I’m super excited about this!
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I think it is morally wrong to sign in with an authoritarian government’s guidelines and policies. Furthermore, concerns were raised above by @Fluffmiceter that Roblox (or Roblox China) would be able to make derivative work and use our IP. Given the track record of chinese knock off (anything) on the market, I don’t know about this program.
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Huge move for Roblox! can’t wait to see how it turns out going forward 
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You know you can always just not apply, it wont negatively affect you or anything and nothing really isn’t gonna happen if you don’t apply. But I can see your frustration if this was being forced upon us.
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I may be not understanding this, but I have one question.
Is it possible to only put some of our games on the Chinese market? Because I want to try and make games of multiple genres (primarily Vibe and Horror). However, with these guidelines, some of my ideas for games wouldn’t be possible.
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Probably not horror if it includes unarmed violence with or without the use of props…
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I find this case unlikely. The Chinese gaming market isn’t a completely closed off garden - they’ve got titles like League of Legends, Overwatch, and, hell, even Path of Exile. It’s strange to ban unarmed violence/violence with props, maybe they have something else in mind?
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I think people are concerned about Roblox’s decision to partner up with China’s government in general. In theory, those of us who refrain from signing up only stand to lose money while other developers would fill the space and make lots of money.
It’s a boycott against tyranny even though doing so doesn’t really benefit us.
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Applied! Looking forward to a response and we appreciate how open the roblox team is being with supporting games in the localization process!
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When players in China play my game, will we get separate statistics for visits, revenue, play duration, etc for them?
Also will China players add to the current player count displayed to non-chinese players? Same for like:dislike ratio? Or will these various statistics be separated between China | Non China?
I’m curious about the impact that being in china can bring to developers otherwise (for example the increased player count resulting in being displayed on sorts that the game previously was not listed on).
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I looked at the submission checklist and most of the listed guidelines are already in the Roblox ToS in some form. They also seem to have removed the part related to unarmed / prop fighting. I made an annotated screenshot of the submission checklist so its easier to understand what you should alter before you localize your game to China. Its just my understanding of the guidelines so tell me if anything is incorrect.
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This is true. If developers are forced to run content through APIs for local areas, then there should be separate like/dislike ratios PER REGION. What if a feature that’s cut in one region makes or breaks the game? Now you’re stuck with a lot of dislikes, since someone didn’t get the same experience.
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China is an extremely immoral country, most likely violating civil rights each and every day. As many have already asked, how will our IP be registered in China? China is known for making knock-off copies of games. How will Roblox be able to secure the copyright over our work and forbid this from happening?
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Ive been reading the Chinese DevForum rules using translate and I have to say, some of these rules are blastphemy
I downloaded the studio-qq version and oddly enough I did not have to create a new account, I just used the one I already have for normal roblox and it let me in. The only difference I saw was the ability to sign in with QQ/WeChat, and you have to agree to the terms of service.
Do games for the Chinese version redirect through the main roblox page…?
Numerous other devs have pushed away this change, and most of them are about the fact that we don’t want to deal with China’s laws.
It would be nice if we kept these away from each other except for the roblox copyright and trademarks, with Chinese devs developing on a Chinese roblox and other countries operating on the regular roblox. This makes things really complicated, much more than it needs to be, if you want to have your game avalible for the population of china.
Also, this has been around for a few years now…?
Questions:
1: Will this affect anybody who does not want their game to have to be compliant with china? In the future?
2: Is the Chinese roblox ever going to have it’s own login/signup system, (seems a bit odd to me you have to use QQ or WeChat.)
3: Is this going to cause a large number of new roblox users very fast causing Roblox’s servers to become slow?
4: Is this a money grab? (honestly, please)
5: Why are you guys using QQ? (roblox.qq.com)? It seems a bit odd you guys don’t use your own systems.
6: Will the communities ever mix or intertwine?
7: If we create games for Chinese people, and we git hit with a law from China, will there be worse consequences than if we just developed for other countries?
8: Are the rules for the Chinese roblox ever going to start sliding into the normal roblox (causing developers to quit)?
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While I can see the incentive to tap into China’s huge market, I find myself very much against it for a multitude of reasons.
- While the market in China may be huge, I’m very much against having my creative output limited by a huge amount of regulations, some not even making sense. I also wonder how games that try to tell a story of any kind will be able to go through into China’s market, as any sort of story that involves character death would most likely have to be changed. While I think it’s funny that some games that are localized for the Chinese market go to ridiculous lengths to abide by the rules (such as making characters salute before disappearing instead of going into a death state), I also think it’s incredibly immersion breaking and jarring.
- As mentioned by @Fluffmiceter in one of the posts on this thread. The fact that China or Roblox reserves the rights to freely do whatever with a developer’s work, even if it’s against their wishes is very concerning. At least when someone steals your work on Roblox, you can contact Roblox to take it down, but here, there’s none of that.
- There are straight up huge moral implications for many developers when it comes to this sort of thing. While I won’t call out any real world events or examples because I don’t wish to get political on this site, I can see why many would disagree with the program and feel morally wrong for engaging with it, myself included.
I’m very curious to see where this goes, and like I said, the incentive to engage with the program is very enticing, but there’s a good amount of reasons not to take part with it.
If anything, I feel like this decision comes from a more corporate standpoint which I honestly don’t like. I’m sure there’s others who can agree with me that Roblox feels more and more “strictly professional” and “business” each passing day, which worries me greatly.
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This program is very concerning in my eyes. China, tencent are known for silencing competition and negative opinions. I am concerned about a “spillover” where even if we to never touch the application, we would be subjected to the morally questionable actions of tencent.
This is seriously making me de-platform out of roblox, I cannot associate or compromise myself and my intellectual property even if im “garenteed” I seriously don’t want to see roblox head down this path.
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[1] Inappropriate content in Chinese games
- Adult content
- Violent content
(Too inappropriate for Kids who visited the game)
[2] Chinese hacker player problem - Unintended content was applied
- It changes someone’s game
(Too inappropriate for Kids)
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I think your mistaking IP addresses with the other kind of IP (Intellectual Property) which is the issue described in this thread.
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Hmm… this is a great opportunity. However, I can’t see myself attempting to go through with this. Great to see that a lot of developers values align.
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Will Chinese players be able to enter the same servers as other players?
If so, then how will we use the run-time APIs to make sure their (and only their) experience is within the China guidelines?
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