Summary of the Creator Roadmap AMA (Jan 24, 2024)

MightyDantheman · January 26, 2024, 9:11am

I unfortunately missed this month’s AMA, but I still must do the obligatory summary.

As usual, here are the asked and answered questions:

Asked & Answered

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Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

This is an important issue. We are building a Rights Manager for rights holders to easily file takedown requests for duplicate or counterfeit versions of items they created. We plan to build additional functionality that will allow creators to sign up to be notified about potential similarities between new items and items they created. From there they can choose to take action to request takedown, etc. Rights Manager is planned for launch in the next few months.

For any other policy violating items (like nudity, etc), we are continually improving our detection systems and processes with human moderators to detect and remove content faster and with greater accuracy. Users and creators can also utilize our reporting flow for any cases where it is taking us longer to remove the content ourselves or if we haven’t yet detected it.

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Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

Over time, we will significantly expand the capabilities of Editable* assets to do everything from supporting live replication/co-creation to supporting robust permissioning so that you can implement use cases like what you mentioned. That will all be within the confines of ensuring content creators maintain control of their creations and derivatives from those creations.

For v1, we wanted to start with a smaller, more focused set of functionality so that we could bring a new capability to the platform safely and use it as a basis to learn/iterate. Furthermore, we want to make sure we have a more robust asset permissioning system generally that we can leverage to implement the right permissions for Editable*, and we didn’t want that to block the release of v1 of Editable*.

Your feedback to v1 will help determine the roadmap and priorities, so please give feedback in the devforum threads about this functionality.

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Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

Great question. Creator input of bug reports and feature requests are a key part of how we improve the platform. We’re glad you’re noticing the progress we’ve made on bug reports. We have made significant progress on bug closures, and made sure each bug gets to a development team. But there is more work to do, as we’d like to open #bug-reports to even more creators.

#feature-requests have to be handled somewhat differently. Our product and engineering teams review these regularly and those ideas go into our thinking about the roadmap. But it is one of many inputs into that roadmap process. As such, we might not take each request on as described, or even feel now is the right time (vs a bug report where, honestly, we just don’t want any bugs!)

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Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

Are there going to be any changes to Game Discovery / the algorithm in the near future?

It feels very hard to find interesting and engaging games, most of the discovery page is plastered with games for much younger age groups which isn’t very encouraging if developers want to make more interesting and varied games for a wider range of ages.

Even with a lot of effort and hours of work on a game that would otherwise do well on a platform like steam, because it does not appeal to younger audiences or otherwise market itself with tons of cash, it will almost never pick up a consistent player base or otherwise be picked up by the algorithm.

It feels discouraging to make unique or different games when they will never be found or played by the majority of the player base.

(I am not referring to 17+ games, but just in general most games shown in the Game Discovery page are either shown multiple times, or are highly saturated and suited for a much younger audience.)

It doesn’t help there are no ways to search for games using genre or other metrics. Almost 9 times out of 10 if I find an interesting new game, its from an outside source or friend-group, because they are not promoted inside of Roblox itself.

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Further questions will be in the replies below…

See also:

What questions do you have for the next AMA?

Continue the discussion…

MightyDantheman · January 26, 2024, 9:13am

Continued Asked & Answered

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Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

We all know that games on Roblox are evolving into games that could definitely be mistaken for games on actual game engines such as UE5 or Unity. The graphics, functionality, UI, etc., are all evolving to become like AAA games. Because of this, what are your plans on accommodating for such realistic/large ideas?

My dev team & I have ambitious plans for making a highly realistic roleplay game. However, we are quite concerned on how the engine/servers/game itself will handle such plans. I know other studios and companies are facing the same worry as well: that Roblox can’t handle such great/ambitious ideas.

Of course, we can do things on our end as well (we would love tips from you guys as well on what we can do ourselves). But what about on the Roblox side of things?

(personally I would love to see an increased limit of server memory as 6.25 GB can be reached quick, see this article about why I & many others want this

Here’s what we’re working on, but we sometimes feel like Roblox doesn’t have enough foundation/support/capabilities to host our ambitious ideas.

