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.
