Hey everyone!
I wanted to give you a reference of how a popular experience on Roblox, Livetopia, successfully integrated subscriptions into their monetization strategy. We hope that sharing how they did it will provide some tips for you to reference when considering your own implementation.
This is just one of many possible approaches to subscriptions on Roblox. The Livetopia team was able to concept and implement this subscription idea in just four days: two for discussion and planning of initial content composition and ongoing releases, and two more for implementing subscriptions into the experience.
We’ll show you more examples soon.
Context
Livetopia was released in 2021 by Century Games, one of the world’s top game developers and publishers. When considering a subscription for Livetopia, the team considered the key principles presented in the Subscription Design:
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Value: The team wanted to make sure that the subscription content presented to players had sufficient value to be worth renewing every month.
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Trust: The team wanted to ensure Livetopia maintained the trust of their player community and would ensure subscribers have continual access to the compelling content as long as their subscription was active.
The team also considered how subscriptions could best complement Livetopia’s core loop. This is an important motivating factor for players, since an ongoing investment like a subscription should grant a fundamental value to warrant the monthly expenditure.
The core loop of Livetopia is:
- Building and customizing residences
- Exploring the map
- Role-playing and socializing with other players
The team wanted the subscription to enable players to experience more of Livetopia’s content and access newly-released premium residences. This would enhance players’ role-playing experiences. For their subscription to succeed, the subscription content has to synergize with and benefit this gameplay cycle. Players should feel like their day-to-day experience will be improved by the subscription’s content.
Subscription Offering
Since houses are a core part of the experience, Livetopia created a subscription offering called Featured Villas, which offers access to ten recently-released paid houses that would ordinarily cost ~99 Robux each. This has value from both economic and gameplay perspectives. The ten houses offered in the subscription include popular premium houses, and one additional new premium house per month, making the subscription the most cost-effective way to gain access to the best premium content month after month. This provides players with a clear connection between the subscription’s offering of houses and a pillar of Livetopia’s core loop: customizing houses.
By designing their subscription offering this way, Livetopia ensured that players can expect something new, exciting, and relevant every month for just $2.99 on desktop/web and $3.99 on mobile. For more information on price differentials, please visit our Help Center.
Implementation
When considering the appropriate user flows for the subscription experience, Livetopia decided on two different integration approaches:
User Flow 1: A player browses and clicks on a particular premium house in the Houses menu.
For a house that is not owned, a player is shown two options:
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Purchase individual premium house for 99 Robux
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Subscribe to unlock this house and many others
If the player chooses Subscribe, they are taken to the Subscription section of the Store so they can see the full contents, review the terms of the subscription, and complete the purchase.
User Flow 2: The player can go directly to the Store and see the Subscribe option like the other purchase options.
For a deeper look at some subscription best practices and learn how to design subscriptions for your own experiences, check out our Subscription Design article.
If you’re looking for more technical information on how to integrate subscriptions into your experience, please visit the Subscriptions documentation page.
We’d also like to thank the team behind Livetopia for sharing their insights with the Creator community!
That’s all for now,
WizardCow47
This is not an announcement for a new update.
