have to pay for. Because MOST popular games on this platform are very pay-to-win.
If a developer over-uses or over-monetizes, then that should reflect in their players, and I’m all for having conversations about how monetization should occur, but I’m not having the conversation of telling me I should make games for free and never expect a return, not even from those who can pay. The cost of living is skyrocketing, as is the cost of developing, and I’m not okay with any conversation that involves developers not being allowed to earn a living on a platform that wouldn’t exist any other way. The pay is garbage for most, but under the premise that if we do our job really well, we can make a living doing this, not that if we do our job really well, we should still make nothing.
I agree, and even though they charge more, they also offer services that we would have to pay upfront for elsewhere. I can make a game on Unity much cheaper than I can here, sure, but I made an online game on Unity. I spent a long time getting online play functional, had no audience to market it to for testing, steam green light takes forever, and all that time I have to pay for a server to host my game while I have to hunt for people to play it.
As rough as Roblox can be, it’s actually one of the best markets for indie developers making online games get be able to get people to play those games while being developed. It’s basically the biggest Indie MMO platform on Earth.
my point isn’t that they’re expected to make free games, it’s that making a free game the basis of profit isn’t a good idea because core values may have to be sacrificed to improve revenue. this is why I believe many AAA studios making paid games consistently fail too, they put too much emphasis on profit/statistics on top of poor management and have a higher chance to deliver a shallow experience.
in short, sourcing free game funding (or even paid game funding) from other more profitable ventures and following up with minor monetization methods on it will likely increase quality because the game won’t be burdened by profit specialization.
I’m at fault for using monetize in that sentence, as over-monetization or aggressive monetizing practices would be more accurate to my stance on it - a dev making their game with consistent outside income that can come faster, and then letting it accrue revenue through less intrusive monetization methods like the aforementioned cosmetics, expansion packs (like how HOURS did), or clever ad integration would be ideal. but the way this feature is implemented, it sounds like it practically forces intrusive or shallow ad integration that detracts from the actual game experience. (which I just think is plain annoying, even if it’s a free game and I’m supposed to be grateful that I can even play it in the first place, despite the fact that I’d rather just pay for a good, honest product if free games are desperate enough to resort to this)
what is and isn’t a waste of time is a personal thing, but objectivity of good and bad gameplay (if it becomes watered down for monetary reasons), and being taken out of the core game itself is what I’m referring to here.
time spent participating in things unrelated to the game just to get something within the game can be considered a “waste of time” if it isn’t as enjoyable as the general gameplay itself, tedious grinds and players letting the game play itself through AFK farms because they know it’s pointless to play during that time are examples of a player foreseeing wasted time despite “playing” the game. a lot of monetization methods like these make this kind of stuff more common, even if clever devs can use them as solid tools to improve player experience, and it frequently ends up just making games plain worse.
I think it’s an entire spectrum for how much a developer wants to make and how much you want a player to enjoy a game, and I’m simply radicalized on the side that benefits players/gameplay more than developers/profit loops for a myriad of reasons, notably why I call free games trying to make money illogical, because paid games are simply a better way of doing it that puts infinitely less stress on the game if you’re trying to also make a genuinely good product. but as was discussed previously, Roblox puts the brakes on devs who try the pay-to-play model by letting free game devs make way more off of their product at the potential of either dampening or straight ruining player experience, and this feature may end up empowering free game devs and even further unbalancing the dynamics of both models.
I was unaware that Roblox relied on this business model, and it explains a lot about the direction the platform has gone in the past bunch of years. basically, whales make the biggest profit margins in free games so incentivize the kind of P2W mechanics that draw them in. as you stated, it’s a direct transition from the MMO landscape and is a great move for profitability - but this model trickled down into everything that wasn’t an MMO and created the corporate battlegrounds Roblox has become today. (which, again, is plain annoying because game dev obviously shouldn’t be free but people are so engrossed in the profit margins that the majority of projects really do just end up designed to be wallet vacuums more than actual games).
the fact that gamedev is/isn’t easier on other platforms isn’t a magical thing, Roblox’s hyper specific pandering toward younger age groups made a great environment for TTD to succeed, and statistics like the obnoxious 70% revenue cut way over industry standard and their restriction to a single platform that adheres to all of their rules instead of having complete freedom to choose a partner/storefront and the entire programming landscape at your disposal are just some of many examples on why I think Roblox isn’t a very good option for a game dev looking to make a long-term career and can be quite limiting, even if the barrier to entry is incredibly low.
