Subscriptions within experiences: Livetopia Implementation

Resources Roblox Staff
#1

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:

  • Value: The team wanted to make sure that the subscription content presented to players had sufficient value to be worth renewing every month.

  • 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:

  • Purchase individual premium house for 99 Robux

  • Subscribe to unlock this house and many others

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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.

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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

73 Likes
Subscriptions within experiences: Welcome to Bloxburg and Slap Battles
#2

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

#3

Hey Roblox, please

Also, wrong topic :sweat_smile: This is not an announcement for a new update.

76 Likes
#4

I’m going to be harsh but quick: does this really need to be an “announcement”? I get that Roblox wants us to adopt subscriptions, and supplying case studies or examples is a good idea… but does it really need to be with the announcements for major changes to the platform? It doesn’t announce anything new for us - just advertising that someone used the information of a previous announcement.

This may seem minor, but announcement threads get blasted through a lot of feeds on other platforms and makes searching for announcements harder. It really should be a creator hub article or in a different category for resources.

134 Likes
#5

I get notified of every thread made in this category. This is not an announcement, it’s basically just an advertisement and tutorial.

Please respect the community by not misusing communication channels in the future.

87 Likes
#6

… Why does everybody need to know about this? The announcements caregory should be for… announcements, not promotions of games for toddlers.

51 Likes
#7

Although subscriptions are a really cool idea, there are tons of issues, the biggest being not having a Robux alternative and the huge amount of countries not being supported! (Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine, Vietnam)

22 Likes
#9

Why do we need to know that a game enabled them?
Also please respond to all of our concerns regarding the new features, don’t ignore us, we are your backbone.

24 Likes
#10

Isn’t this supposed to be an category for announcements? This is just an advertisement of an roleplay game like Brookhaven, We don’t need to know that a game enabled them. I understand that you want us to use subscriptions, I won’t use it until it supports robux and my country

yoo that’s where I live, sad to see it not supported :frowning:

25 Likes
#11

Hi
Interesting case study.
However, I think it’s missing one vital answer: was it worth it?

Is it worth the effort of adding subscriptions to the game?
What do players think of it?

I’m not asking for specific numbers, but a general answer would be nice to hear.

18 Likes
#13

I dislike the pressure Roblox is giving to implement unethical monetization practices.

It makes sense from a business standpoint. If Roblox knows they can make money by showing my game, they will do that. However, the “act now and get higher percentage of revenue” really annoys me. Sure, have monetization in the algorithm, but stop catering to this idea of subscriptions more than other things.

I think it’s cool that someone was able to implement this and we’re given details on that. But, I don’t like subscription models. It’s predatory by nature. No matter the implementation, you’d have to make players pay to continue to use the contents of the subscription. I stand by ethics, I don’t want to implement this.

37 Likes
#14

This is not an announcement, nor update you could have just edited the original subscription announcement to include this.

This adds nothing to the community.

26 Likes
#25

Can you guys please make a section called “New Game Implementation” OR “Dev-Related Social Media.” The “announcement” is good but should be moved to an already existing or a new news section.

12 Likes
#30

Hi Nexus,

I totally get that this isn’t a typical announcement. We hear your feedback and are working on fleshing out the DevForum and its categories to create the best category for a post like this. More on that coming soon.

With this feature being available to users as of last week, we’ve had plenty of creators reaching out and asking for examples and best practices! For this instance, the creators of Livetopia were gracious enough to share their best practices with the community, and we decided this was the right avenue to share that information.

29 Likes
#31

I think this post should be flagged with #documentation like the Roblox Sketch Series on Subscriptions. That way, people who want to know more can enjoy a guide without having everyone be notified as if it was a major Roblox update.

image

12 Likes
#32

Announcements has already previously been misused for an advertisement back in November 2020 but that one was more egregious in that it suggested financially supporting someone who had been actively working against developers on the platform. Use case examples already exist on the Creator Hub for other articles and Roblox previously had an exclusive category under Resources called Roblox Tutorials that they used to share content that otherwise doesn’t fit right on the Creator Hub.

Please make this the last time. I track Announcements because I want important creator updates in my feed, not noise. I bluntly do not care to hear about implementation stories like this nor for Roblox to continue trying to entice me to use a feature with carrot stick benefits that both already do not resonate with me at all. Announcements is never the right avenue to advertise.

26 Likes
#33

I tried to report this announcement as being spam, because this is not an announcement, it’s an advertisement. It appears this post has been manually approved. Roblox staff, please stop violating your own rules.

13 Likes
#34

this is not the correct topic, consider keeping stuff like this out of announcements

10 Likes
#35

Hi discodorothy,

I totally don’t understand the massive wall of text that you wrote that has nothing to do with what the person actually replied, and just talked about the feature related in the post.

We understand that Livetopia would like to share this, but what does this have to do with the inappropriate placement? There are already existing categories that this post could have gone in.

Sincerely, Raterix.

15 Likes
#36

people would 100% be more on board with shilling to roblox if their game actually ended up getting any recognition, yet instead roblox (and its staff) does… this.

7 Likes