Today we are excited to announce cross-platform play! We are making final preparations to give Xbox players the ability to play in the same servers as users from other platforms, such as PC.
While this change will be happening in the next few weeks, there are a few key things that should be noted:
We highly encourage our developers to never split their Roblox games. It is way more efficient if all of your game data is centralized to help you keep track of your player data.
Text-chat for Xbox users will remain disabled. Xbox players will continue to be able to voice chat with each other.
PC players will still be able to communicate via text to everyone in-game. Xbox users will be unable to see or respond to these messages.
Xbox users will now see Roblox usernames in addition to the Xbox gamer-tags above users heads in-game, in the player list and anywhere in the Xbox app.
PC users will continue to see Roblox usernames as usual, regardless of the platform other players are on.
Certain styles of games have a strong bias towards PC users and hardware in comparison to console users. Developers may want to keep this in mind when thinking about their own games.
Cross-platform play will be enabled for all Xbox users by default, however any Xbox user can opt-out of the feature and will continue to play isolated with other Xbox players.
Player.Name will change from Xbox Gamer Tag to Roblox Username. This transition is seamless and requires no code changes.
We advise developers to continue to use userID rather than usernames in code, particularly when handling save data or progression.
If you have any questions regarding this change, please leave them in this thread.
Xbox users will now see Roblox usernames in addition to the Xbox gamer-tags above users heads in-game, in the player list and anywhere in the Xbox app.
PC users will continue to see Roblox usernames as usual, regardless of the platform other players are on.
What if to users have the same username? Is there a symbol to identify who is who? I know its unlikely but the chances of someone taking your name on XBOX Live can still happen.
Does this mean that my game (and others who used the CreatePlace API) are never going to see this happen? Because games who used CreatePlace are basically forced to be experimental in the status quo.
Maybe I missed it but are we able to make our games not cross platform? IT says that players can opt-out but can the developer make their own game not an option?
I don’t plan to opt-out, but I don’t want to have to worry about it in the future.
Also, how will player count numbers be represented on the Games page? Still by platform only? Or will Xbox-PC be the combined for compatible games?
Is there a clear difference between a console player and a PC player in-game? What if a console player asks a PC player a question over voice chat, and then thinks they’re being ignored?
Will we be able to opt-in to split servers from the development side for all players regardless of their own choice? Some games, such as FPS, would benefit from being split. I’ve read about how combining those sort of games lead to PC players always winning. It would be great to split the game servers but share player data between platforms.
Players can opt-in themselves, but I want to provide the best experience to my players without them having to fiddle with settings. If a game has gameplay that’s best split apart, then I want to offer that to my players. Otherwise, they have to experience a frustrating play session first to maybe realize they need to opt-out of cross-platform play to have a good experience in the game. Lots of players (e.g. young kids) won’t change settings and will just not play the game because the PC players are too good.
I don’t want to have to make two games just to split my players. That splits player data and updates, too. I’m looking for the existing functionality where players are split, but data and updates are not.
Some things might be best to have different programming on Xbox. Are we able to tell if a player is playing on Xbox?
Some games don’t use the default Roblox Humanoid system. If we write our own system or our own nametags, can we get the Xbox gamertag to display in our UI?
Will we always have the option to separate PC players from xbox players? I’ve got too much copyrighted content that definitely wont fly on the xbox. I can’t just remove it either. I gotta keep xbox and pc players separate or it may cause me a major headache if I can even separate the content per player on the server.
(yeah yeah dont use copyrighted stuff. i did and so do many, thats just how it goes on pc)
The ability to seamlessly publish your game instantly to every platform is a big benefit to development on Roblox! But if you really want to make your game only available on a particular platform, you can always control platform-availability on the “Access” tab in place settings.