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Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

Many of our creators are already making amazing, high-fidelity experiences, like Frontlines. We want to see more experiences that approach this level of quality, and we want to continue adding functionality to the platform to make it easier and easier to build realistic/large worlds. Two years ago at RDC, David showed an image of a 50,000 person stadium as an example of the type of experience we’d like to support, and we haven’t lost sight of that goal. We want to enable limitless scalability and fidelity long-term.

In terms of specifics, this year we will be working on significantly improving performance, especially on lower end devices (better client frame rate, improved memory efficiency, etc.) so that higher fidelity experiences can reach everyone on Roblox. We’re also focused on avatar performance (such as layered clothing performance), and pushing the limits on larger experiences. If you haven’t turned on streaming, I encourage you to do so. We will continue to improve this system and long-term this is what will get us to being able to support truly massive worlds.

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Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

I like that you guys are working on a Ban API so people don’t need to invest time and resources into working with datastores or an external system to create their own moderation system.

As much as this is great, This has the possibility for abuse for games that use user generated models or levels that use scripts to communicate with the game and make things work. Without the ability to sandbox these scripts in an environment that the developers of the game can limit (which would be AWESOME), this leads developers to work on their own workarounds to prevent certain functions from being called - which leads me to this ban API.

Will this ban API provide a way for experiences to ** completely disable** the api all together, whether they have their own system and choose not to use it or choose not to use it and wish to disable it to prevent any backdoors from blocking a lot of users from joining. Just “not using the api” is not really a viable option for some, and can destroy possibly these experiences if we are not given an option to disable this ban api.

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Here’s a non-built-in custom solution for something similar:
Fallen Character/Parts Recall Height [v1]

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Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

Yes, with the Audio API, there will be options that provide more control over voice, allowing you to implement changes like fine-tuning distance attenuation, building features like walkie-talkies, and enabling non-spatialized voice.

For avatar tooling, we do not currently have plans to support bone drivers and constraints on imported armatures. If you can expand on your feature request though, we’re happy to consider it!

Lastly– for the powerful search and browse capabilities we outlined in the Creator Roadmap– those are in reference to the homepage and experience discovery. Not all of them are applicable to Marketplace, but we do plan to improve the discovery and usability of avatar items. This includes algorithm, UX, and interface improvements to help with discovery and navigation.

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~~Unknown question from @colbert2677. Only found question appears unrelated.~~

Question was related to “genre sorting” but was removed by the poster as a similar question had already been asked.
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Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. We acknowledge that you are not getting the response you would like on your earlier feature requests. We are committed to better communicating discovery products related changes via blog posts, AMAs, and other formats, starting this quarter. We will also share our active work through the creator roadmap (Roblox Creator Roadmap ).

To clarify, our recommendations look at a number of signals to match users with experiences they will love. This includes long term engagement, retention, relevance, and monetization, among other signals. We have also made improvements to accelerate the discovery of new experiences that are showing staying power. Several new experiences have achieved success thanks to these improvements.

We mentioned earlier that discovery by genre is something we’re rethinking. Genres are very fluid on Roblox as we see creators evolve their experiences, and users on Roblox look for experiences by other attributes (like themes). There are also diverse opinions on how genres should be defined, and we also find that genres can be easily abused without the right safeguards. We are now thinking about how to build trusted sources of genre information: from creators, users and other expert sources, and how to do that at scale and in a way that can’t be abused.

Please continue giving us feedback.

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Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

We realize the limitations of our current serialization formats and are actively thinking about what is needed to enable a rich ecosystem open to third-party tools. While we cannot commit to an exact serialization format at this time, our vision is that creation on the platform is open.

When we release the Studio Luau File Sync Beta, it will include a preview of a new format to help test our assumptions about what the ecosystem needs. It’ll take time to refine this as we evolve both solutions while maintaining backward compatibility. Our long-term plan is for the finalized format to be released alongside the full release of Studio File Sync.

Stay tuned for more information here, we are very excited to learn from each other as we build out both products!