Retiring game passes and their effects completely

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
#21

Hello Colbert,

Upon purchasing a gamepass, the player is purchasing the product you published the gamepass for. To change or remove this perk is going against the player’s “contract” if you will. They have bought the gamepass expecting a feature that you have said they will obtain. As you mentioned

By the Terms of Service, the expectation with game passes is that you honour the purchases made.

If there is an issue with a gamepass, you should adapt the gamepass and not change it. For example: Let’s say you have made a Weapons gamepass, but you don’t want player’s to be using weapons in your game anymore. You should still keep the weapons ingame but perhaps make them weak or not do damage. Instead they could have an effect such as freezing a player in place or propelling a player away on impact.

Another example:
You make an admin command gamepass. You realise that this is not what you want for your game. You understand that you cannot remove their perks but can take the gamepass offsale. This is not ideal for your game of course due to 4000+ people having them still. The way you can loophole this is by creating a new game, it can be the same as the old but the actual place must be separate. In this game your “contract” with the player is void as it is a separate game. They purchased the gamepass for the previous version and as long as you leave the old game up still, roblox will not be able to have an issue with you since player’s are still obtaining that perk.

Hope this helps.
Fxnlxn

#22

2 years ago, when this topic was still relevant to me, I had already set my sights on compensation of equivalent value in order to honour a player’s purchase but opened this thread to investigate other potential venues for retiring a game pass from an experience.

The “contract” established within a purchase is that a game pass purchase should provide a benefit of some kind and a player’s purchase should not be invalidated in bad faith. So I don’t necessarily agree that changing the benefits violates that “contract”, nor do I think this advice is applicable to every experience - the whole idea is to remove the feature, NOT to leave it in as-is or in a watered down state, so it doesn’t help to that extent.

I also don’t believe in creating a new experience to void player purchases. That is entirely in bad faith and not a feasible solution to resolve an issue of one game pass. It doesn’t scale well and it’s not respectful to players. Additionally it could cause some trouble when dealing with duplicate passes from a customer service perspective.

Equivalent compensation is the way to go and what I’ve adopted since creating this thread and it’s what I also encourage for anyone else facing the same issue right after planning monetisation out thoroughly before creating game passes and products.

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