Whenever I’ve ever released a game, that’s gotten popular or what not (if any), I’ve always found that people play them because they’re in the featured tab or because a youtuber has found it and brought their following on to play it. With live-ops, it’s seems to do more harm than good. Personally, the current “Featured Sort” system is excellent. It gives a month or so to a set of relevant games that are not only deserving of general consumer attention, but even Roblox’s attention, but live-ops seems like a knock-off attempt at that with shorter promotion time.
From being a child myself, as most people have been, people forget that our attention spans can be very small, and if this new system advertises a game once every month, for 24 hours, then some might question the purpose of this new approach. Is this update really more focused on player retention on one game or player retention on all games ?
Moving on…
Leading onto the big elephant in the room, Why are roblox taking their big-earning events out of the pasture in favour of a knock-off featured sort? Surely that’s a huge set back for the player base and all those potential players that could have been on playing the next egg hunt, or next halloween trick or treat game. From a view as a developer, and as a consumer, I can only see a few possible reasons why:
The reasoning I’m putting my bets on…
Roblox likely listened to overall player feedback on past events and/or correlated said feedback with retention statistics they have and have responded by removing events. Of all of them, this seems the most likely and while it is definetly unfair to burn down the house to smoke out a rat, they can’t risk losing their player retention levels on the platform due to one tiny bug in a game the community is focused on at a time. Obviously in our view, this is not the case, because we, as developers, work excessively hard to make sure a game is not only playable, but enjoyable in the long run so that way people will continue to play our games. However, from a consumer point of view, anything from a destructive bug that hasn’t been fixed, to the toxic attitude of a community can just as easily put them off playing the game, if not joining at all. A sad truth, but one we all have to live with and hopefully prevent from being the case.
There are also likely other benefits for the business/financial/managerial side of roblox that are likely not publicly discussed for self explanatory reasons, but it seems very obvious from the reaction of older/mid-age players that this is a feature that they’ll miss, specifically only the brighter parts of the events, rather than the parts they didn’t enjoy. The concept of a monthly event is good, but I feel it is becoming increasingly important with this increasingly expansive community, how that concept is executed on the main page, and especially the time taken to perfect that concept. Roblox are a business and are usually stuck to a timetable to execute said concepts, and fixed time limits can lead to rushing. Issues can arise from the stress of completing in time, which can mean that a game isn’t fully perfected in time for release. Thus, I’d fully understand why they’d remove the normal events, as it gives the big event developers more time to work on their final craft, but removing the big events as well is beyond me.
After looking at the post a second time, they’re also not offering a way to award players with catalog items, which is utterly ridiculous considering the decreased allotment of promotion you’d get a month.
From my view, it is not very cost effective for us, as it all it does is reduce the potential player count we can get. When a game is promoted by an event, there is usually a stagnant leap in player count, following the introduction of that item, with a continued rise in player count until the majority of people have the item, or the event has finished. From there, player count will slowly decrease to normal figures, if not higher (hoping that the developer updates the game repetitively). However, with this new system, you get 24 hours of promotion. The spike you’d get initially from the start of live ops, from players joining your game for the item, would thus not exist.
In comparison…
Assuming we are comparing two fully identical, christmas themed, games with a quest to get an item, where one version of the game follows the events model, which is promoted for a month and gives the item at the end of the quest, and the other version follows the live ops model,which is promoted for 24 hours and gives nothing at the end on the platform, you can predict the way their player count drops and rises, and you can also get a good idea of retention in this period, and plot them on a graph.
(P.S - This graph is made up of predictions, and it assumes that both games are the exact same and have the same player count at the start, and are promoted at the same time, and exist in separate universes. It also assumes that the content in each game are the exact same, with the only change being that one offers an item on roblox and the other ingame. The graph also assumes 10,000 players as a max (i didn’t have room to put it in properly without being unclear), so if it peaks at 10,000, its likely goes higher)
(P.P.S - The graph is based on a hunch again, and player count for events are predicted based on experience from seeing them on the front page and from being a player myself. They are not based off any figures as I didn’t have access to them at the time of this post.)
As you can see, this shrewdly drawn graph depicts an event game doing much better at the start, following the hype up of the event, with a smooth(ish) decline as the holiday goes on. Obviously, we cannot forget the major dates that the event is all about, so there is a rise in players on the dates of christmas eve/day (however I wouldn’t expect people to be on Roblox on Christmas Day as its one for family!)
What is clearly visible here, is that Live-Ops under performs in comparison to Events, due to lack of promotion from Roblox themselves but also little-to-no hype about playing due to the lack of items Even if you combined all of the live-ops games together and all their player retention, it may still fall short of previous event’s retention due to the players moving from one game to the next (assuming that the majority of players are kids).
Of course, I’ll update this figure or in another post I’ll display any information if people are willing to provide evidence of events performing better than LiveOps (given this feature hasn’t arrived yet, it might be a while), feel free to message me over the forum, but that is besides the point. I feel like Roblox do mean well by pushing this new approach, as from my point of view, it is there to satisfy the needs of the increasingly large amount of new/upcoming developers, and it is designed in a way that every developer gets an equal allotment of time, and there is some honour in doing such a thing.
However, I don’t see an initiative like this working without some form of reward on the website. Players are unlikely to be interested in playing without something to work towards. The only reason I ever really go on event games now (unless they’re ones i play regularly) are to collect the items so I have a nice collection of nostalgic treasures from my past on the platform. If liveops was inplace of the normal monthly events (not like the christmas or easter events), then I’d be thrilled! However, this change is frustrating. It seems like a large kick in the back and it’s disappointing that even with Bazooka’s promising vision for the company moving forward, we still lose so much of what made Roblox the thing it is today.
Feel free to leave your thoughts on this as I really want to discover other people’s views on this so I can be better informed for the future.
