Response to "Roblox as a career"

Affenity · November 1, 2019, 10:49am

Intro

Before I continue, I’d like to state that I am in no way a popular developer that has ever DevExed, but I’d like to state some things about the Roblox platform, and other things that I have noticed, that I believe you should consider.

But before I begin writing a block of text, I’d like to answer your question, yes and no.
Yes, it is possible to have Roblox as career, as well as no, it isn’t possible to have Roblox as a career.
Now that’s probably confusing you, but I will explain to you what I mean.

Basically

As HeadlessHorror has stated above, you need to dedicate time, money and tears to be successful on the platform. You will be needing all of the mentioned things and even more. You need time; if you want to do Roblox full-time, you’re actually going to work more than full-time.
Why? Bug fixes, updates and players are essential to your game’s survival. You can spend 6 hours working on a new update, but if there’s a bug, until you have fixed it, it’s not even near 6 hours of work.

If you don’t update your game, the game gets boring / repetetive / old, and players no longer want to play it. That also brings us back to another topic, the players. Your players are mainly children, probably some adults too, but we’ll focus on children. As you probably know, when children want to do something, they don’t want to wait or do some unnecessary stuff that prevents them from actually playing.

If they can’t play the game near immediately after joining your game, they quit. They want games that they can join instantly, that are fun to play. Social interaction in your game is very important. Some players play to get friends as well, if they can’t interact with other players they’ll leave, even if they think your game is good. It’s just like playing a single-player game.

Now, I could create a huge post about the psychology of children etc. but I would like to answer your question more precisely. I’m not a psychologist either.

The platform

Now, as you have probably noticed, Roblox is a huge platform. Let me explain to you how this affects a developer’s experience of the platform as a whole. This includes a list of pros & cons so you can weigh things out for yourself.

Pros

Huge playerbase

Roblox is incredible because of its playerbase.

Roblox is unique because it’s very simple to get started with a game and share it with anyone in just a couple of minutes, with possibilities of millions playing it every day. The playerbase is mainly children, who are often paying “customers”. You can earn money easily, and since there’s no other installation for players, they only have to download the Roblox engine and they can play any game on the platform!

Compare this to games where you have to install every single one, which takes up additional space etc. That process results in loss of players.

No server management

Speaking as a web developer, I know how annoying, difficult and time-demanded managing servers really is.

It takes time, it takes effort, and it takes money. Roblox, however, lets you deploy any game and there is absolutely no server management at all, you simply deploy your game and it’s running and you pay the expensive fee of nothing. It’s free. No more headaches thinking of server management. The only thing you have to worry about, is to make the game and maintain it.

Freeeeeee

Roblox provides all tools for free.

Roblox is free, you can develop for free, you can deploy games for free, you can use free models for free, you can upload free models for free. This is the major step Roblox has taken, which is also a part of Roblox’s identity, keeping Roblox free. Some engines require you to pay monthly or annually to develop.

Other engines require you to pay for hosting your game’s contents, some engines also support deployment and installation of games for a price. Roblox, however, gives you all of that for absolutely no cost.

Cons

Now, all of these awesome features can’t have no cons either. Please note that this is not me complaining about the platform, it’s me describing how bad this actually is for a developer wanting to make a living off of it.

Unstable uptime = loss of money & players

If you ask any developer you can for sure get a clear response of what they dislike about the platform.

As far as I know, Roblox does not provide a SLA, so if your game goes down, Roblox’s servers go down or anything that is Roblox’s fault but affects you, you’re the one ultimately paying the price. Whether it be money or something else.

Roblox updates Studio, and the engine every week, and this is great, but the chances of failure of any kind are pretty high. Suddenly a feature does not work, or it doesn’t work as expected.

This also applies to server outages. Sometimes Roblox doesn’t work. This happens more frequently during weekends and that’s obviously because more people are no longer going to school. But this is an issue. If you spent $500 on ads and the entire services is unusable you just threw that money out the window, and AFAIK Roblox doesn’t have a SLA you can’t get your money back either.

The outage also results in less players which means less income for you as a developer.

Dictatorship & little transparency

Roblox, more often than not suddenly decides to change something without asking the developers first.

One day you might wake up and see that a feature you need is going to be removed in a couple of weeks. Or, you might wake up to see players complaining about something not working because Roblox implemented a new update nobody knew about that you had to manually disable. This is wrong, Roblox should ask the developers what they think about it, before they make a change.

A perfect example from GitLab. Two days ago they were going to use third-party services for analytics to better improve the experience for their users. 90% of the users complained. Do you know why? GitLab didn’t even ask if the developers wanted this change. They suddenly announced it, and they lost many customers, and gained less trust than before. Do you know what happened? They stopped the “feature” because so many people filed a complaint. After stopping the change, they sent an email to every customer apologizing for their behavior. GitLab is developer-focused and what happens when they don’t even ask if they can do something? Nothing good.

Take, for example “Private modules”. It’s a controversial topic, but it’s an important one. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands were relying on private modules. Whether it be the developers or the people using them. Roblox suddenly made an announcement saying that private modules were no longer going to be a thing. The thread Removing Support for Third Party Closed Source Modules resulted in almost one thousand posts, all of which either supported the decision or were completely against it.

Datastore issues frequently

Roblox provides a free datastore for developers to use, it’s a great idea but the implementation is awful.

Just search the forums for “datastore issues” and you will get hundreds of topics about developers complaining. It’s extremely unstable and you have a high risk of losing player data.

For example, once, the datastore returned “nil” instead of the players’ actual data, which resulted in so many players losing their data. Many developers have moved to external services for storing data, and they should. If you lose player data, you pretty much lose the player forever. Can you imagine playing a game for 12 hours just to find out the progress doesn’t exist anymore? No, you can’t, neither can they.

