In case you missed it - we launched our new four-part docuseries on YouTube, Roblox Hack Week.
This new docuseries follows four Roblox engineers as they build and compete in Hack Week 2022, our largest self-organize employee event to date where Robloxians put our values into action and drive rapid innovation for our platform.
We invite you all to watch the docuseries and get a first-hand look inside one of the most exciting times of the year when we think about what’s possible for our platform, community, and where we want to see Roblox in the future.
Hack Week has always been interesting to watch. I love the format this time around. Following a couple people/teams over the course of a week instead of just showing the end result is very different from previous years. I still hope for more information of the projects to get published, even if they are impractical and won’t ship any time soon.
I was hoping to hear more about what the other projects were. Will there be any information about what they were? Also, are there any plans for some of the projects to continue development and perhaps reach live production, even if hack week is over?
It is very common for some hack week or experimental features to go live eventually. In fact, game join queues was a hack week project and went live this week. We have something similar at the company I work at and something I worked on became production-ready a couple of weeks later.
This was fun to watch and I enjoyed it a lot, really neat to see the details and each team’s journey through it! Also listening to Mr. David in the fourth part was interesting…
Before this topic was made, I have been watching all the episodes and I am amazed at how all of the 400 employees made such great demo features! Even if some did not win, they did the best as they could and definitely can improve soon this year! Let’s see what Hack Week 2023 can show us
I seriously do question how much Roblox spends on marketing their company culture and writing fluff pieces about the Roblox employee culture. It feels like Roblox has built itself a little bubble and have gone completely out of touch with the developer community, no longer providing the kinds of updates and fixes that we need to make better games.
If any higher ups in charge of product and engineering see this, one thing in particular I would like is for the release of the Voice Chat API so we can do more with voice chat than just have unconfigurable bubbles attached to humanoids. The fact that this feature has been left half-baked for two years now is super frustrating.
While I do agree, I think the main issue is just the lack of communication. I’d love for Roblox to have something where they show their progress and what they’ve been working on each month. That way it doesn’t feel like features are just announced and then left floating in the void until one day it’s announced that the update is done, or is just forgotten. I’d at least like to know if something is being worked on or not. But I do think that Roblox is improving, especially after this post.
Actually, what would be really nice is a page that shows a list of features in progress, along with a progress bar and list of to-do checks (similar to Trello).
I think poor management is also to blame here. Roblox has grown and grown and grown and now their company is absolutely massive. It seems like the company has too many employees and not enough freedom to actually pursue projects, make decisions and make impact. Too many times brilliant ideas floated around here and obvious changes have been shot down here, and I think the issue is that nobody can do anything without going through a long chain of approval.
I’m not entirely sure if that’s the issue, to be honest, in fact the opposite. Roblox is just wanting to go off in too many directions right now. They want to be everything, instead of polishing what they already have (like the entire website). We’re obviously also only able to look at it from the outside as we don’t really know what’s going on or what they have planned. But, at least from the outside, it does seem like there’s a lot of poor choices going on.
I believe in at least some of those cases, investors are to blame. Investors are notorious for being out-of-touch with the product or service they’re investing into. They see the sales, they see other similar products/services, then they try to convince the company to go in the direction they want, even when they have no idea what they’re working with or really what they’re even talking about.
I guess that’s another way of looking at it. Roblox is trying a lot of things at once, but in a disorganized and confused way. Too many new releases come with additional promised updates, which promptly are forgotten and never mentioned again. Voice Chat API? Extended terrain decorations? etc.
Also, so many minute updates that add a single button or a single tiny quality of life feature usually credit a team of several people for the change. This suggests to me that there is bloating in how the company works.
Investors are definitely a negative force working against the goal of making sensible, good product decisions. It’s really confidence-draining when you see a Roblox executive making interviews spouting nonsense about integrating NFT’s and blockchains into Roblox (which I fully believe to be a completely useless technology, why are we de-centralizing something that works just fine centralized, under Roblox servers and Roblox’s hood???)
Unless I’m missing information here, I don’t see why people are freaking out about Roblox’s “NFTs”. I don’t even recall them calling it that directly. All they’re doing is the same system they already have with limiteds, but with all UGC items.
Although specific details on the integration are yet to be announced, Clark Lampen, who is the Vice-President and Digital Gaming Analyst at the game’s partnered finance firm BTIG, has stated that the Roblox team are “taking measured steps forward to introducing Web3 features into their product.”
I’ve heard about the new collectible items and I think at worst they will be harmless, and so far there is no indication of anything blockchain-related. Though I do think using blockchain/NFTs would be a tremendous waste of resources, unless Roblox wants to create an aftermarket for selling items off-site for real currencies, which seems to violate every safety principle they have??
Anyways, I don’t want to derail the thread any further so I’ll leave it at here!
Some people might enjoy this, but personally, I think it’s far too long for little reason. Please call me back when there’s a recap on the hackweek that shows the experimental technology I’m interested it, not a mini-series.