I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. I think that if roblox (at the very minimum) keeps the current DevEx rates we will see most of our teenage developers stay with the platform for the ‘easy’ money. As we get better and better there will be more and more of our high quality games dominating the front page.
Basically what I’m saying is: I think the current developers will stick with the platform for $$$ and compete strongly with the younger developers.
Any thoughts on this? I think the experience will make our current generation the ‘top brass’ in a few years when the age difference between new devs and veteran devs grows larger.
I think you’re right in the short term, but this is why it is so great that we have these new studios coming up. Newer developers can start the same way most of us did - just trying to make things. Then they can apply to join a studio and can start at a low level developer rank where they get to learn from more experienced devs. This way they’ll already be able to earn experience and money on successful project, and then after a few years they’ll be good enough to run their own dev groups.
And as this happens, older devs will be more likely to start moving to other platforms such as Unity or they may just move on entirely as they start their careers in another field.
I think we will have a cycle that consistently improves game quality as well as helps younger developers to find more immediate success and learn from those with more experience than them.
I think it will be fine in the long-run. Just because of the progression of life, I can’t see many people sticking around much past 25 years of age. For myself, I think I’ll probably have a full-time “real” job in the next 2 years, and I won’t have the free time anymore to make games here. I think the same will happen for others as well.
@NoahWillCode makes a good point too, with game studios and such. That will allow younger devs to get to work alongside more experienced devs too, which should help then learn good techniques quicker.
What I would hate to see is ROBLOX turn into what the mobile game industry has turned into: this weird montage of awful quality games that are not even games but just terrible money-machines that exploit psychology to get money out of people. And I think younger devs will be there to help out with that, because the ones that will succeed will be the ones who are creating for fun, not for profit (I hope). They will be on the forefront of creating cool tech creations and such that people love to play around with.
New:
You say the reason it will be dominated by adults is because of the money. However I feel like one someone maxes out the amount of money they are making on ROBLOX they may have greater ambitions. It’s kind of like fishing in an aquarium vs fishing in the entire ocean.
Tech is another driving factor. ROBLOX makes it extremely easy to create games however this sometimes comes at the cost of having a lack of freedom in terms of what you want to make. People may want to move on for the sake of seeing what they can do (I feel these are the people that commonly make tech demos)
You can’t really ‘max’ out the money. Just make the game a group-game and distribute funds amongst alternate accounts and DevEx through them. That’s legal according to ToS and I saw an admin mention it once.
What I plan on doing is earning at least ~10k a month and upkeeping that while moving on to another engine. That being said - if I start earning less than $XX,XXX per month I’ll go back to roblox to get that easy income back.
I’m sticking with Roblox for as long as I can simply because of the easy money.
I didn’t mean literally max money. The reason DevEx amounts go up is because someone is making more than the cap.
I meant they max out the platform. Why doesn’t apple have a trillion dollars? Even though they’re popular, there aren’t enough people on earth (yet) for them to have that much money. Same concept.
Sort of related to the OP, but one thing ROBLOX NEEDS to do is to encourage building more so that there are more new devs around. If you look at the front page, there are no building games. If you’re a new account, you only start with a blank baseplate. Build mode is gone so there is no transition from regular build tools in a the more advanced edit more. Most of the uncopylocked places are ancient and don’t actually provide any insight into the current trends in building. It is harder for new users to get into building, which makes the transition to scripting and other more advanced game features harder.
If ROBLOX wants more developers, the transition from a complete noob to someone who wants to build games needs to be easier. Making it so you need to set up a personal server to build is too difficult because for new users. A baseplate is nothing for users to build off of. There is no easy tutorial for basic building like in the Classic Happy Home place. No build mode so users can easily mess with the few uncopylocked places there are. New users can’t just jump into their own place and start building with basic tools, so they don’t learn the basic of building, so they never see the need for scripting, so they don’t jump into actually making games.
I understand there isn’t much ROBLOX can do about the fact fewer places are uncopylocked now and the fact there are fewer building places near the front page, but they can atleast make it so in order to start building you can just click a button and get into a semi-prebuilt place with simple tools rather than jumping through loops to get to a blank slate to build on.
I see your point and I think they are starting to help that by adding more themes and gameplays to pick from besides the default baseplate. This gives new builders and scripters the opportunity start to messing around with some quality places and learn from them. Also, they do have the model endorsement program to put more quality models at the top of the toolbox so new users can easily find good models to look at and mimic.