Support

Roblox has a dedicated support team, but it’s not particularly well-made.

Sometimes, you as a developer have questions. There isn’t really any team made specifically for this, and contacting the “regular” Roblox support is not ideal. Contacting support is commonly known as near useless. The first reply is 99.999% considered useless. It feels like you’re speaking to a bot that replies with anything other than your actual question.

For example, I tried to make a group once, the group was not made but it took the Robux from my account. I contacted the support team, they spent 2 whole days to respond and the answer was the following:

Did it make any sense? No, and I waited 2 days for it. I replied with “I think you may have misinterpreted what I sent. Please re-read it, thanks!”. This time it took a couple of hours, imagine that!:

Anyone who needs actual help needs to email the support team twice and that’s not ideal. Many new players will drop off after the first response since they think Roblox can’t help them at all. And that’s not good.

DevEx (earn money by earning Robux)

Roblox has a program called Developer Exchange (DevEx for short), which you have to follow in order to earn money. It’s awesome, but…

Even though the process of getting the money is awesome, the way to do it is not particularly ideal.
Have you ever received a ban on your account? Have you ever been met with a warning? Any infraction on your account drastically reduces your capability of exchanging Robux to real currency.

Do you want to know how bad it is? Developers are creating websites where they sell Robux for cheap because they can’t exchange it. Friends I know have been declined of DevExes for something they did years ago. What can you do with 1 million Robux without using DevEx? Sell it on the blackmarket. They spent a lot of time to make a great game, and they can’t do anything with the virtual currency other than selling.

Even though selling Robux on the “black market” is bad, it’s ideal for the developers. Why? It guarantees payment. Roblox reserves the right to stop you from using the DevEx program for any reason, which means your entire future is at stake at their decision, which is mostly decided by previous moderation history, which takes us to a new con, moderation.

Moderation

Roblox has to moderate their platform to be child-friendly and COPPA-compliant. They need to remove any inappropriate content that could cause harm to children. That’s cool and all, but…

Although moderation is necessary. It’s extremely strict, unfriendly and unhelpful for legitimate developers. More often than not developers uploading assets to Roblox have most of their assets declined by a bot. You have to contact support to fix it, or you can simply edit one pixel, upload it again and it will get approved. Wow. If you choose to contact Roblox you have to wait several days for a legitimate response.

To the second part, sometimes when receiving bans/warning you get a very vague description, so identifying the issue / which asset was bad is difficult. I uploaded an image of a plane once and I was warned because selfies weren’t allowed. Does that make sense?

Ooops, misclick

It happens to the best of us. One click and you’re permanently banned from the platform.

Currently, Roblox does not allow you to cancel uploads, or delete assets that you have uploaded. So, if you accidentally click the wrong image you might as well say goodbye to your career. There should be a way to first review the assets you want to upload before they get uploaded. There should also be a way to delete assets, at least in the first few minutes.

Support, take two

Yep, this issue is bad. This isn’t about contacting the customer support, but getting legitimate / genuine help from Roblox with an issue.

Unless you’re a top developer, or actually push Roblox to a corner, you won’t get any help at all. This thread is probably deleted, but it was about how Roblox didn’t give help until hundreds of developers responded to the issue.

https://devforum.roblox.com/t/adult-content-in-script-resulting-in-game-deletion/373686

Let me show you how Roblox handled it before & after the topic becoming popular and causing massive discussion:

Before:

After getting massive attention:

Organizations / teams and deployment

My guess is that Roblox studio and the developer features on the website were originally designed for a single developer only. There is currently no good way to have a larger organization / team to work on a game, simply because of the lack of overview and control.

A con about deployment is that anyone who has edit access to your games, also can publish the games and the owner is held responsible. That’s not ideal for teams at all. It also brings other issues, since there is no complete way of distinguishing the development place from the production place.
At RDC (18 or 19), I remember a popular developer seeing his game was broken, and even though they fixed it, the fixes were reverted/not working. There was a simple answer:

A developer didn’t turn off Roblox studio so it just auto-published the production game every x minutes which resulted in the entire game becoming completely useless. Now you can see that Roblox isn’t very well suited for larger oganizations, right?

BUT

Despite all the cons listed about the platform, Roblox has recently started to improve. More recently we’ve seen Roblox asking for opinions for features / removal of features, being more transparent about updates and more, and this means they are changing. Sooner or later (hopefully sooner), the cons listed here will be fixed and turned into pros to make the platform stand out even more.

Conclusion

Now, after listing a lot of the pros & cons here, you might think Roblox is a bad platform to develop on because there are so many cons. But it doesn’t mean you can’t make a career out of it. Some developers, like ScriptOn dropped out of college and started a career around the Roblox platform. I don’t know the latest news but I believe it’s going good.

It is possible to make a full-time career, but there are risks involved. You will face issues, and by time (+ dedication, effort) you can experience success. There’s no guarantee you’re going to be able to make a living off of the platform but if you actually want to, you can. If you’ve got a particular skill, you can do commissions and earn money, in addition to work on games. That way you’re getting some income even if your game doesn’t succeed.

You need to figure out this out for yourself if you want to become a full-time Roblox developer.

My personal recommendation is: unless you’re fairly certain you will succeed, and you have a good team + good game ideas, I’d recommend you have Roblox as a side project. Find out if your ideas and execution of plans are actually going well. If you find out that it’s something for you, and this is something you want to do, then go for it. As some other have stated, Roblox has some issues they need to fix before they’re able to become a great platform to work with.

system · November 1, 2019, 10:50am

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buildthomas · November 1, 2019, 2:43pm