I see a lot of devs make genuinely good games on this platform, but the fact is profit-driven dev teams have seem to begun leading the platform and making an even larger barrier-to-entry/success than there previously was for the majority of solo devs, and the already meager earnings will be split even further if a team becomes involved; which means even more burden of profit on what is ideally a creative project.
my struggle is that it actually was that for a very long time, is viable to be used as that, and is still marketed heavily as that, despite the entire platform basically swaying in the polar opposite direction at this point as its own, fully fledged game market where you can argue that Roblox has even formed its own “AAA” system through large developer groups.
my main clash with this platform at the end of the day is that they (rightfully, as a company) prioritize profit, but there was a very long period in Roblox’s history that people were just plain making things for free on the site (and some still do), but now many individuals working within the platform see it as a serious no-nonsense workplace environment that makes genuine profit, which leads endless developers into a mindset that can end up prioritizing profit over vision, potentially resulting in worse games and (purposefully or not) compromised developer creativity.
and while the platform has technical prowess far beyond anything it had back then, we see these teams of experts with the best tools simply rehashing what is most engaging within a market and spawning genres like the Simulator, RNG, and Modern Tycoon ones. I simply want to see really good games get made, and once in a blue moon they do; but it’s plain unrealistic to make a solid gaming experience on Roblox because they aren’t as profitable.
I’m not trying to say that good games don’t get made on Roblox or that devs don’t deserve to be paid, but that the mindset Roblox cultivated is simply making a worse environment for players through these low-yet-high effort games being everywhere, and tools like this line pockets but propagate the issue instead of throwing the players a bone for once. I could (and should) just hop to another platform that more accurately matches my age group, but when a Roblox game is done right it’s simply a unique enjoyment you can’t get anywhere else, and I just want more of those.
Before this model, all online games required you to pay for a subscription (Typically 14.99/month) with a very few (like Guild Wars) having you pay for updates plus the main product. For offline games it was only purchase and play, sometimes with things like shareware or demos so you could try the game first, but nothing was really ever free. When a game was free, it was usually because the game was an advertisement and endorsed by and for a specific company. Even those were not often completely free.
I agree the mechanic encourages P2W, which I don’t really like. I actually despise how game companies often hire psychologists to try to make games addictive and for them to add monetization meant to exploit people with gambling addictions.
On the plus side, it allowed many more people to play many more games, but on the downside, it can be a bit predatory.
That’s actually why I like ad monetization, I see it more as an equalizer allowing players who can’t pay to be able to still obtain paid content.
Roblox is marketed as “free to play”, and it is, you can still play most of the games for free, it has never been anything other than monetized. Robux has been a part of the Roblox business model since 2007, so monetization has always been a part of the platform, their model has never been anything else.
When it first started, they were literally creating it from Lua and still developing the platform, there’s a difference between them being small and growing as a platform and being small and growing as a platform being the intended business model. There are AAA games now because not only are there teams, but there are people who have made games on this platform for 15+ years now, and the platform has had a long time to make itself more viable, allowing things to be possible more and more as time passes.
It could not be viable without growth, and as a publicly traded company, I expect it to only become bigger. Things are no less free than they were before though.
There are plenty of non-monetized games on the platform, plenty being developed, and lots of old games that still work. When you get to higher end games made by teams or people who have been developing for many years, yeah, it’s natural at that point they need to make money. If you start developing on Roblox at 13, you’re not making some AAA game, and many of those games are still made and still not monetized. That same developer 5 years later is an adult with things like rent and college to pay for. If all the Roblox developers quit when they became adults, this platform would be dead and most games as they became decent would be abandoned. When you’ve invested your time, gotten good, and can make higher quality games, it makes sense that those games need to be monetized more so than the stuff you made when you were just learning.
Roblox Academy was sold on the premise of kids learning to be game developers, no parent ever paid for that expecting their kids wouldn’t ever make anything from that skill. Roblox did it intending for them to monetize, because that’s how Roblox makes their money. They sell Robux, devs sell stuff for Robux.
If anything, ads are a way to bring things back down. While yes, some team games are going to take advantage of that, there are millions of games on this platform and there are more games that are not over-monetized than there are games that are. This is why ads are a good thing, they are a way those of us who don’t want to over monetize can still make our games sustainable.
I’m not a team, I’m a solo developer, even as a solo developer, I spent years learning to be able to make games like what I work on now. Between the time I spent learning and the time it takes to make a good game, I still have to survive. I’m sure I’ll have a year into this game before all is said and done.
The biggest difference between Roblox and other platforms is Roblox makes it harder for premium (games you just pay for once and own) to be viable and the Robux model is so ingrained that I’m not really sure even the player base is receptive to them enough to make them sustainable.
I just disagree here though, I think allowing players to experience premium content without having to pay is a bone, and this is the first time Roblox has ever added anything that could do that. This is the first time Roblox has done anything for non-paying players.
You can, but you won’t find it better. Steam, Epic, Google, Android, M$, Xbox, Playstation, etc. all the platforms out there are full of:
A) Mostly games you pay to own before you even play them.
B) Freemium games that are more monetized than 99% of Roblox games ever will be with pay-walls preventing you from ever really being able to viably play the game without money and massive P2W mechanics.
C) Shovelware free games that are ad-supported and often try to harvest your data as well.
The grass isn’t greener, I own thousands of games across many platforms. I would say even right now, there are more legitimately free and less monetized games on Roblox than any platform on Earth.
When you try to make a game on another platform that’s online, you are immediately hit with server costs (I have made a MMO on Unity), which is part of why Roblox devs make less, because (greed aside), Roblox does provide an all-inclusive platform which includes free hosting and a ready-made player base.
