Of course, they weren’t found directly liable in a court of law, which is what happens in many instances of lawsuits. But, that was directly a loss across the platform and for us, which is what I’m far more concerned about here on the DevForum.
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This new Roblox function makes the marketplace well… look like idk theres just thousands of ugcs everywhere and some are even free. I think that if this continues bots will invade Roblox games to get these ugcs and no player will get a chance to get that LIMITED CROWN!!! ugc they been working for. I see this as a Roblox L but I still appreciate all the work they make to get there players happy
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Yeah, roblox is gonna ruin the platform and some ugc creators said that they were gonna quit. Idk if im gonna buy premium just for that
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I’m starting to get the idea that Roblox did virtually no surveying with the current UGC program members on this, I haven’t seen a single program member in support of these changes yet. Extremely concerning lack of transparency, which I imagine could be in part due to the UGC Program which used to be more of a small alpha testing group that could easily communicate with staff, now being a very large program that is not the case. I also saw someone else mention this on another UGC suggestion thread.
EDIT: I have been informed that this has happened with very large UGC creators, so I’m retracting the “no surveying” part. I still feel the miscommunication between other creators is quite disappointing. This is a decision that affects everyone in the UGC program, not 5-10 people.
To be fair, they did somewhat mention this in a very vague marketplace roadmap release in May, which just said Our economic systems should mirror the real-world with a very vague description, containing no details of anything like this. I don’t see how they would’ve not got that it appears the majority of people aren’t a fan of most of these features if they actually asked anyone ahead of time in clear and actual descriptions for current members of the program. To make matters worse, the same roadmap release in May also touted seeing a 99% drop in reported copies of Roblox-created Limiteds., after making an announcement that users would be refunded when a UGC limited was taken down. It almost seems like they’re just giving us virtually useless roadmaps with 1 sentence in response to wanting roadmaps published. Just about every other company I know of can provide usually some amount of details on a roadmap, even publicly available ones, but Roblox seems to either provide none or when requested to provide some, intentionally provides meaningless details.
Additionally, if this is part of the concern of revealing features too early, I’m not even fully against an NDAed roadmap and some type of private commutation on this either before being released to public roadmaps, I’ve seen and participated in multiple large companies that have these types of programs, but the public roadmap should still be providing more than a meaningless sentence that doesn’t describe the feature, or it shouldn’t mention it at all. Currently, the only program Roblox has is Community Feedback, which doesn’t have any sort of clear roadmaps available, however does have focus groups and closed betas. This program is also extremely limited access, there are only 277 people that I can view in it currently. I would like to see that number expanded, there are many more large developers on this platform than that.
I’m going to post a feature request later today regarding these transparency and roadmap issues with quite a lot more details both from the current roadmap, past announcements, and the very recent RDC event announcements, because this is a big part of the issue too, beyond the scope of just these changes. I’ve had these frustrations for a very long while, essentially since DevEx was a thing and Roblox was no longer “just a game”, although I have never written a full and proper feature request outlining the full concerns with it. None of this would’ve likely been announced as a “new feature” to begin with if they correctly collected feedback. I was hoping they were moving toward change when Nick and Tian were newly hired for Engineering and Product Leadership for Creator, who said they were interested in making a change for this, but it seems they’ve just gone back to being virtually the same as before.
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For those concerned with transparency I urge you to read the quarterly earnings call transcripts that are publicly available in the Investor Relations section of the Roblox corp site.
At the 2022 GDC I attended the Roblox ‘Keys to Creation’ session and after seeing the 5 year innovation plan laid out I could see pretty clearly what direction Roblox was going to move in.
That said, I wanted to know more so I started reading their investor reports and have done so ever since. There is a different sort of transparency for investors with topics that translate into vague generalizations when directed at devs.
I usually stick with the earnings call transcripts but have found helpful information in the longer documents as well. It is worth a close and thoughtful read.
The changes you are seeing now are ones that have been discussed in previous earnings calls. You’ll also get a snapshot of what is to come.
Here is a link to the quarterly reports for those interested. The letters and transcripts are good places to start for each quarter.
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Right now?, Clearly Roblox needs to clam down from their bad trademarking updates…
Right now its for ID-Verifyed people I think.
Community-led Marketplace - Everyone can publish avatar items to the Marketplace, including Limiteds (Late 2023)
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They’ve been talking about Public UGC for a while as a goal in their roadmap. They said it would be late 2023, which would include this month and the months up until the end of the year.
I’m saddened to know that these are ROBLOXs updates for Public UGC. I was “okay” with the 750 robux fee, being verified and having premium. However, mentioning that new creators won’t be able to make REGULAR UGC and converting everything over to how limiteds work?
No.
I’m not okay with it, and all I wanted was to make cute items that haven’t been uploaded on the catalog for what I’ve been wanting that everyone would be able to access. I don’t have the type of funds to do what ROBLOX is actually asking for.
I’m truly disappointed with their actions and future goals.
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Also people are able to use item + bundle, basically it will look different positioned and rotated if you gonna use simple head, but if you make this accessory to work with specific head that has broken or different positioned attachment, theres a high chance of those items to not get downed.
i tried my best to explain so sorry if you dont understand.
