Roblox Stories
Its Importance for Both Developers and Players
Abstract
We don’t talk about game marketing enough. Many starts with a mindset of “if I make a good enough game, it will sell itself”, those who have many years of experience and a list of credentials knows that this is a foolish thought. Marketing is one of the most important aspects of game development.
The most effective method of marketing is word of mouth. Word of mouth is essentially an applied form of finding your product/market fit where your player base becomes your sellers, where you can get players for a lower cost than what they are worth to you. Many companies will go to lengths to encourage their user base to double up as sellers, i.e. referrals will award you with considerable credit within their services. This works because consumers will trust their friends more than they do you.
Proposal
Currently, we have some lackluster features to screenshot and/or record videos that write directly to the file system which is only sharable if you send the media on a platform that supports such format, notably Discord that is constantly in a fight with Roblox for various reasons, i.e. censorship.
Therefore, I propose a sharing system that allows the player to capture in-experience moments, otherwise unrecoverable memories, easily with a click of a button. My vision is to be able to directly share them onto the Roblox feed page that is currently unutilized. This would be the story feature found in popular social media such as Snapchat and Instagram. This means we can allow players to influence their friends in making similar stories by playing our experiences. The vision for this is if players were to click the story in the background, they see a popup link that takes them to the experience’s front page!
I would benefit a lot from this, and not just for the aforementioned marketing purposes which are very sweet, but also that it unlocks an unexplored world. I have developed many games, and one of them is called Action!. Its gameplay is simple, you and your fellow friends take up respective roles as either director, actor or technician and then create a movie together. A game design issue we discussed for many weeks, was how do we allow players to share their movies with others? We talked about featuring their movies in a centralized area such as a cinema but that had many issues of its own. We settled on the idea that only people who recorded could save the video. In our sequel, we implemented short codes - high collision - that people could copy and download. This was a huge hassle for players, but there was nothing we could do. These immense video clips also took a significant space. If we had these proposed ephemeral stories, we could have avoided all of these issues!