I have more than my share of complaints with Roblox, but I wouldn’t be here if the platform didn’t have incredible potential, and of all the things they have done that I don’t like, this isn’t one of them. Games can’t really force you into ads, but if they try, I highly suggest not playing them. I think the primary beneficiaries of ads will be players who don’t have Robux having ways to get content that would otherwise normally only go to players who have Robux.
Wait, you guys monetize your games? All my robux goes right back into them… or at least it used to, until they upped the minimum requirements for ads a crazy amount. I’m not ID-verified by choice, too, so even though my account is ancient I can’t even use this particular feature even if I wanted to.
If you have less than this you weren’t going to make any money off the ads anyways. Complaining that you can’t hurt the quality of life of your users for zero money is sillier than complaining that you can advertise in-game at all. There’s not much reason for Roblox to exhaust resources determining when an ad having been shown actually makes sense. If this restriction wasn’t here people could flood the search with clickbait bot games that literally just make you join to show you an ad. This restriction prevents low effort scam and spam games from advertising.
You are told when players can’t see ads.
There is not a better way that doesn’t mean verifying your identity. Your age is a number associated with you, you can’t validate your age without validating who you are. If you validate who you are, they don’t need your ID. Your ID is the least intrusive way to validate who you are. Secondly, your ID is not stored. The only time this complaint even applies is for DevEx. There’d be literally no reason to opt into this if you don’t already have DevEx with which your SSN is stored. Your drivers license or ID doesn’t matter a bit compared to your SSN.
Almost certainly, but the necessity for a holder account is questionable.
Phone verification does not verify your age.
There is nothing that ties 2fa to your phone or computer. You can store the 2fa secrets literally anywhere or even write them on a piece of paper. Same with the backup codes.
Your ID is not stored or linked to your account. This is in the privacy policy of the service Roblox uses to do ID verification.
how is having immersive ads in your game and making your own immersive ads not allowed as a minor but creating any other type of advertisement is allowed? I don’t think that contract signing thing applies since you never really have to sign any contract to create a GUI within your game that displays advertisements, and if it did apply then what sets it apart from other ads like banners or sponsors that don’t have these restrictions?
The point of ID verification is likely not to… verify your age. Maybe that was the case for voice chat, but that was a while ago now - they’re all over locking essential or very useful features behind the “hand over your ID” wall now, likely making sure you cannot use an alt to bypass the rules, which… phone verification already does considering VoIP is blocked? ID verification isn’t even 18+, it’s 13+ - they are choosing to do this. It’s mind boggling to think there was a meeting where they decided to screw over literally everybody without a valid ID or who is not 18 (so most of their core audience) but I rest my case.
I am done with Roblox now because they seem to not be capable of making any decision which will not make at least half of people upset and all of this ID verification crap is rubbing salt in the wound.
ps: i’m sure 20 people did not all need to be notified about this post
It requires you to be 18+ so yes, it is also to verify your age.
I don’t know what you mean. I replied to the people complaining about it with information. I am not going to reply to every person individually, especially when you’re told not to do it.
A player doesn’t have to ID verify to be shown ads. A player doesn’t have to agree to any advertising guidelines to be shown ads because the advertising guidelines aren’t for them. The ID verification applies to people who want to be the ones showing ads, who have to agree to the immersive ad guidelines.
those terms and standards apply to all ads (Banners and Sponsors included). users under 18 have permission to create those advertisements and I couldn’t find anything in the documents that said why those same users aren’t able to create or display immersive ads which fall under the same rules as all the other advertisements. Immersive ads are also created with a similar process as sponsor ads are and under the same website (Ads Manager). If there were laws that didn’t allow users under 18 to create immersive ads then I believe that those restrictions would also be under sponsors.
From the publisher eligibility section in the advertising guidelines:
Publishers and their experiences must meet the eligibility requirements listed under the Immersive Ads page of Creator Hub, and eligibility must be maintained on an ongoing basis for program participation.
I am not suggesting that Roblox is actively making a legally binding contract or that it’s completely necessary I am saying that the reason that the 18+ requirements exist is likely to make the guidelines more strongly bound. Minors can sign contracts but it doesn’t necessarily make them legally binding. My point was that if Roblox enforces 18+ restrictions they don’t need to worry about it at all, it is just much easier for them to enforce and will allow them to eventually expand to implementing legally binding contracts and such if they want to.
Other advertising platforms do this for the same reason. E.g. Google’s AdSense and Facebook’s ads both require you to be 18+ for similar reasons. It makes it easier for them to enforce and easier to modify their guidelines later.
Yes it’s hypothetically possible for Roblox to get rid of this restriction but they’re probably not going to because they want to decouple their advertising tools from Roblox and be their own ad provider for the platform.
no doubt in my mind that you who made the post is over 18
feels disrespectful to be granted a monetization feature and then have it taken away
but according to your ego, you just felt the need to ping the entire community and throw some links at us like it solved anything
You just started a war and pinged an entire community of developers who are mad about not being able to make a profit/unneeded restrictions simultaneously. Good job! You probably have access to this feature yourself judging by the nerve