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I want to add my sentiments here from another thread I posted on prior to finding this one:
There are so many things to love about the current virtual creator marketplace. The fact that it is virtual and has no real world value means there can be so much freedom with how the marketplace operates; and the decision to allow the market to be driven by developers, including the creation of limiteds, has been a very obvious boon for creators and community engagement.
I love to give back to my community for their support in my endeavours. As a creator, I create, and I want my work to be enjoyed by as many people as possible without using FOMO to drive my sales and compromise my values. I want to put my creations in the hands of the community as much as possible without them having to deal with any stress on if they can obtain things or not. We stay away from limited sales for this reason; and where we do have limited content, it is always available for an extended period of time to allow everyone to find a comfortable time to enjoy it.
I do not support the vision to remove opportunities and harm the market and its existing creators, some of who have made a living off the platform. We heard a success story about how the UGC accessory program literally changed someone’s life, yet Roblox wants to constrain us and make it more difficult to have even a bit of that success - in fact, forget about the success, we can’t just let our communities enjoy some items to use on their profiles or around the website.
Our wonderful creators and players deserves more respect than this. The virtual nature of the economy should allow more flexibility, not less. Not everything has to be a simulation of real life, which has its own issues that others in the thread have better insight and have talked about. Just because it’s been announced at RDC and thoroughly planned, does not mean it’s a sunk cost. I dearly hope Roblox will back out of removing infinite quantity items and allow us creators to choose how we want to present our items in the market rather than adhering to a single way to do so.
Time and time again, we know and understand that Roblox’s vision ranks king, and ours is only really secondary. Though if the idea is to empower creators, then likewise Roblox should not be speaking for our creators and instead using their words as a heavyweight in this process. Working with creators to entice and switch them over to this vision is incredibly backwards. Roblox should instead preserve what our creators and players love, while adding more opportunity on top.
This is not the future I was hoping for when Roblox said they were considering the best for the avatar shop and how to prevent it from ending up like the existing UGC marketplace (shirts and pants).
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I also think it’s unnecessary to make it require premium, since it would be harmful to people who have no money to spend on roblox, but still want to develop such accessories
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One thing that I wonder about is a quiet part of these marketplace changes that hasn’t been directly addressed that I know of and that is what will happen with 2D clothing.
Eventually it will be discontinued, as discussed last year but with the upcoming marketplace changes and projected by end-of-year platform-wide shift to skinned mesh/animatable bodies, will changes/discontinuation of 2D clothing happen along with this or will the 2D clothing market continue with upload/sales to accommodate the few skinned mesh bodies that support them for a while?
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gruh, this has to happen after the announcement of bundles?
I personally noticed that the bundles catalog is kind of garbage right now and wanted to enter the program to provide more diverse bodies beyond (template edit #340) or (recolor #213). The fact that bundles have no upload fee was even more incentive - I’m not someone with spare money. This restocking stuff however seems like it’d completely ruin what they have planned and stated for that, doesn’t it? The required premium is even weird considering they got rid of that for other clothing items. Isn’t ID verification enough?
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I don’t wanna see ugc be nothing but limiteds, please rethink this one ROBLOX
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I think making all UGC avatar items “flexible” (effectively limited) goes against the freedom promised by the platform. If a creator wants to upload an item anyone can purchase forever, without resales, that should be an option. Forcing everyone to engage with artificial scarcity and restocks seems antithetical to the vision of Roblox as a democratized platform for all creators to create and sell things however they want.
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Disappointing but not surprising tbh
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Could you provide the link to this conference call and any others? I’d like to see them for myself.
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Lets say your a UGC creator will are access get revoked. because of new update. because I got accepted and i dont have verified ID yet.
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They mentioned it in my reply, it can also be found throughout Roblox’s investor relations website.
I didn’t really truly think too much about the investor reports directly when I mentioned transparency earlier, but it is definitely clear they’re a lot more transparent with the investors than they are with the developers. The differing details provided between the two of us are highly concerning.
However, I did see this already clearly when Roblox would do interviews with the press. For example, let’s take some of the newer autogeneration AI features, they’ve said openly in interviews they’re intent is for AI to replace the developers in the long term. However, when they decided to add an AI data collection opt-in box to the creator hub after RDC announcements (which now seems to have been removed, oddly?), their language was extremely different.
I’m still writing up parts of the feature request I mentioned, which has gone into quite a bit more detail than I originally was planning to.
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Hello, here is the link to the Quarterly Results page of the Investor Relations section:
About halfway down the page you will see a Financial Summary Table that is a quick reference to the different parts of each quarterly report.
The earnings call for example that references the shift away from traditional avatars and 2D assets to platform-wide use of rthro/skinned mesh avatars and 3D/layered clothing is in the Q2 2022 earnings call transcript .
A word of gentle warning: be prepared to be jaded. It’s why I joke about ‘Roblox: Powering Monetization’ but it isn’t really a joke. Behind the scenes, it is clear that innovation is more about driving monetization than it is about driving imagination. Pretty dystopian stuff.
Yeah, companies have to make money - but for me, the worst part isn’t that so much as it is the double standard of transparency between investor audience and dev audience.
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I completely agree with your opinions Blizzie. Even at this point, UGC is so flooded that I barely get sales for new items I published lately.
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